A Review of My First Year of Blogging

1. 2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day.

2. 262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.

3. 21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz.

4. Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, but I’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float...)

   Update: the product manager of Adsense, Rob Kniaz, read this in my blog and got my account squared away. This happened in approximately fourteen hours from the time I first posted mentioned the problem on a national holiday. Life is good...

5. Most linked-to posting (953): The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

6. Can’t-understand-why-more people-(11)-haven’t-linked-to posting: Ten Questions With Aziza Mohmmand. What a shame because this is the purest story of entrepreneurship that I covered.

7. Ending Technorati ranking: #45. Highest ranking during the year: #35 or so. One interpretation of this self-judged lack of success is that the blogosphere prefers news and gossip to essays although my buddy Seth Godin disproves this theory.

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8. Primary blogging tools: MarsEdit (Dear Ranchero hands, MarsEdit needs the ability to schedule postings), ImageScale, and iStockphoto.

9. Most disappointing realization: After a week, most postings are “gone.” Perhaps people’s expectations of blogs are so low that they don’t consider them reference sources. Hence, I have to write another book. My challenge is that I have three tasks: answering email, blogging, and writing a book, and I can only do two. :-)

10. Speaking of books: my request for ideas generated approximately 125 suggestions. Thanks, guys! I’m leaning towards writing a book called How to Change the World: A Practical Book for Impractical People. I just have to figure out how to make it a curve-jump ahead of, as opposed to repackaging of, The Art of the Start. If you’d like to help, please click here for a wiki for this idea. The password is “kickbutt.”

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Comments

[John Dodds]

What do you mean by impractical people? Impractical in what ways? Majora is a good idea as a lead-in but I don't think she was ever remotely impractical.

[Deirdré Straughan]

"After a week, most postings are “gone.” "

I can think of two possible reasons:

1. I have occasionally wanted to read again or reference something read a while ago on a blog, and been unable to find it. Many (most?) blogs are not set up with any attention to long-run usability, so in effect anything older than a week disappears into the void. We have all become so used to this that we don't bother to look for older stuff even on the better-designed blogs.

2. Many blogs try to behave and therefore are treated like newspapers: everyone's frantic to talk about today's topics TODAY, knowing that the short public attention span will have moved on by tomorrow. Therefore, once an entry is past its sell-by date, we assume it has no further relevance.

"Live blogging" of events such as conferences exacerbates the trend: bloggers bang away on their laptops during speeches, giving their oh-so-important opinions while the speaker is still talking - time for reflection and synthesis? Nil.

[Mike Koss]

Typo on your CPM amount? You state:

Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $.014 cpm.

CPM = $3,350 / 2,436 M (thousand) pages
CPM = $1.39

[engtech]

That was one of my very disappointing realizations with blogging as well. Content "dies" very fast (unless it shows up on prominent search terms).

It's a beast you have to continually feed.

[Dimitry B.]

Nice summation! I can't believe I missed the 10/20/30 post. Nice insight and tip for the future.

Thanks and Happy New Year
Dimitry

[Tim McClintock]

Guy,

You asked, "How often would you like me write a new posting?"

Sure, I'd love to read something everyday, but I'd rather read something you are really passionate and excited about. Most of what you write falls into this category, but if that doesn't happen every day, I'm good to wait for it. Thanks for a great year!

Tim

[Jon]

What impresses me the most about your blog Guy is you are honest with the traffic vs revenues you generated. It stands as a stark reminder at how tough it actually is to try to make a living off blogging ;-) If a guy at #45 in techno makes less then 4K for a year of his efforts, it makes you wonder what the guys ahead/behind are at.

I think you have also discovered one more hard truth about blogging, few people look through "old posts" but I guess they do serve as good content for search indexing, so it isn't all a loss. Probably an advantage to you, anyhow, you can update all those old posts and release a book, generating easy sales ;-)

Jon
Founder of myfoodcount.com
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