I forgot to write an article about it, but on November 19th, Thoughts From My Life turned 1! That's right, a year has gone by with me blathering about whatever on this site.

It all started with my article on Insurance Policies and then I just kept rolling after that.

What turned out to be my most popular articles (and largest Adsense earners) have been these four articles.

• Collecting Air Miles and Their Value
• Collecting Aeroplan Points and Their Value
• Aeroplan Versus Air Miles - Comparing Them
• Best Nintendo DS Homebrew

Overall, I feel it has been a success. My original intent was to use this site as a tool to learn more web programming, have a diary for whatever I was working on or just thinking about at the time, and have it make enough money to pay for itself. The blog now earns over $40/month in passive income and an extra $50/month in sponsored posts that I write. Not bad, considering my costs are $15/year for the domain and $5/month for the web hosting.

What Articles Have Been Published?

It has been an interesting year so far. I tried a number of techniques to get traffic to my site and it has settled into a little over 100 uniques a day. I thought I would write about whatever I was thinking about or trying to figure out and see where the articles take me. I thought it would be an even distribution, but it has been fairly one sided.

Year to date, here are the categories on my site and the number of articles in each one after the course of the year.

It is interesting that Finance was one of my smallest categories, yet it gave me over 90% of my passive blog income.

What Has Changed?

Well, I wrote my own website code. I am a software engineer and to help keep my interest up in this project I decided to write my own code. It has been a good experience and I learned some PHP out of it. It definitely hindered me in a number of areas as a lot of my time was spent coding and not writing.

I have learned a ton about blogging. My best article describing it is 9 Blogging Lessons I Learned From John Chow. His site was the first one I started reading back in November of 2006 when I started mine. I have followed a lot of the techniques he has done, but have to admit I have grown out of reading his blog a bit. I still go back, but this has taken its own direction for me.

Goals For Year 2

I want to take Thoughts From My Life to a much higher traffic level and revenue level. Goals for this year are:

• Add frequent commenters section to the layout of my pages.

  It will include a link back to their site without the nofollow tag on it. Just payback for writing comments and help to encourage more comments.

• Add a recent articles section to the layout.

  I'm hoping to catch all the search engine visitors and get them to stay longer by exposing them to more article links.

• Add a recent comments section to the layout.

  Help the readers stay up with what people are saying without having to navigate to articles.

• Get involved more with other blogs.

  Consistent reading helps with creativity and I have received traffic from other blogs because of it.

• Write more articles for the more active areas.

  I have not written an Aeroplan article in a long time. It might be time to expand that area and try to capture more search engine traffic.

• Develop more SEO into my posts and site.

  I will constantly refine my site for search engine optimization ideas. Researching keywords when writing a post is also important.

Here's to another year!

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2009...A New Year
Earn Revenue Online - December 2007 Recap
Advertise On Thoughts From My Life
Canadian Capitalist Anniversary
2007 Year In Review - Thoughts From My Life

Category: Blogging

Original Post: Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

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