Happy birthday Cats Who Code! One year of blogging in review

The story

Back in June 2008, I was blogging since almost a year on Lyxia.org, a blog in French language that I have sold since. Together with a friend, we decided that it should be really cool to create a blog in English to share our knowledges with people worldwide.

We had to pick up a domain name. It wasn’t easy, as always. I first tried to find something like “webdevmagazine.com”, but all the interesting names were already taken. So, as both me and Michael (the friend I was starting Cats Who Code with) are cats lovers, I came up with the name Cats Who Code, which I found original, funny and catchy. 1 year later, I still really love that name.

So, Cats Who Code were born. I created the first blog theme, which was pretty simple and not so pretty. For our first articles, Michael and I translated posts from our respective blogs. While I was in holidays in New York City, one of our early articles, 100 Vim commands that every programmer should know hitted Delicious.com frontpage, which was very encouraging. At the time, our feedburner count was something like 70 readers.

Cats Who Code first logo, used from June to December 2008.

In august 2008, Cats Who Code did a great performance by placing two GNU/Linux related articles on Digg frontpage. On August 18, we had 18000+ unique visitors, which is still our absolute traffic record. As the blog was starting to grow, it required us to work more on it. I started to work a lot and to publish WordPress related posts on WpHacks to attract some new readers for Cats Who Code. At the time, I was contacted by Packt Publishing for writing a book about WordPress. I accepted, and after 9 months of hard work, the book is going to be released soon.

October 2008 was definitely an important month in my life as a blogger. Inspired by the WordPress book I just started to write, I decided to launch a new blog, focused on providing small but usefull WordPress hacks, tips and tricks. This blog is a great business model because the posts takes approximately only 10/15 minutes to be written. I didn’t expected it, but 2 months after launching, WpRecipes already had 1000 rss suscribers, while Cats Who Code only had 700.

WpRecipes allowed me to sell lots of premium WordPress themes and benefit of affiliate programs. My online revenue was multiplied by two, which I think was great.

As 2009 was arriving, Cats Who Code became an established blog with an average 3000 unique visitors per day and 1000 rss suscribers. WpRecipes had almost 2000 rss readers, and the average unique visitors per day were 1000, which was not bad at all for a blog having only two months!

Sadly, at this time I was fucked “Smart”priced by Google. My Adsense income was divided by 10, so I decided to focus more on direct advertising. It worked more on WpRecipes than on Cats Who Code, probably due to the fact that CWC was more generic than WpRecipes, which is only focused on one thing, WordPress.

At the beginning of 2009, I launched PsdRecipes with my friend Jeremy Herve, and relaunched WpVote, the Digg site for everything WordPress. Sadly, none of theses sites managed to get an efficient online recognition. While I still think they’re both great sites, it didn’t attracted people as Cats Who Code and WpRecipes did. You can’t win everytime. At the same time, I sold my first blog, Lyxia.org, for $3500 because I didn’t had the time to maintain it.

The story continues with two great thing that allowed me to earn more money online: The first is BuySellAds.com, an advertising marketplace where you can sell ads on your blog. At first, I didn’t wanted to join because they take 25% of your revenue, and though that I’d make more money by selling ads directly on my blog. But I finally decided to give a try. I had nothing to loose anyways.

I was susprised, but 2 weeks after creating my account, BSA had already sold the two ad spots available on Cats Who Code and WpRecipes, for a total amount of $105 (after they took their 25%). At the time, I understood that the 25% they good is nothing because BSA allowed me to sell more ads, and sell it at a higher price than I used to sold it directly on my blogs.

The second good thing at the time was WpWebHost. This company, which provides a WordPress friendly hosting, contacted me and asked to join their affiliate program. They also gave me free hosting, so I switched most of my sites on their servers, and I’m very happy with.

With their killer affiliate program, WpWebhost pays me a nice amount of money every month.

May 2009 was also an important month, because for the first time, I bought a blog. The blog is PsdVibe, and it focus on providing Photoshop tutorials and resources. When I bought the blog, it has 750 rss readers. Three weeks later, the count jumped to 1200. One of the greatest thing of having multiple blogs is that you can use one to promote the other, and vice-versa. I used this technique a lot and had great results.

The blog today

Currently:

• Cats Who Code have +/- 2500 rss suscribers and an average 3500 unique visitors per day.
• WpRecipes have 3600+ rss readers and an average 1500 unique visitors per day.
• PsdVibe have 1200+ rss readers, and an average 3500 unique visitors per day.

And now…A new design!

…Happy birthday Cats Who Code! And of course, thanks to each of you for enjoying reading this blog.
To celebrate the first one year, I have redesigned the blog, making it looking a lot more profesional (In my opinion, of course!) Also, we have a new mascot, designed by talented Ukrainian designer Zira. The new mascot is a drawing of my cat.

Any plans for the future?

I talked about the past, I talked about today, so now let’s talk about the future.
My main plan is to continue my works on my 3 most important blogs. Don’t forget that most of the time, success is exponentional. As an example, when I started Cats Who Code, popular Web Design/Web development blog Six Revisions had 6000 suscribers. Now, one year later, it has 20000+! In fact, it took me 7 months to reach 1000 suscribers on cats Who Code, while 3 months later, I had 2000. The most difficult time for a blog is when you start it.

Cats Who Code had some talented contributors in the past year: Michael, Hayes Potter and Alex Denning, the only Cats Who Code guest author who ever made Delicious frontpage. For the upcoming year, I’d like to get more guest authors, so if you’d like to contribute to any of my blogs, don’t hesitate to contact me.