I guess for me it’s a tad bit harder to review 2006 because it was the year of inner-change, the year in which my way of thinking change more than anything else. These kind of changes are harder to explain because they are not events with facts that you document but rather changes that happen inside of your mind, which eventually affect the way you act. It’s much harder to determine these changes, but I’ll try my best.

First, what change am i talking about?

A major change happened in my online journey in 2006, mainly in the way i outlook the web and what’s happening in it, specifically the web-earners and the blogosphere.

Today i feel i have unified a solid but flexible approach towards the way i want to do things in the future. Now, after nearly 20 months of blogging and 12 months of lurking around the online entrepreneurs underground, i feel i have got the basics of starting and evaluating an online business, namely a website or a blog.

Today i believe i manage to see things from a much wider angle, I’ve ran, struggled and stumbled many times during 2006 and I’ve witnessed sites rising to the top, and sites molding like they have never been there at all. I have learned that the small daily changes that happen with my blog traffic or my Adsense earnings are negligible in the long-term, they should be noted and analyzed, but overdoing that might mean i will read and read instead of working.

Today i look at my online-business map with a smaller but a more precise magnifier, i don’t get too excited when i hit $100, and I’ve learned not get in panic when i reach the rocket bottom $20 a day. I have a bigger plan than worrying or celebrating a daily milestone from this or that kind.

The big change happened late 2006, started late 2005

It all started with a traffic surge that i received back in December 2005 to my first blog after i wrote about a woman who married a dolphin. I woke up on Christmas day to find that my blog, which usually averaged 25 visits a day back then, received a whooping 100 unique visitors in 12 hours, what a great success.

It was that very December that i finally purchased a domain name for that blog and started marketing, writing content and dedicating more thought and time into the blog. In early January i was featured on ProBlogger which resulted in another traffic surge and gave my only blog back then some sort of authority that it needed. The growth never stopped since then, it wasn’t a quick growth, but there was a growth every month.

After 3 months of intensive blogging, researching, learning and covering flaws, i decided it’s time to start another blog, this time with the aim of not repeating the mistakes I’ve made with my first one. In April 2006 my 2nd blog hit the screens for the first time, averaging 30 unique visitors right from the very first day, and never going below that.

Today, that merely 9 months old blog is my flagship, earning me an average of $800 in the last 3 months. And all of that is a result of a very big, slow and uncompromising change that started in 2005, and started yielding fruits starting October 2006:

You can make a change too

As you can see in the chart above, the change is a very big one between the last 3 months, namely October, November & December, and the rest of the time i was running Adsense. It was a big change, but a change that took a lot of time.

So don’t think it’s not possible, you can pump your earnings in 2007 as well, all you gotta do is get up your ass, stop reading inspirational posts like these and start working hard on your content, design, and marketing skills. If you have these 3, and a serious dose of patience - you’re a winner.