I promised that I would be switching to cash accounting rather than counting each penny as I earned it. But then I realized that I’d be making the switch mid-year and in some cases I would be double counting some income, creating a false total.
Then in August, the changes that I had been planning for the blog for a while finally came together: InvestorBlogger became a multi-channel blog with separate and identifiable ‘channels’ on Finance and Blogging. Those two are perhaps the strongest streams. Three additional channels were created for minor stuff, and so InvestorBlogger Dot Com has increased page views, readership, readers, RSS readers, page time and much more. Though each of the channels is still slowly building up steam, the benefits have been positive so far.
Since August 1st, I’ve published a number of great articles in both the primary channels, as well as the occasional piece in the others. I’ve worked hard on the SEO of each piece, including keywords, descriptions for both blogs and posts. I’ve added sitemaps for humans as well as search engines. I’m also extending advertising by joining new networks and working hard to promote the site on AdWords.
While I’ve been doing all of this, income to the blog has dropped somewhat to a less than spectacular $390.27 for August. This brings the total to a grand sum of $11,962.38. This is not bad for two years work and focus. I’ve really succeeded in making an extra $6000 or approx. $498.50 per month over 24 months.
So at this point, rather than switch to cash accounting. I will be ending these ‘consolidated’ accounts as I split the blog into two major parts. It’s quite difficult to know exactly where to put these reports. Rather than that, I’ll be splitting the reports into two: Online Income and Offline Income. Of course I’ll be keeping a track of the income myself, you’ll need to do a little detective work! Online Income will in future be posted in the Blogging Channel, while Offline Income will be posted in the Finance Channel.
So what did I learn? A number of things actually. I’ll be sharing them as the blog takes on these new directions.
Today is the last day in 2007, and in Taipei, we’re already approaching the end of the year with the usual fireworks at 101! If you haven’t seen them, they’re quite spectacular. I’ve added a video. After the video we’ll look at 2007 in review.
It has been an amazing year on InvestorBlogger… As I start to recap what’s happened in my blog since December 31st, 2006… let’s just see how it has played out.
Blog Audience
On the upside, the profile of the blog is now much higher than it was last year at the same time. In fact, my blog has gone from an Alexa of millions to 113K. On Technorati, it’s moved up to under 50K at the moment. We currently have a readership that’s now a little under 80 or so on our RSS feeds.
Traffic wise, InvestorBlogger has now reached about 1500 Unique Visitors per month on average, with traffic doubling just in the last few months alone. Page views are running at about 3000, too. This has helped with additional traffic from links, advertising and so on.
Blog Content
In addition, we’ve added nearly 800 posts this year alone! That’s incredible. We’ve already published a best of 2007 with posts that generated the most traffic. But there’s a ton of good posts amongst those 220,000 words on the blog! The reorganization of the categories helped me to think much more clearly about the nature of the blog. We currently have 13 categories. Unfortunately, some of the posts are wrongly categorized from the early part of the year. I don’t have a tool to help reorganize them… Any plugins?
Online Income
In early September, I passed the $5,000 mark in total online income. Since then, I’ve been moving in on earning $7,000. Offline income hasn’t been so successful, but the active/passive ratio of the income has been quite surprising, approximately 40% of the income is automatic – I don’t have to do anything! Obviously the paid posting that I have been doing is quite active, but there are a number of other sources of income that need little or no intervention on my part.
Challenges
Offline: 2006/7 was a difficult year for my business: faced with declining admissions, and rising costs. We set out to tackle both. And we have succeeded. But running a business as we are is certainly not a passive thing.
Online: The blog has moved from regular hosting to a virtual server. I was getting frustrated at the slower response times, then the blog was unavailable for part of August (not good!). Eventually, I took the plunge and opted for faster hosting. For a while, things were fine; but then in November problems returned.
Finally, I took a carving knife and began going through the hosted files to pare down what was not being used. Eventually, I found one plugin that might have been the reason for ALL the problems in the first place. It was duly removed. But the benefit was that a lot of junk, some of it insecure or old was either passworded, moved to inside the root folder or deleted. The result has been a better performing server overall. I’m still experiencing mild spikes in activity, but that may be due to other junk in old user accounts. I’ll be cleaning them out during the year.
The Carnival of Making Real Money is helping to drive traffic to the blog because it is hosted right here on the blog. The current entry has generated so many submissions that I’m having a problem dealing with them all. Still, we’re looking forward to the next issue.
We’ve run several promotions throughout the year, none of which really has taken hold. But that’s okay. The first was the BlogBuzz that ran in June and in November. I’ve had the opportunity to review a number of websites and provide additional exposure to our traffic.
We’ve also run advertising in three fronts: a review on Michael Kwan’s Blog (which really helped to coalesce my thoughts on design), a text link on CashQuests (which generated about 65 visitors), and a link on John Cow’s Blog (which has brought 90 visitors).
Well, I’m really looking forward to 2008, and whatever happens, it will be an interesting year! I hope you enjoyed these posts in 2007 as much as I have in writing them.