At the end of each year I like to take a moment and look back at how each of my blogs have performed over the year.
BloggingTeacher.com has had a pretty quiet year. I stumbled into 2009 with an unfocussed, sloppy blog and then got hit by a tidal wave of Real Life:
- Running around like mad as the building of our new family home reached completion
- Moving into the new house in March, and the subsequent million things that appear on your To Do list
- A new arrival in our family in May, prompting me to put this blog on hold
- My employer went bust and my colleagues and I all lost our jobs
Despite all those challenges I managed to find a way to make time for this blog again, and in October I successfully rebranded and relaunched as BloggingTeacher.com. In those few months at the end of 2009 I was very happy with how things went.
Visitor Growth
In March I had a good month when I released my popular Twitter and WordPress Integration Guide for free. After that things died down as I was posting infrequently, and then during the hiatus traffic was generally under 1000 visitors per month.
After relaunching in late October I managed to boost that figure to about 2000 per month for November and December. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks on how I achieved this.
Overall this blog saw served about 15000 unique visitors for the year, which is lower than I’d hoped at the start of the year but pretty good considering I didn’t post at all for most of the year. Still it is a big jump on the previous year (this blog was originally launched in March 2008) which had less than 2000 unique visitors for the year.
Popular Posts
Twitter and WordPress Integration Guide – this is my free guide to integrating Twitter with WordPress blogs, covering such topics as auto-tweeting new blog posts, adding a Retweet button, and letting visitors include their Twitter ID when they leave a comment on your blog posts.
How to make a directory website using WordPress – this post from 2008 stayed popular in 2009 again. It is a short interview with Dani McDaniel of Just Tweet It and goes through how the website was built using WordPress customizations and plugins. Although the site has changed a bit since then it is still a good introduction to using WordPress in slighly unconventional ways.
Sample WordPress content for theme developers – this was just a short post linking to another blog that released a really useful XML file for importing dummy content into WordPress for testing themes etc. It draws a lot of traffic simply by ranking well for a variety of search terms. Just goes to show you the value of linking out to others regularly.
What the Top 100 Blogs Teach Us About Domain Names – one weekend I had an idea and sat down to spend what turned out to be many many hours analyzing the domain names of the Technorati Top 100 Blogs. The results were interesting and have proven popular with visitors. This post is just a few weeks old but is already one of my most heavily trafficked posts.
Goals Reached in 2009
In December 2008 I took part in a group writing project and posted my goals for this blog for the year. Here they are again, and how well I did at each.
Increase paid blogging income – I achieved this in 2009 by going from 1 to 2 paid posts per week, as well as doing some ad-hoc article and review writing. Even while this blog was on hiatus I continued the paid work. The money has turned out to be quite helpful, and I’ved used the experience to write a report on how to make money freelance blogging. Subscribe to my feed so you don’t miss it when I release it very soon.
Publish my first ebook – although I was originally working on a paid ebook I shelved that project and instead released my shorter Twitter and WordPress Integration Guide for free. The success has given me confidence and ideas for more ebook projects, and to that end I also attended Joanna Penn’s seminar on writing, self-publishing and marketing for authors. My biggest problem now is too many ideas! With the right focus and effort I can deliver on a few of them this year.
Consistent posting – obviously while on hiatus this didn’t happen, but since the relaunch I’ve posted consistently and enjoyed the results. I am trying to decide between 1 or 2 posts per week as my regular posting rate but have a few ideas on how to add more posts with only a little more effort on my behalf so I hope that works out.
More visitors and subscribers – I achieved both of these after the relaunch. More visitors arrived thanks to an effort to produce good quality content and much better promotion on social networks etc. And by revamping my design and adding a mailing list I am converting many more visitors into subscribers and Twitter followers now. This is a great confidence booster and makes me want to keep delivering good content for these people who are giving me their attention.
Site development – I achieved this by switching all of my blogs to the Thesis theme for WordPress, paying for logo designs from 99designs.com, and then slowly tweaking the blog designs with minor changes to get the look and feel that I like. So far it seems like visitors are engaging better and taking the blogs more seriously thanks to this work.
Goals for 2010
Release Free Report – my free report on making money as a freelance blogger is almost ready and I want to release it in by the end of January.
Release Paid eBook – I’m going to re-evaluate all of my ebook ideas and half written drafts and prioritise at least one of them for release this year. The ebook will be first and then if appropriate a print edition will follow.
Release Free Blogging Course – I answer the same questions over and over from new bloggers so its time I wrapped up what I know in a short e-course and made it available to people.
Guest Posts – I’ve never guest posted before, I’ve only worked as a paid blogger for other blogs. Guest posting is such an effective promotion technique that I really need to get started with it this year. I am going to aim for 10 guest posts this year. Also, I want to start accepting guest posts here, so for that I’ll need to develop some guest posting guidelines and start reaching out to fellow bloggers with invitations.
Mailing List – I want to reach 1000 mailing list members by the end of the year. I think with the right incentives for signup this should be easy to achieve.
Twitter – I’m proud of my Twitter following because I think it is largely real people and not just a bunch of bots or accounts with auto-follow that I’ve tricked into following me. But Twitter is such a powerful network that I want to get my follower count up to 1000 as well.
I think that is plenty of goals for this year and definitely enough to keep me working hard. I hope you all have a great 2010 and look forward to connecting more with you this year.
Image Credit: Flickr
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