Yes, it’s my birthday today and am turning…..well a year older than yesterday. I don’t really feel much different, do you feel different on your birthday’s anymore?
So May 31st marked the end of Q1 for Financial Highway, although I am not planning writing a lot about my blog growth on constant bases, I think there is some value in sharing some quarterly blog results. If you go through our archives you may notice posts starting out in January, but that really isn’t the date I started daily blogging. I started at the end of Feburary (Feb 18th I think) to make things easy we’ll forget about February and assume started blogging in March 2009.
Early Stages- Visitors
I did not expect much growth in the early stages of the blog, but well into the first two weeks we started to gain some good traction, we went from 15-20 visits per day to about 80 visits per day in the first two weeks. After the first month we averaged a little over 100 visits per day and eventually in the mid 200 visitor’s per day, although those numbers are not large, they did exceed our expectations.
Subscribers
Subscribers are those who have signed up to receive free updates through our RSS feed or email (if you haven’t already subscribed, I suggest you do so NOW by RSS feed or Email), this also exceed our expectations. In the first three months we have seen a constant growth rate in our subscriber base, now well over 120 subscribers. Again numbers not huge compared to the big blogs, but better than expected.
FH in Media!
One of the biggest accomplishments for us was the fact that we were mentioned in the mainstream media. Financial Highway was featured in Canada’s largest newspaper The Globe & Mail, see FH in the News section.
Other Accomplishments
Some other important accomplishments we have had in the past three months, we decided to join twitter in April and bye now have a decent number of followers well over 120 (Follow Me on Twitter if you are not already).
We obtained a Google Page Rank of 3 by April, basically within a month!
We started to giveaway prizes to our readers, so far we have given away books, gift cards and software’s for more info check out our Prizes section.
We have written four guest posts, Mortgage Insurance vs Life Insurance on Canadian Capitalist, Two guest posts for JD @ Get Rich Slowly: An Introduction to Insurance, 14 tips for Purchasing Life Insurance we also had a guest post on Canadian Tax Resources; Understanding Critical Illness Insurance.
We have hosted four carnivals if you missed any of them you can visit our Carnival section, we will actually be hosting Carnival Of Money Hacks next week again.
Financial
Again this will NOT be a very common thing in Financial Highway but I think for the first quarter I will share this. This also surpassed all our expectations, although I have not placed a huge emphasis on income from blog we still had a very good income. We only placed Google adsense ad first but over time we have had several direct sponsor’s. Our income from all sources over the three month period was $620! Yes much more than expected, we actually turned down two ads last week. We obviously had some expenses as well, our total expenses was around $300.
Thank You
We have many people to thank for our success, first all our Readers! A blog is nothing without it’s readers and subscribers, so thank you to all of you!
There have been many people who have helped us throughout the first three months but two who got us started are; Million Dollar Journey and The Dividend Blog Guy who helped out with the early stages by giving tips on how to get started with a blog and gave us a review after the first month. Thanks guys we appreciate your help!
Last but not least I would like to thank my amazing fiance whom I have sometimes neglected due to the blog, but who has been understanding and a great supporter, thank you!
So far it’s been a great journey and we hope to continue to grow and provide our readers with valuable and uptodate information. Please keep your comments and suggestions coming!
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Congratulations Ray! This was a great 1st Quarter alright and here is to the continued success of the blog! I am glad you are not neglecting the income side of your blog’s balance sheet in the initial days.