The most unexpected thing with this blog is my entry into online advertising, Google Adsense in particular. In the past, I had not been keen at all into advertising. I suppose after hearing how so many others are earning a reasonable side income from online advertising, I thought I had to give it a try. In just about one year, I’m quite happy to find myself earning slightly under $100 a month from Google Adsense. This is really cool and it has got me excited to keep my blog up-to-date and generate traffic. I don’t forsee Google Adsense ever becoming a significant part of my income, but it will certainly be very cool to earn decent pocket money from it.
Another notable achievement is the Google Pagerank score of this site. It has Pagerank of 5. I’m quite delighted about it. It means that Google is finding links into my site “sufficiently valuable” to be featured favourably in search results. I’m still quite impressed how certain queries are ranking my site higher than others that I would have deemed logically more relevant. E.g. “m1 fixed broadband” turns up my site first above M1’s own official website.
In the course of the last two years, I got bored with using other people’s WordPress theme, and decided to roll out my own. I also made it available to others. I called it Simplicity. It doesn’t score very high in WordPress theme directory, but I’m encouraged by the plentiful positive feedback that I’ve received. I think a project like this also helps to generate back links into my site. This could well be responsible for the favourable Google Pagerank score I’m getting.
Just to share some boring statistics. As of now, there are 488 posts and 625 comments (there are more comments in a separate forum) in the last two years. Again, I’m sure this is not impressive but, to me, it is encouraging. In March 2008, there were 14889 pages served; in March 2009, 43064 pages were served. That’s a three-fold increase in traffic year on year.
At some point, I said to share some of the things I’ve been doing (or done) which I thought might have helped make this blog site better. Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten around to it. Just too many things piling up on my todo list. In fact, I’ve been lagging behind responding to some blog comments too.
As I mentioned in my About page, one of the original reasons for getting started on this blog was to give myself sufficient opportunities to write long-winded stories. I was getting slightly concerned that I was not getting enough practice and my writing skills were deteriorating. Well I think that simple goal has been well met.
Happy birthday to my blog. Happy birthday to Vanessa too. We’re still uncertain if her HFMD is for real.