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2008 was an interesting year. ChrisBrandrick.com had somewhat of a rollercoaster year, some months having more posts than others and at times my blog experience lots of traffic to nearly none. This is my ‘Year In Review – 2008′.
January
In January of 2008 I made a total of 18 blog posts, covering such topics as promoting your RSS feed for free, adding a favicon to your site, and of course my goals for the year (which I will review in an upcoming post). The site received over 1,300 unique visitors from a variety of places including the UK, US, Japan, Brazil, Australia and so on. Back in January I had just under 5 or so subscribers to my RSS feed. This is also the month I started to heavily use Entrecard, as can be seen by this January blog post.
February
February saw 20 blog posts being published onto the site, two more than that in January, and this month I was clearly feeling generous as every Wednesday was an opportunity to win some prizes, in what I dubbed ‘Winning Wednesdays‘. Winning Wednesdays was an effort on my behalf to attract more subscribers to my blog, and due to the regularity of prizes, ranging from free blog reviews, entrecard credits, to cold hard cash, it clearly worked as my subscribers jumped from a pitiful amount in January to over 70 subscribers by the end of February. Running contests in addition to other content such as, how to install gravatar support on your blog, giving some link love on valentines day, and my findings on facebook advertising, was a massive help for improving traffic also, as February’s traffic was more than double that of January, coming in at over 2,600. In February I also began using the Kontera plugin in an effort to further monetize my blog.
March
The month of March saw a drop in posts, down to only 11. As for why my posting frequency dropped I’m unsure, but either way it seems to be the start of a dissapointing trend for less blog output throughout the year. During March I blogged about the progress being made on the development of my gaming site Gamebrit, the then upcoming version of WordPress 2.5, along with how to watch videos in high quality on You Tube. Despite posting considerably less in the month of March, visitor numbers remained encouragingly ‘high’ coming in at just shy of 2,500 uniques.
April
Not a lot happened here at ChrisBrandrick.com during the month of April, and I only managed to post four times. This complete drop off in post frequency was down to personal matters, such as sorting out and actually moving house. It wasn’t all bad though, as I managed to share with you how awesome of an application GrabUp for the Mac is. Also back in April I upgraded wordpress to the then current version of wordpress 2.5!
May
In a very similar fashion to April, May suffered from a lack of blog posts, only this time it was due to my internet connection not being installed for nearly over a month, not at all a good thing when you work online, in addition to this I also had University work and an exam to prepare for! I sure did spend a lot of time at my local coffee shop using the WiFi that month, yet still only managing five blog posts, one of which detailing how to follow me on twitter!
June
One post. During June I only posted once. Not cool. The only post I did make was explaining why I wasn’t posting, reason being of course I was in the process of starting up a new company with a few good friends of mine. Kufu Design LLP is the name, and web design is our game, check us out! Suprisingly enough I still pulled in more than 1,000 unique visitors. Oh and at this point in the year, I had not gained any RSS subscibers, but lost about 10 or so.
July
A slight increase in blogging returned to the site for the month of July, despite me speding two weeks of it on holiday in Turkey! During July I blogged a total of 7 times, twice about the aforementioned holiday, along with updates on my photography over at flickr and my page rank increase. Unique visitor counts were up on the previous month.
August
During the month of August over 1,200 of you stopped by to see what was going on, and I was clearly enjoying my summer to much! Not only was I working at Kufu, but I was also getting ready to attend the annual music festival at Leeds! In addition to that music related blog entry I also updated on what was going on over at WooThemes and how twitter decided to drop support for SMS updates for those in the UK, a sad day for us UK based twitter folk…
September
This month I returned back to University to commence my final year of my degree, so naturally i blogged about it, along with how Google Chrome was introduced, how the iPhone was hitting Pay & Go and another update on yet another WooThemes release. Traffic increased this month to over 2,000 uniques, most of them coming to read about the release of Googles browser.
October
In October I posted 8 times, and during this spooky month I posted a fair number of reviews, in a somewhat successful effort to generate income via my blog. All of October’s posts can be found here, including one revealing details on how my gaming website project ‘Gamebrit‘ is going.
November
Novemeber only saw four posts, including more reviews, and word on how Google had finally added theme selection to their email service GMail. During November my RSS subscriber count stablized at around the 50 mark at which it has remained since.
December
A disappointing end to the year with only two blog entries, one of which was Entrecard releated, the other wishing all my readers (thats you!) a very merry christmas!
An epic blog post I’m sure you will agree, but that is my year in review of what went down here at ChrisBrandrick.com during 2008. Be sure to look out for my goals for 2009, (and a review of my 08 goals) soon along with more blog updates!
