First Anniversary of abhisays.com

This week my blog abhisays.com is going to complete one year on internet. This is my 300th article on first anniversary of my weblog. One year, 300 articles, more than 500 comments, 39k technorati ranking, 370k alexa ranking, Page Rank 4, 1000 unique visitors everyday, earning 12-15k rupees per month. This data is not looking much attractive but important thing is that still I am learning a lot of things and one day I will become top blogger. That is all my blog abhisays. So How I started this journey? I am going to explain everything what I did in this one year for blogging.

In march 2007, I decided I should have one personal page on internet. Then I tried to buy some relevant domain name. But the domain names for my name were not available. Actually I was in search of some short and easy to remember domain name. Finally I registered abhisays.com. It is a good domain which sounds like “Listen carefully, when Abhishek Kumar says something”. At that time I have not much idea about blogging and blogs. However I have tried blogger.com for creating my first blog on internet. But I never liked to use free services like blogger, windows live, wordpress.com etc. The main problem with these free blog service providers is that we have to use subdomains(Now you can use your domain name also on blogger). Then I saw some blogs on internet like Labnol, JohnTP, CopyBlogger, Tech-Tonic, Tech-buzz etc. Some of them were indians. Then I saw the number of blogs on technorati.com. At that time there were 55 millions blogs in the blogosphere. I scared how will I survive? But anyhow I started my blog abhisays.com with the WordPress blogging script. I read some reviews about wordpress on some blogs. Then I came to know that wordpress is the best option to start a new blog or you can say self-hosted blog. I installed wordpress successfuly on my web-server using cpanel. Then I started searching any good template for the blog. Choosing template became a big problem for me as I was confused with a large number of templates available free on internet. Believe me I tried almost 100 WordPress themes for abhisays. But after a few days, I settled on the XMark template. My first target was to get good ranks in Google for my articles. This I achieved by using some of the SEO plugins of WordPress. Then my blog started receiving traffic from Google. Google search is very important for any blogger. I believe SEO for Google as the best option for internet marketing. Directory submission is another one. I have submitted my blog to about 20 top blog directories.

Now everything was ready. The only thing left was what type of articles I should write. It was a big decision. Then I thought I would write about anything which I see interesting. So the blogging journey started. My blog was receiving pretty decent traffic. So I signed up for adsense to show adsense ads on abhisays. But the income from adsense was very less. So I decided to go for alternatives like TextLinkAds, Shopping Ads, Writing Reviews etc. Suddenly my college examination came and stopped blogging for some time, then after completing graduation I went to my home town, where I found some problems related to internet connection. After getting AirTel GPRS internet connection, I again started updating my blog. Then I saw review of zoundry blog writer on some blog. I also installed zoundry on my pc. And believe me that was amazing expereince. It made my blogging work much easier. One day, I found one of the articles on some other website, then I learned methods to remove that copied article from that website or better say combat blog plagiarism. After a few months I shifted my blog to HostGator. As I believe HostGator is the best hosting provider for blogs powered by WordPress.

After two months, I got call from a software company in Bangalore. On 27th July I joined that company. Again I found many troubles in blogging. Blogging in Bangalore is not a joke as it took me about 2 months for assembling the entire infrastructure for blogging. Life in metro cities is horrible in India. I will point out this issue in some other article. You have to settle yourself first then in free time, free mind you can blog. My blog was completely dead while I was working on projects of Foreign Clients. On one sunday, I got a mail from Amit, who is also from my college. He told me that my blog is very good and we should do something to monetize it. But I told him the real situation. I told him that I couldn’t write new articles while working 9 hours per day in any software company. So he told me that he would write new articles and reviews for my blog. That was great moment. It was re-birth of my blog. During those bad days, my blog ranking was 500k in technorati and 1500k in alexa. For last there months we have posted more than 120 articles and conditions for my blog has really improved.

Ups for abhisays.com

• New hosting from HostGator. (Almost 100% uptime. I have never seen my blog down.)
• Transfer of money from paypal to Indian Banks.
• Contribution of Amit in my blog.
• Zoundry Blog Writer.
• Very good ranking in Google for relevant keywords.
• 39k technorati ranking, remember technorati keeps track of more than 90 million blogs.
• Google PR 4.
• Continuous Upgrades of WordPress.

Downs for abhisays.com

• Alexa ranking is not upto the mark. (350k alexa ranking)
• End of my graduation. (shifting from Bhopal to Muzaffarpur and finally to Bangalore)
• New Job. (working in any sofware company 9 to 6 in Bangalore, You can’t do anything extra.)
• Infrastructure problems.(Lack of Internet connection, PC problems)
• No regular updates.
• Poor networking with other bloggers.
• Less number of tips and tricks articles.
• Some Hated features on my blog.
• Some Common errors on my blog.
• Problems of Blog Plagiarism

One year is not a big period. I am still in learning phase. Blogging has become very tough job for me after joining a software company. All I need support and faith of my readers. Let’s see what happens.