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!

Last week I re-enrolled back at University to begin my third and final year doing my Web Technology degree. Today I had my first lecture and it’s good to be back after a 5 month hiatus.

University Of Lincoln

As I posted back in January getting into my third year at the University was one of my goals (goal 7) for the year, which clearly I have achieved. So yes, just a short post, but I am back at Uni and come May I hopefully will have a degree and be Chris Brandrick BSc.

Today I woke up and opened my laptop to check my emails, but that wasn’t to be as for some reason I had no wireless signal. After a bit of investigation work the realization was that there had been a power cut, and the power was still down.

I am currently on my Easter break from University (I do a Web Technology course) so I planned to put some serious time and effort into working on my various sites over the holiday. Of course with no power, and no internet this was going to be tough. It suddenly hit me, that I was going to have to be creative on how I spent my time, especially considering my laptop had only two hours left on the battery. I spent those two hours doing some work in Photoshop, and playing around with CSS in Dreamweaver, but once the battery had died, what was I to do, especially considering work was a priority for the day.

I ended up drawing (yes hand drawn!) some website designs and drawing mock ups of logos for upcoming sites, among with listing my plans for some sites, along with tasks I wanted completing soon, and prioritizing them. Having this time away from the Mac, and more importantly the internet, really did help me focus on what needed doing and when by. Oh and I took the dog for a walk or two.

The power was out for over 6 hours. Lesson being? It’s always healthy and more often than not, productive to take time away from your PC (if thats your primary work area).

What would you do without a PC and net access (if you work online that is)?

Happy New Year! I hope you all have a great 2008 and achieve all that you aim to. (Also to bring in the new year, a congratulations from Scott at mythermos.com for winning my small holiday entrecard contest.)

Now as for my plans for 2008, these include goals for my blog, my sites and personal aims:

1. Get a custom blog design:

Mainly a goal I hope to achieve far before 2008 is even close to finished, I want to give ChrisBrandrick.com it’s own look and feel. It’s commonly known that using a public free theme (despite their merits) is frowned upon. Having a design unique to me gives my blog an identity, a brand, and recognition. John Cow has various cow theming, John Chow has that big car, TylerCruz has that nice custom avatar, all memorable stuff. Being unique is a big positive. So hopefully I can achieve this goal fairly soon. If you know of any good Wordpress design folks, let me know.

2. Increase my blog earnings:

Now from the offset this shouldn’t be to difficult, especially considering my blog is currently earning me £0. That’s right, I am currently making no money from this site, but this isn’t because I can’t, it’s because so far I just haven’t. The goal for 2008 is not only to make money but to make a specific amount per month. For those big internet entrepreneurs out there this may not seem like much, but it’s a goal I am realistically aiming for. By the end of the year I hope to be making a consistent £100 per month ($200 for you reading stateside) from ChrisBrandrick.com. This will be handled carefully, as for a start this blog will never be plastered with adverts, if and when I do implement ads it will be subtle and well placed. I hope to make the majority of this earning via reviews. Watch this space, as once I do start earning from this blog I will no doubt keep you guys in the loop.

3. Learn to drive:

I’m 21 in two days, here in the UK you can drive from the young age of 17. It’s about time I got a driving license and learned to drive, it’s a life skill I want. Sure traveling by train has served me well, but having your own set of wheels is an independence which I eventually want. This year, despite it’s pricey nature I hope to learn and pass my driving test, thats the goal. Buying a car is not.

4. Blog more:

All you have to do is look back over my archives for the past year to see that postings here at my blog have been lacking, sure it may well have picked up in the past month to a rate I am happy with but I intend to improve more, mainly to keep myself motivated and working. I intend to post at least (at a minimum) of five times a week. Hopefully you the reader will appreciate this to! More posts on my web developments, reviews and personal musings coming your way.

5. Launch WebmasterPlay:

You may remember all the way back in June of 2007 I posted about a webmaster forum I was creating, since then little work has took place on it for several reasons. Initially things were going well, with the front page created and the sites feature set building impressively. Unfortunately I hired an individual who wasn’t quite what I was looking for when it came to skinning the vBulletin forum. Due to this misfortune I took a break from developing the site, and this break lasted far longer than expected. I still really want to WebmasterPlay finished, and hopefully 2008 will be it’s year. Videogaming webmasters keep an eye out.

6. Increase RSS Subscriptions:

Only yesterday I made a posting detailing how I had installed Feedburner tools to my RSS feed. With this freshly installed I figured it would be worthwhile to make a goal relating to my readership. So with any luck by the end of the year my RSS subscription will hopefully be at 500, I have no idea how hard this goal will be to reach, but why not start me on the right path by subscribing now.

7. Get into my final year of University:

An academic goal which relies on me working hard(er) and getting the required grades, from now until May. Although without sounding to cocky, I am fairly confident that I will get into the 3rd and final year of University, this goal will act as a reminder as to why I am doing the course I am (Web Technology) and why I want to do it. The 3rd year starts in September so be sure to check back for the results then!

8. Launch and make a success of GameBrit:

This is the first time I have mentioned GameBrit on my blog, but here we go. GameBrit simply put is a british gaming website I have been working on for a short while, I hope to launch it within the next month or two. But more details on GameBrit coming in a separate post. I want to make sure I get it launched with the desired features, and getting at least 15,000 uniques per month before the year is out.

9. Purchase an iMac:

This goal really does depend on my online earnings, as I intend to fund this expensive purchase almost entirely from my money earned online. A new 20″ inch iMac, will it be mine this year?

10. Increase overall earnings:

What with me launching a small number of new sites this year (more details soon) I hope to start earning a healthy income from my online endeavors. As detailed above I would like to earn £100 a month from my blog, so on a whole £1000 a month from all my sites seems like a logical target. This will require a lot of personal effort and hopefully I will see the results. £1000 ($2000) per month from my portfolio of websites.

Those are my goals for the year, and hopefully when I come back to review this post in a years time, it will have been a successful year. (The above aims are in no particular order.)

I wish you all a productive new year; be sure to share your goals with me!