In my series for 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge
- Joining The Challenge Of 31 Days To Build A Better Blog At Problogger.net! U2?
- What’s your Elevator Pitch?
- 9 Advantages Travelling Offline With Your Notebook!
- Continuing 31 Day challenge to Build a Better Blog
- Popular Websites And Their First Year Roundup!
- 6 Helpful Tips To Build A Better Blog!
- 7 Insightful Tips To Improve And Raise The Quality And Readership Of Your Blog
Many blog readers and owners questioning, how did some bloggers got so popular? Is there an easy way, a surefire manual for that? Certainly not, everybody cooks with water and starts with a few readers and a vision. Here are some examples of some famous and successful bloggers, who are looking back to their beginning of their website and how everything started:
John Chow, looking back
John Chow was stunned by the success of his first year. He started with 0 income from his blog and earned an average of $2000 monthly by the end of the year. Not bad but two years later he would be depressive if his website would make this amount of money. Nowadays he makes a whopping $20.000 to $30.000 a month. No wonder, since he has 50.000 RSS subscribers and a hell good marketing machine. 
After 3 years, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net
Darren is a pro, he has about 85000 RSS subscribers, in September his website will be 5 years old and his success has no limit.
Chrisg.com after his first 6 month
For Chris Garett it was important to have goals with his blog to be successful. After 6 Month he already had 3815 RSS subscribers, today he has around 13.000 readers. On his 6 month’s anniversary he had some new goals. Looks like he made them.
Weblogtoolscollection after the first year
Mark Gosh of WeblogToolsCollection is very thankful for his readers in his first year roundup. He also apologized, that the comments function didn’t work, error in the code. Funny to hear that from a WordPress Expert. Back in the days not everything was so easy in WordPress as it is today. 
He mentioned in his Flashback that he had to change his provider 3 times in his first year. Curious how many times he changed after that, I guess he never expected such a run on his website, neither his server providers.
WPCandy and their first birthday
The guys of WPCandy list their most successful posts of their first year and some statistics, I’m sure those numbers are already much higher by now.
Smashing Magazine first anniversary
Smashing Magazine, probably the most popular online design magazine thanks all their readers. Sad, that they didn’t show any statistics though. Would have been interesting how their journey went from a small blog to be no. 1 in Design.
Freelanceswitch.com after his first year
They started with around 3000 readers, I guess they hit a good niche right on the spot. Today they have around 40.000 readers!
I have to say it was pretty difficult to find some first year roundups, thought there would be more. And to my surprise, some big blogs have an awful archive, you cannot find anything or they don’t even have one. I hope you liked this little list and you can see, everyone starts from little. There is no magic. And maybe one day, you will belong to the big bloggers. Good Luck!
What about you, do you have a “First Year Roundup”?
P.S. this post belongs to build a better blog in 31 days. One of the tasks was to write a link post. Since I always wanted to write about blogs and their first year roundup, I thought that would be a good opportunity.
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June 4th, 2009 at 7:45 am
This is really a huge improvement. I did not know that it is possible to make such money from the blog. This is a really huge salaries. You gave me motivation to start my blog.