2009 was a huge year for me. It was the year I started blogging for real, even that I had been blogging since late 2005. And more importantly, it was the year I started studying SEO, Internet business and affiliate marketing, concepts I had very little knowledge at the beginning of 2009.
I'm not doing Internet business, blogging or marketing, as a primary source of income, so all this is extra for me, which is great. For all this I own HUGE thanks to the 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, the book most are familiar by now.
On April 5th 2009 I placed on order at Amazon.com - DVDs and some books for my wife, H. For some odd reason, I don't know how, the Amazon magnificent recommendation system showed me the 4HWW while I was placing the order.
I ordered the book, it arrived 2-3 weeks later (takes a while for packages to arrive from US to Finland), and I immediately started reading the book. So this was around beginning of May. In matter of days, I read the book and it changed my life, especially my "online life".
The World of Warcraft-, EVE Online and XBOX 360 -playing gaming geek suddenly realized he could make some extra cash online. And that's how I started. On 20th of May, Zemalf.com was born. And here's how I did traffic- and money-wise.
Traffic
Statistics from Zemalf.com are public at See the Stats and here are stats since birth of the blog, 18358 visits:
This blog was founded on 20th of May 2009 (or actually 21st, but as I registered zemalf.com on the 20th, let's call that the birth day). The above statistics are all time stats for Zemalf.com as of 7th of January 2010, which makes this blog 233 days old, or 7 months and 19 days as of today. According to this date duration calculator (pretty handy btw), that also converts to about 5600 hours and over 330k minutes.
As there were 18358 visits within that time rage, there has been about 79 visits each day on average, or 3 visits every hours. Near the end of 2009, the daily visitor count was at 100.
Unique Visitors and Traffic Sources
During 2009, 13645 unique visitors checked visited this blog:
During the first couple of months, the blog had redirected traffic and imported posts from my gaming blog, which I later exported back, thus the quick traffic from day one (and the downward spiral from middle of July to late August). Majority of the traffic came from search engines, namely Google, but there were other sources as well, on smaller volumes:
There were not big spikes during 2009 and I didn't do any guest posting (something I will work on during 2010 and onwards). Interestingly, blog commenting alone brought Problogger.net to the list of top traffic sources. Nothing earth-shattering, but 187 visitors is 187 visitors.
I should probably combine all the traffic I've received from blog commenting and we'd be talking thousands, which is huge for a new blog, all thanks to the advanced blog commenting tricks and keeping it real. What makes the traffic from blog commenting so special? Bounce rate for blog comment traffic is 35% smaller than the average (for me, based on top 10 blogs that have sent me traffic through my comments).
That reminds me, that I really got to work on my bounce rate. It's at 70-80% range, which is really bad. Not sure of the reasons, but probably the lack of eye-candy on the design has something to do with it.
RSS Subscribers and Hub Sites
As of today, this blog has 209 RSS subscribers, which I'm quite happy for. The number fluctuates a bit, but it's still a rough estimate. Unfortunately, the subscriber count has quite a bit of "subscribers" from FriendFeed, and the real number of subscribers is around 110-130.
As for other blogs of mine, largely thanks to the gaming blog I mentioned, there were about 40000 visits to all my blogs combined. In addition to this, some of my Web 2.0 videos and documents did nicely (not related to Zemalf.com, but to the gaming site instead).
- AnttiKokkonen / Scridb, 9673 reads.
- 30+ page guide on how to create perfect character in Fallout 3 (great game)
- TheZemalf / YouTube, 90,406 views.
- WoW Achievement: The Lurker Above has about 80k views all time.
All this in addition to increasing Twitter following relatively naturally from 0 (I registered on Twitter on November 2008 and started actively using it on May or so) to 1390 by the end of the year, 2009 was a great year.
Money
As I stated on 7th of June 2009, until that day, I had made 1 dollar and 88 cents (through Google AdSense) online, and that was my starting point. And here's how I did on 2009 (note that this blog no longer has any form of advertising, and most of the income is from my "niche blogs"):
- Advertising $592.70
- Contextual Advertising
- AdSense $15.06
- Chitika $1.64 (tested for a bit)
- Direct Advertising $576
- Contextual Advertising
- Affiliate marketing $258.25
- Affiliate products $230.39
- Reviews on Zemalf.com
- Misc
- Micro Niche Finder
- 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
- + Other products on the niche sites
- Amazon.com $13.12
- eBay $14.74
- Affiliate products $230.39
- Product sales
- No products $0
Total Income Online: $850.95
I went from $1.88 to $850 in seven months (or 214 days), which equals to nearly 4 dollars a day :) Not something I'll retire on, but taken that prior to May/June 2009 my Internet marketing skills were 0 (that's zero) as all I knew to do was activate AdSense on a blogspot blog, I'm happy I got that much.
2010
2009 was a great year, but now it's time to think bigger, here are the goals.
At the end of 2010 the numbers will be at least:
- Traffic: 500 unique visitors a day
- Subscribers: 750 RSS subscribers, 100 email subscribers (to be started)
- Money: 250 dollars a month
To be honest, I'm not sure about the "money-goal", but the traffic and subscriber numbers are within reach but I gotta step up the game for those as well, and whatever money I happen to make will be a nice bonus. 2009 was a life-changing year for me and now it's time to make 2010 even better.
How will I achieve this? Primary methods for traffic: Guest posting and article marketing, in addition to more focused SEO strategy. And I'll be experimenting more with my niche sites, as there's great potential there, as I didn't do much to get the figures I showed above (from which majority came from other sources than this blog).
Was the 2009 as exciting for you as it was for me? How did your blog do?
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