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Oh, well when people say blogging changed their lives – they are absolutely right!

It has been one amazing…really amazing year with you guys! Blog grown from nowhere to quite impressive size in one year! Read further and I will share all last year statistic numbers, my works, successes – everything I have done on my first year being in this online design community! I am also creating big surprise for you free *.pdf document with roundup of all the posts done in the last year, only I am recreating articles with only the best of the best selections. I hoped to get finished and release it now, but it was bigger job than I thought, so you’ll have to wait a little bit. Now read a little about past and present, but get ready to be back tomorrow for new inspiration, resources, tutorials about everything design related! Thank you for being with us!

I started at August 30 by choosing domain name 1stwebdesigner.com – to choose this domain I wrote down full A4 paper with different names, phrases, adjectives. I really don’t know how good this domain name is by I got lucky and it was registered at first in 2003-2005 and then it was free for 3 years, when I picked it up. Interesting anyways – I found it out because of WayBackMachine (wrote a post about this webpage some time ago too – Wayback machine – history of Internet).

I guess that’s one of the reasons, why this blog ranked so fast and so well on Google search engine at first at least I guess so.

And yes, again – this is my first blog, so I think I am not optimizing and maintaining it good enough still, but at least trying my best. And you know – this blog is only half visible part of whole work, there must be done a lot of networking, marketing to get noticed in this already overwelmed blog world. I will be totally honest here with you (I won’t share only my income just now), so read and do the same if you want to get similar success as I am getting now.

Okay, let’s get started with visible part – blog, numbers and little statistics, shall we?

Public Stats:

• 10,780 Alexa Rank
• 18,538 Compete Rank
• 950 Del.icio.us Bookmarks
• 25,382 Inbound Yahoo Links
• 14,666 RSS Subscribers
• 5,174 Twitter Followers
• 5/10 GooglePage Rank
• 2,420 Technorati Ranking
• more than 400,000 unique visits in August 2009

Below you can see last year’s timeline – slowly, slowly, but all the time growing!

I think not bad first year achievements:

• Unique visits – 2,295,383
• Pageviews – 4,904,173 (almost 5 million pageviews wow!)
• 2.14 average pages per visit
• 2:25min average time on site

A little bit unbelievable for me, but trending is good!

Here you can see my top 10 traffic sources:

1. Google (organic) – definitely my TOP 1 traffic source and by the way I am already sharing and will continue article series, explaining how did I achieve very high results in early days using simple SEO techniques. Start to read from this article – How To Create Popular Blog With Keyword Research, Heatmaps And SEO? and stay updated for future articles.
2. Direct Traffic – my guess is that a lot of direct traffic comes from Stumbleupon someway.
3. Stumbleupon
4. Digg
5. Delicious
6. Twitter
7. Images.Google - with simple SEO techniques also images can be nice traffic source.
8. Smashingmagazine – this is the biggest design blog and somehow I got their sympathies and they often link to my articles. Thanks for that, I still haven’t done my guest article there, due to lack of time I guess. But this year I will definitely become their guest writer too.
9. Good-Tutorials – tutorials are excellent traffic source but also article creation takes a lot longer and requires special knowledge and ideas.
10. DesignFloat – did well in early days, now I really believe DesignFloat is past, if they will not rapidly change their approach.

Top 5 keywords:

• photo fun
• illustrator brushes
• high resolution wallpaper
• photo editing websites
• high resolution wallpapers

Top 10 Countries, where visits came from:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• India
• Canada
• Spain
• Germany
• Brazil
• France
• Japan
• Mexico

And about my blog.. Through this year there are 134 posts (+1 this one) written, where 6 of them are made by guest writers Srikanth AD (5 posts) and Andy Walpole (1 post). My biggest thanks to them for contributing and I hope in this year we will do even better. If you want to contribute too, read the details on Write For Us? section.

Blog also has 4 pages, 10 categories, 261 tags, 6,215 approved comments (a lot of them are trackbacks though) and 2,258 different nicknames were represented in the comments.

Huge thanks to my top 10 commentators:

• Sulumits Retsambew (81)

• joyoge designers’ bookmark (62)

• Ecommerce Website Design (44)

• Dicky (40)

• Luis Lopez (38)

• Johnson Koh (33)

• Stop Dreaming Start action (33)

• BunnygotBlog (24)

• Sulumits Retsambew show (23)

• Wallpapers (21)

And here are the most popular last year’s articles I’ve made:

1. 45+ Free Design Template And PSD Files
2. 35 Beautiful High Resolution WallPaper Collection
3. 28 Online Photo Editing Websites To have Fun With
4. 57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions
5. Logo Design Trends 2009 – Showcase
6. 101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts: Part 1
7. 70 Hand Drawing Style Resources, Brushes, Textures,Icons And Tutorials
8. Unique 3D Text – Xara 3D + Photoshop Tutorial
9. 45 Sites, Free Icons And PSD Resources For Web-Design
10. 30 Beautiful Illustrator Brush and Symbol Collection

Okay, so much about blog statistic numbers, but how did I manage to get that traffic? Ah..here comes not so visible part..social networking..

Did you notice, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Digg, Designfloat are in top10 traffic sources? And there are a lot more social networks in top 50 traffic sources.

And yes, again I started on social networks one year ago too and I’ll show you my accounts to show you at least idea how much work hides behind the scenes:

Twitter – I started to use Twitter just on September, when I had 60 followers.

Now… I have 5,131 followers, while I am following only 2,260 people (I follow only designers in the same niche – I add them directly or find through MrTweet service), through last year 1,405 tweets has been made. Twitter is not about how many followers you have, but how many targeted followers you can get. That’s my explanation about Twitter as my Top6 traffic source. You can view my Twitter account and follow me here.

StumbleUpon - I joined to StumbleUpon on Aug 5, 2008 and when I started to blog it was definitely my best traffic source for my new blog.

Now I consider myself as StumbleUpon power user with more than 29,000 favorites, 2200 reviews, 218 subscribers and 360 friends. A lot of effort and time has been put here, but believe me it’s paying off! You can view my Stumbleupon account here.

Digg

I joined Digg on August 28th, 2008 and at first didn’t know how to use it right and didn’t make any traffic at all. Now I have 138 active friends, 722 fans – who help to get my stories popular. I worked hard on my digg profile – almost 11,000 diggs, 100 comments and currently 7 stories I submitted made popular. Not really Digg power user, but trending is good and network also is very powerful. You can view my Digg profile here.

Designbump

am Top1 user on Designbump now too, look at statistics and view my profile.

DesignMoo

Top1 user here as well, look at statistics on the bottom of page and view my profile.

Gtalk IM – here I have more than 100 friends, whom I can ask to help me on Digg, Reddit – my networking list.

To get better I also joined to Yaro Starak’s Blog Coaching Program – I really have to give credits for my knowledge to him too!

I really didn’t want to impress you, but I just wanted to show at least part of the job behind the scenes. Really now I hope you will understand why 50% of my time goes writing article and other half 50% goes promoting, networking and sharing that one article over the blogosphere!

Right and finally few feedback articles I made this month..and screenshots from history:

The First Month Of 1stwebdesigner

First 132 RSS readers and ~45 000 unique visits!

The Third Month And Time To Talk!

1362 RSS readers and more than ~100, 000 uniques per month!

New Things Happening At 1stwebdesigner Website

And here you can find out what’s happened just month ago – big changes and still  a lot of work must be done! But now I must say..redesign really put this site to another level!

What can I say, stay with us, because I promise – I will work even harder, I also learned a lot in this year – hoping you did too! Let’s get started – Year 2 stage comes! Cheers!