1 year old today, my “state of the blog” address

edwired
edwired

The edwired.com and edweird.com blogs are 1 year old today!

It was January 7th of 2016 when I made the Hello World posts on the WordPress blogs I created on the edweird.com and edwired.com domains.  I registered these domains way back in late 1999 and used them for a variety of things including having them pointed at websites and email.

The technology used for hosting web sites has changed over time, and a year ago I decided that I wanted to build my skills on what is a very popular content management system at this time.  I have learned a lot about WordPress in the past year, and I am continuing to learn even more about what it means to host, create, publish, and monetize content on the internet.

Each of my blogs currently has 15 unique pages and about 80 blog posts, most of which are published and not drafts at this time.  I’d like to make a blog post on each one each day, but in practice I’ve been averaging about a post a week on each.

I average about 5 unique visitors per day per blog at this point.  They each view on average 2 pages.  This number has grown over the year and is more consistent when I am posting to my blogs on a regular basis.  I display 3 ads using Google Adsense on my blogs, and my revenue for both sites combined was between $4-$5 for the entire year.  I monetized my YouTube channel in December and started creating video blog posts.  It contributed about .30 in that month to the total I mentioned above.

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For the first six months I also hosted some ads or created links that used an advertising network but during that time I didn’t earn enough commissions to keep that account open.  I’m no longer actively using that network but I still remember what I learned while implementing it.


I have affiliate accounts with both eBay and Amazon that I use for linking and inserting advertisements that can pay me a commission when people click on them and then buy something on those sites.  I describe this in my Disclosures page as I am required to per FTC regulations.  I have also shared my links with friends so it’s difficult to know how much of the approximately $70 I earned on eBay, and $6 I earned with Amazon during the year were because of blog readers instead of friends and family using my links.  I didn’t see any other income from my other partner and referral links.

The costs for my domain registration, domain name service (DNS), and optimized WordPress hosting could be around $15 a month per blog depending on the vendors and plans I choose.  I mention this so that when I say that my blogs aren’t yet paying for themselves, my readers will understand the figures involved.  I didn’t start publishing these blogs to make money, but it would be nice if they were self supporting.  In the past year I have been very pleased with Hostgator.

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I’ve used the skills I’ve learned in the past year to take on two clients for which I have also created, managed, and updated WordPress websites and social media channels in the last year as a for profit venture.  It’s possible that I will add additional clients and websites in the next year while also growing my own two blog sites.

If you have been thinking about starting your own blog, or would be interested in having a website created for you, or have any other questions, please use the form to contact me.  If you like my blogs please be aware that you can be notified up updates via following my Twitter account and/or by signing up for email updates on each blog site.  Thanks for reading my blogs.

 

Ed

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