Ten Year Blogiversary
by Josh ShermanTen. Freakin’. Years.
Ten years ago today I “re-established my web presence” in the form of a blatant knock off of Daring Fireball’s design (which sadly, I couldn’t find on Archive.org’s Wayback Machine) and an abomination of an 18 sentence paragraph.
I was also a little over a month away from the 1 year mark of registering the domain joshtronic.com which if I didn’t take action, I probably would have let it lapse under my “use a domain within 12 months or just let the damn thing go” approach to domain squatting.
So what’s happened in the last 10 years of blogging?
Honestly I was going to list a bunch of things out, but as I did it all started to sound like I was just patting myself on the back.
That’s not really me so you’re just going to have to read the nearly 600 posts to catch up ;)
Appreciate everybody for reading my weekly rants and raves.
Heres to another decade of successful blogging! 🎉
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Great stuff Josh - congrats!!
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Appreciate it!
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Congrats! Mind sharing stats over the years?
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Not at all, don't think I can embed an image on here, so here's a link:
https://i.imgur.com/aM2tI3h.png
In 2015 my VPS Showdown posts really started to gain some steam. The tiny spikes prior were due to some "You're doing Linux wrong" posts I had done that gained some traction.
That big spike was when Linode picked up on my posts, cross posted me to their Medium account and promoted my tweet about my post on Twitter.
That all said, really hard to get much value from a zoomed out 10 year view of the stats, especially with that crazy spike in 2017.
I don't put any effort into anything but the writing. No worrying about writing to keywords or anything. I started the blog to become a better writer, so I just keep the focus there :)
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Thanks for sharing! Neat to see other stats from bloggers. When you publish a post, do you share it anywhere?
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New posts go out via my newsletter to a few hundred subscribers, and is posted to my Twitter automatically (which may cease when I move off Mailchimp).
After being verbally abused on a handful of occasions for self posting my content early on, I decided to not give a single fuck about sharing stuff and just focus on generating content.
Fortunately, if you're publishing good content (which I've done like 3 times now) people will definitely post it for you.
Think that's something that people don't realize or perhaps don't want to admit in their marketing efforts. Slamming stuff down people's throat tends to not work because people never wanted it in the first place. If you can build things / publish things that people want, the referrals will happen organically.
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Happy blogiversary!
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TYTY... just realized that the individual post shows today's day, but the actual milestone was last year's September... almost to 11!!!
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Also, interesting you added this is a product. How does it make money?
I was thinking of doing that for my rosie.land website to try to encourage me to make money from it, somehow, some day :)
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All affiliate plays at this point. Sadly it's all revenue paid direct to me so I can't put up a verified metric :(
Many moons ago I had written a comparison post, Linode versus DigitalOcean, because at the time, I was hosting with Linode and DigitalOcean was fairly new, and I couldn't find much about them yet.
That post ended up becoming somewhat regular as each would release new stuff and then I'd review them again (mostly just benchmarks) and post.
Everything started to escalate a while back and I was getting more and more feedback about how my last post was outdated and I needed to update it..... so last year I moved to monthly posts :)
That's one arm, the other is Amazon affiliate stuff. I review the crap I buy, occasionally I write a gem like my post about getting a lawn mower started which helps me know it's spring because of the pop in traffic (and pop in sales of a particular additive I used to get my mower started).
I've dabbled with Adsense and Carbon and while I made a few bucks a day from them, I've always felt they cheapened my personal brand a bit. Had a Patreon linked to the site for a while as well, and nobody contributed.
Was a bit weary to add my blog as a product on here, but figured since it's generating consistent revenue and I've found a couple of somewhat repeatable processes, it's slowly become more of a brand / tech resource than just a place where I B&M about stuff (I still do that too, just not all the time ;)
My buddy @jwd2a has joked in the past that I'm the Chris Coyier of Hosting Reviews, lol
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well done and congrats!
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Appreciate it, @rosiesherry & @markosaric
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That's great though, a nice little income you've got going there.
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Well done on all the blogging. I admire people who write consistently like that!
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Thanks... definitely a labor of love. At this point, it's just part of my routine, but if you were to go through the last few years of posts, you'd see where I phone it in sometimes and just write about not knowing about what to write about, lol
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