AshwinR.com turns one year!

It is hope in this wider sense which enabled my father to build, from scratch, one of India’s largest modern enterprises. His was an undertaking powered by hard work, initiative, self-belief but, above all else, the capacity, as he would often say, “to dream with your eyes wide open”. - Anil D Ambani

AshwinR.com turns one year! Happy Birthday to my Blog! The first year of my blogging was fantastic. I loved every minute of it, honestly. A review of my first year in blogging…

A PR 5 Blog

AshwinR.com is a Page Rank 5 blog. I know that Getting up to PR 5 is no big deal… even achieving PR 6 is fairly easy, it’s just a matter of time. Anything more than PR 6 is hard work. But it’s good to have a PR 5 as that itself creates a brand and sounds nice as well. I’m looking for PR 6 by the end of this year.

Now for some stats. I have currently 104 posts and 3,444 comments, contained within 24 categories with Akismet catching 18,930 spam comments (and counting). The RSS readers is hovering around 115 readers (see the FeedBurner count in the sidebar) and some 30 odd subscribed via email. The total Page Views is over 295K (see Stat counter in the bottom of the page). I’m looking for 1 million page views by the end of 2007.

4 figure Blogger

The total money that I made with Adsense alone in this year till now is $1341. I’m going to repeat what most of the bloggers say: “I didn’t expect to make this much money from this blog“. It took almost five months to pull off my first $100 (the threshold required to get payment from Adsense), after that there was no looking back! I know this money is peanuts, but still I take pride of my blog revenues as I put in a lot of effort.

For the following year, 2007 I have $3500 as the revenue target. I’m going to diversify my earning model and look beyond AdSense. And hopefully in the year 2008, I’ll be a 6 figure blogger.

Blogging Lessons

One thing that I can tell from my experience is that hard work never fails to bear fruits. In some way or the other you’ll be rewarded. Never care about any other thing like SEO, CTMs and CTRs, traffic, comments, etc.. work hard and things will fall in place automatically. Similarly there’s no short cut to success also. You reap what you sow. I can tell that this blog has average success, only because I didn’t work hard.

The second thing is never wait for things to happen. I know a lot of bloggers having so much potential and talent wasting away by not having a paid hosting and web domain. They wait for their first pay-check to get paid hosting. I also did the same thing. I transferred the posts from my old blog to this place. Google found out duplicate content and this blog was penalized. I lost traffic because of that. Traffic is everything in online success. It’s so difficult to pull up the audience and make them engaged to your show. You need to be proactive. Register a domain and get a paid hosting now! More Read: Importance of Paid Hosting and Domain name

The third thing what I have learnt is simple. Keep providing value. Give, give and keep giving till you start to receive what you wanted (traffic,sales, money or whatever you expect). You need to have your site established. For that you have to blog with unique content (or interesting concepts). Then it’ll be a matter of time before you achieve what you want. There’s no shortcut to success. Hard work will reward you one day.

Do what you like doing

Most of the posts takes me at least 5-6 hours to write and get it posted here. Sometimes I’ll write it in paper and again type back here. Not to forget the research that goes behind most of the posts. Some posts take days together to get on board! This is a lot of hard work which many people shy way from. But never ever I found myself in a situation regretting for what I did. I have spend 6-7 hours on a stretch for certain posts, blogging from Dubai (when I don’t have laptop, separate PC-which is used by 4-5 other people, spending time after office hours when the PC is free) and in a not-so-good environment to blog as well… but I never felt the heat of hard work. I did what I liked doing. Blogging taught me that hard work can also be pleasurable.

Looking ahead…
This blog is going to sport a new look and theme soon! I actually planned that along with this post, but it got postponed and I wanted everything to be running fine and didn’t want to act in haste. A theme change is overdue here as was a theme made for browsing at 800*600 resolutions plus I wanted a newer and a better theme. I might also go for a paid theme, once I get decent revenues from this blog.

Other than that, you can expect me to post a lot more regularly (note that it might be frequently) and at the end of next year, this place will have over 275 posts. I’ll continue to concentrate on movie reviews. It’ll be a lot more different from what you see in other places with movie lists and honest reviews.

Soon, I’ll be adding in the “Best of AshwinR.com” or the popular posts list that featured in this site. I’ll be adding in 6-8 posts in that. Is there any of my posts, that you would like to see there? And is there any changes that you would like to see here, any areas that you want me to blog on or is there any suggestions which can make this blog better? Just leave a comment. Each and every feedback go a long way in improving this blog!

I just want to do what I like - providing value with every blog post, without any other motives like wannabe “Pro Blogger”, money, FeedBurner’s RSS readers stats, Technorati or Alexa Traffic Ranks, etc.. Well, I’ll make sure that your time is well spend after visiting this site!

Seasons Greetings! Happy New Year, 2007 to all and may we all have a wonderful New Year. “May You Live In Interesting Times!“