Happy New Year & Review Of 2008
Posted January 5th, 2009 | No Comments
Happy New Year people! I’m excited for what 2009 will bring for this site because 2008 was a massive year. In this post i’m looking back at some of the key moments including getting to the top of Google and the front page of Digg.
Black Is The New Pink!
I’m sure there won’t be many of you out there that remember this site in all it’s pink glory (see image to the right, click to enlarge). It’s hard to believe that’s how it looked as recently as April 2008 before the big relaunch! Until then the site had only been used as a way for me to upload bits and pieces for family & friends and post interesting videos and links.
I blogged about web design issues over at my business site Jigsaw Internet Solutions but the site (and blog) is aimed at clients rather than the web design community.
A Blog About Web Design (or not…)
After launching fluffypig.com v2 I fully intended to blog about web design, you know, things like HTML, CSS & Wordpress. As it happens, 9 months later and i’m yet to make a post about web design (unless you count announcing a couple of new sites) although I did once blog about Firefox and Future Of Web Design conference!
The posts started out pretty personal about things such as my Facebook account, Gordon Ramsay restaurants. I did keep up the Tech quote with a popular post about Mac Apps that I love.
iPhone Mania!
The first post that was really popular and would go on to shape the future of this blog was ‘I’m Glad I Waited For An iPhone 3G‘ which was basically me being very excited about the soon to be released iPhone 3G (after waiting a year for it to come out). Other iPhone posts followed and were also very popular, including ‘Free iPhone 3G‘ and ‘iPhone 3G First Impressions‘.
The Digg Effect
The blog then really hit the big time with another iPhone post. This time ‘Top 10 Best iPhone 3G Apps‘. This post caused my host to suspend my account after receiving 200,000 page views in an hour after arriving on Diggs front page! (See image, click to enlarge). It peaked at position 3 on the front page and currently has 1110 Diggs, that number would have been much higher had my hosting account not been suspended for almost 48 hours! Maybe I would have hit number 1!!
Number One In Google
Following the massive spike in traffic caused by the Digg effect, the number of visitors eventually settled down but were still significantly higher than ever before and far more than I ever expected my little blog to receive. To this day I still receive a lot of traffic from Digg but my main traffic is now from being ranked #1 in Google for high volume search terms such as ‘iphone 3g ringtones‘, ‘iphone 3g apps‘ and ‘iphone 3g games‘.
Selling Out
With an average of 1000 unique visitors a day the internet marketer in me reared it’s head and saw it as too good an opportunity to miss. I went against my belief that personal blogs shouldn’t contain advertising and installed Google AdSense, at the same time I also sold a couple of sponsored links in the footer. It’s still something i’m not totally happy with, of course I enjoy the $100+ payments from Google (even more so with how much stronger the dollar has gotten lately!) but I never like to see ads ruining me designs! If the traffic ever falls to a level where i’m not making decent money i’ll be happy to remove the ads right away. I never intended for this site to make me any money, it just happened!
The Unofficial iPhone Blog
It soon became clear that my posts about iPhones were by far the most popular and as it’s something I love to write about the blog became very iPhone orientated. Other posts included ‘5 Things Still Wrong With iPhone 3G‘, ‘Your iPhone 3G Questions Answered‘, ‘Top 20 iPhone 3G Games‘ and ‘Create FREE Custom iPhone Ringtones‘ which is the most commented post so far with 111 comments to date.
Busy Real Life = Blog Neglect…
Unfortunately October & November were hugely busy months for me with my business. I was busy developing high profile websites such as Altec Lansing, Business Link and Sarah Beeny (C4s Property Ladder) at the same time. I had very little free time to post and as such the visitor count suffered, dropping to around 500 unique visitors per day, a 50% decrease.
Luckily in December I found some more time and started reviewing more iPhone games which has proved very popular and brought most of the traffic back! Though I make sure to remind myself that it’s still a personal blog and leave the odd post about TV shows I like, movies i’m excited about or photos i’ve taken etc…. And my favourite blog post of the year is nothing to do with iPhones or Apple at all! It was me doing my bit in the quest to get Jeff Buckley to number one ahead of that shitty X-Factor woman. Obviously it didn’t happen, but he did make number two which is a massive achievement and my blog post was viewed by over 3000 people with over 300 downloading the track directly from my link. So in my head at least I played a part in knocking Leona Lewis to number 3 ;)
2009
So who knows what the blog will look like this time next year! I guess it will depend on how much effort I put into it and how many shiny new things Apple bring out. I do already have a few ideas lined up, but I think i’ll save them for another post ;)
Finally thanks to everybody that has contributed to the blog, whether by commenting, subscribing or even just reading. Hopefully more of you will get involved in 2009 and in the meantime, feel free to add me if you use Twitter.
Subscribe To Receive FREE Updates Via RSS or Email
