Happy Birthday, TopTut.com!

Yay, today toptut.com celebrates one year online, not that anyone cares. And, in 16 days from now I will celebrate my birthday as well, not that anyone cares either, but anyway, let’s get back to topic!

So, 365 days online as well as 356 days of blogging, as this was my first ever blog. Spending time around the blogsphere teached me a lot, in fact from -200% knowledge I think I am successfully reaching for about +65% of being a good blogger, not only making money off this blog, but also producing my own WordPress themes and helping others (a bit).

History

Originally I got this domain free, off my DreamHost deal and was planning to make a blog, pull it to PR3 and sell for 50 bucks, putting 100% profit in my pocket. Upon the first Google PR update TopTut.com hit PageRank 5 and of course I couldn’t imagine selling it, let alone this whole blogging thing started to be interesting.

Notable MileStones

From the notable milestones I would outline 2 comments I got; one from Jim Westergen, and the other from Steve Pavlina, both gurus I highly value and learnt a lot from. Other than that, last month I got MyBlogLog installed and was pleasantly surprise to see 3 well known faces here — John Chow and his copycat, (who ended up beating his search results in Google — John Cow), as well as Cow’s blog designer Hyder. Looks like the whole family came to visit toptut.com!

Our first design got featured on Screenalicious (back then we used a free theme, now I have my own) and our Photoshop tutorials were published on pixel2life, good-tutorials, tutorialized, Photoshop Roadmap and dozens of other tutorials databases. Our Free WordPress themes got used by over 2000 (!) of websites, and at present, toptut.com is Top 2k Blog on Technorati! (On this occasion, also many thanks to Colleen Chard from Kalina Web Designs who kindly blogged about my first WP theme and help me greatly with getting started).

Moreover, we got featured on Paula Mooney’s Bloggers Salary list, although the blog revenue went MUCH higher since then, even back in April I was already on the respectable 90th place (let’s not forget that the first places are all monopolized by Wall Street blogs, CNN money blog, Times, USA Today and other empires).

So, How was this year?

Apart from the unpleasant and unjust fight with some other wp themes designer, and apart from the fact we got banned from digg.com– it was an awesome blogging year! Having my entire forum’s community support and people who willingly promote and link to this blog, it was really great being a beginner blogger, although I think my blogging revenue (x,xxx$ monthly) can easily push me into pro-bloggers category soon.

About half a year ago I also opened the Dark Light of Love blog, dedicated to romance and bedroom (to its farthest extent), which gets more and more exposure as well (surely people would be more interested in tips for improving their sex life rather than in tips for improving their SERPs! :D)

So, that’s it about the exiting last 365 days of toptut.com floating somewhere in the cyberspace of WWW.  Cheers!