(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)
What a year! When Website In A Weekend was started on January 26, 2009, the market for “build a blog really fast” seemed wide open.
It was exciting!
I registered the domain, installed WordPress, got right to work. The first article was “How To Rapidly And Easily Create Pillar And Flagship Content For Your Blog,” which was a simple list of the top 6 links on Google for the term “pillar content.” (This article has been extensively rewritten at least once, and is due for another rewrite.)
Within a couple of months of getting started, a number of Very Big Players stepped in with similar offerings. Players like Yaro Starak, Leo Babuata and David Risley.
That really sucked.
Sucked for me in any case.
Imagine: You are developing the Next Big Thing, and you’re ready to ship your first product or service, then you read on the news that Google or Microsoft just launched an identical offering and already has thousands of paying customers.
It’s like you’re sailing for Happy Land, and someone steals all your wind. There you sit, becalmed, dead in the water, wondering: “What did I do to deserve this?”
However, such… esteemed… competition validated my concept and the market, which felt pretty good.
But it raised the bar much higher than I anticipated in my initial vision.
One year along
Here’s where we’re at after a year:
- 246 posts published, 79 in draft (needs some pruning).
- 60 pages published, 20 in draft.
- A few small info products published. You can find them if you dig, not currently promoting them.
- A few hundred subscribers via newsletter and RSS feed. There has never been a concerted effort to enlist subscribers, the result is the count never drops week over week, and open rates are very high.
- 1000 comments reached on December 15, 2009; 1590 comments 5 weeks later as I write this bullet point. I didn’t start promoting Website In A Weekend until I had well over 100 articles, most of which was “evergreen” or pillar content.
Up until mid-June, I was posting on There Is No Box regularly as well, often daily.
Between both blogs, I estimate I published 250,000 words in 2009, between 175,000 to 200,000 on Website In A Weekend.
What would I have done differently?
The biggest thing I would have done differently is published more frequently early on. I didn’t start daily publication until early June. To be fair, I was learning quite a bit about WordPress when I started out, so it would have been hard to publish daily. Two to four times per week could have been feasible.
Given an earlier start on daily publishing, I would have started promoting earlier. However, I still would have waited until I had 50-60 articles published before going on the self-promotion warpath.
I didn’t have any clear goals when I started. This is largely because I didn’t know what was possible… I didn’t do any research, I just jumped right in and did it.
Speed of Implementation
No research?
Yep.
Website In A Weekend was conceived and executed on in about 1 hour. I was helping a friend install WordPress during a weekend work session some friends and I have monthly, and the concept appeared in my mind. I registered the domain immediately, then set up WordPress right away with the first article on pillar content.
This “speed of implementation” approach is regarded as a critical aspect of succeeding as an entrepreneur.
So is “failing fast,” but I’m not sure exactly what that means. I don’t have a definition of failure for Website In A Weekend. This is probably a strategic mistake.
That being said, this site fulfills more that one goal, and for reasons other than making money directly.
2010, the year ahead
“So, tell us what you have in mind, Dr. WordPress.”
Sure.
More money is tops.
This risks alienating some long time readers… but I haven’t had offers from anyone to pay my rent, so I’m cool with it.
Let’s take it pointwise:
- Increase monetization without sacrificing too much community. This will include a few small info products and a few highly targeted services.
- Keep community engagement on topics I enjoy writing about. As long time readers (bofem)kd know, this includes “soft” topics such as emotional engagement and intimacy. This helps me refine my craft, help others refine their craft, and explore various topics relevant to the blogging community at large.
- Revise Website In A Weekend eCourse. Tentatively, one article will be revised and republished each Sunday. There are 25 articles (for 25 hours) in the series, so the entire course will be updated completely twice yearly. I may be open to co-authorship on certain articles; conditions would be much stricter than for guest posts, but traffic would be higher as well. For example, the eCourse is going into very light automated twitter broadcast, with one article link posted daily at noon San Fran, noon London and noon Melbourne.
- Refine my hypertext writing craft. Most bloggers limit hypertext to simple linking from one article to another, or one website to another. But there’s so much that can be done. I’m not that inclined to give that stuff away, it’s very time consuming to develop, but anyone paying close attention will catch at least some of the details. Some of these techniques end up on the Insider list, watch for an invitation on the Weekender newsletter.
But enough about me…
How old is your blog?
Have you been at this game more or less than 1 year?
How has it worked out for you? Are you meeting your goals? Why or why not?
What you have done differently if you were to start over from scratch, right now?
kd I was writing this the same time you were pestering me to define it. Synchronicity is funny that way.
