My annual report : One year after starting to blog

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Its been one year since I started my blogging career, actually its been one year and ten days to this date as I’m pretty late for this post. It was on the 19th of May 2009 when I started a blogging tips blog named Quidoscope and that day was very joyful for me as I’d launched my first ever website which felt like a great achievement and I guess I could never have thought that the challenges I’d face in the future would make this achievement look like a piece of cake.

For now lets just forget about life and times of Quidoscope and go a bit more into the past, that is two months before this when I was sitting with a cup of tea and reading John Chow’s site where he is claiming to have made six figures in over a year and instead of being inspired I was actually jealous of him, I had no money to start my own site, my parents wouldn’t give me as my marks had already deteriorated, but I was to learn an important lesson, that is feeling jealous may lead to an opportunity and so it did .

Get a wonderful opportunity and find instant success, but the same old me

I always knew that I wasn’t the lucky ones in life, I usually faced problems and failures in whatever I did, but that April my luck was sure to change and thats because on the day of my results at school when my marks where extraordinarily high, ofcourse I was happy, and moreover I could ask my parents for a few bucks to start my own site which they could never deny. I successfully got $40 on my PayPal account and very soon I started my own site, quidoscope.com .

That site was purely built on static HTML and it contained more ads than the content, but thats what you can expect for a person who creates a blog on Dreamviewer as I still hadn’t heard of WordPress. I successfully generated 3000 visitors on the very first month by exploiting Yahoo Answers to its highest extent and to my surprise I earned $21 on the first month from Adbrite.

This was more than enough to boost my confidence, I had more than $50 in my Paypal account and I had a strong urge to boost my income. I created two more sites, one was a business blog and another one is one of my secret ones which I sold recently, by then I had heard about WordPress so within a week I had successfully launched both the blogs.

Just after I had launched my blogs I found out that my account on Adbrite was suspended as I had placed their ads on one of my blogs which had adult content in it. I tried many times create a new account both on Adbrite as well as Adsense, but till today I never succeeded.

By the end of July I was almost bankrupt with less than $5 in my Paypal account and I knew that it wasn’t possible for me to pay my next months hosting, so before that I imported all the blogs blogger and set up a redirect on my domains. My blogs, my content and everything else were safe now, but it took me a few months to get out of that depression and the self blame situation.

The worst times of life

During the middle of August I faced the most saddest and the worst times of my life, my blogs were my top priority and I wanted my blogs to grow more than my marks, due to this my marks at school had come down to such an extent that I was almost about to flunk at school, I had problems at home, at school and everywhere.

My blogs were safe as they were on Blogspot, but I constantly felt frustrated due to its lack of growth. I actually worked my ass off each and everyday only to find 3% to 4% growth in traffic. But if ask me now I’ll say that those were priceless cause I learnt more than ever before, not only about making money or blogging but about life and struggle, okay I’m not gonna get more philosophical .

My marks started to improve slowly and I was above average in a few months, but still I wasn’t satisfied mainly because I was interested in making money more than my marks. I kept blogging very hard but with no results, I used to generate a few affiliate sales, but that didn’t generate consistent income.

I win a prize and I start thinking like an entrepreneur

From July I started to spend a lot of time reading other blogs and books on entrepreneurship and successfully creating an online business, and I got to know why I had failed and from then I was just waiting for another opportunity to prove myself and I was pretty sure that I’ll be successful the next time.

In beginning of December many blog contests were being started and most of them were awarding big prizes to winners and planned out everything to successfully attempt these contests and make the best of these, but someone already had other plans for me, my schools quarterly exams began during the same and I could never dare to sit for hours in front of my comp, so I felt their was some sort of black magic avoiding me.

After the first 20 days during December my holidays began, but still I couldn’t actively participate in any contests mainly because all the other contestants were way ahead of me and I could never have competed with them. So I managed to write a few comments for each post on one of my friends blogs, smartbloggerz which was running a blog commenting contest, and surprisingly I won the prize for the best commenter and successfully claimed $30.

I was overjoyed after winning that and $30 was more than enough to start a blog, but still I decided to sell the domain I was using for my business blog which costed me $5 for listing and I successfully sold it for $45. So totally I had $75 with which I was confident of going ahead with a self host for Dumb Little Blogger.

Even though I had the money I bought the lowest cost domain and the cheapest host possible, I stuck to only free advertising methods and never bought any paid softwares and tools, this is mainly because I had started to think like an entrepreneur, I had set up a plan according to which I was going to invest a particular amount of money only if I reach a certain level in revenues.

Slow but memorable success

After I set up my blog on WordPress I still wasn’t making consistent income, it was just a few affiliate sales hear and there and even though I made money through advertising, I never got them to my hands mainly because I could not meet the minimum threshold. So I had to pay for my expenses with the help of my savings, but this was according to my plan, as I knew that I would not make any profits for the first 3 months.

In the month of February I made a few affiliate sales and this seemed consistent, because my affiliate banners got constant clicks and I was succeeding in generating sales every few days. My blog became profitable and I no longer had to depend on my savings for running my site, but still I wanted to improve my financial state and kept avoiding new ventures, but I was investing money efficiently on advertising, that is whenever I met my profit targets.

From February to May my blog has had steady growth and now I’ve invested money in a hell lot of advertising networks and almost all are working well. And now I’m feeling confident enough to invest and start more websites.

It isn’t ‘The End’ yet

I guess my story for this particular year has been worth writing a post on, I’m sure most of you would feel that it isn’t worth, even today I’m the same guy I used to be one year ago, but I’m pretty mature and have gained the ability to judge. I still don’t earn enough money to make a living, but someday I’m sure I will make more than a living.

I’m sorry if I frustrated you guys for this post, I do feel the same, anyhow your free to share your reviews on this post and it’ll be much more interesting and useful for our readers if you can post your blogging stories as well. To keep up with future posts please do follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my feed.