06.21.06

Milestones

Posted in General at 1:21 pm by admin

Looking Back… 

Looking back, I still clearly remember the cold day in January when I wrote the very first entry on this site. CyberWyre has been online for nearly six months now and has grown to something that I had never imagined it could.

Although I have always avoided, and actually never really felt a need to post anything about my personal life on this site, this blog entry is the exception. A lot has changed in my life in the past six months. In January, I had only started to apply for grad school, and the initial goal of this site was to find a way to support myself throughout school without a steady 9-to-5 job. In the past six months I have fought battles in my mind should I go back to school or not, back and forth constantly weighing my options. Whenever this would happen though, I would usually refer back to my very first post on this site where I clearly stated my goals and why I was doing what I was — this usually set me back on track.

Looking Forward… 

Now nearly at the end of June, I have been accepted into a two-year Masters of Applied Science (Electrical and Computer Engineering) program here in Toronto where I will be studying precicely what I initially set out to — VLSI design & optimization, CMOS logic and hopefully will have time to better understand the design of current FPGA systems as well.

So how does school affect CyberWyre? A lot more than it ever has before. With only a little more than eight weeks of full time employment left for the next two years, I need to find that steady source of income more than I ever have before. CyberWyre started off slow in January and February receiving anywhere from 50-100 unique visitors a day, and generally making me enough money to cover my morning coffee, sometimes not even that.

Things changed completely near the end of February and through March with the introduction of the Highest Paying AdSense Keywords page which was an instant success, bringing in close to half a million visitors and drawing the attention of magazines such as Red Herring and Forbes. I still swear my heart stopped when I received voicemail from the senior editor at Forbes wanting to interview me about the site.

CyberWyre is now attracting anywhere from 2000-4500 unique visitors a day, and at times has hit peaks of 50,000/day. Monthly, this has translated into approximately $600-800/month in affiliate earnings, banner clicks, and private advertisement arrangements and is still increasing.

Lessons Learned…

CyberWyre has been a great learning tool for me, and I hope that it has been for you too. As I progressed, I always tried to document all of my experiments, my successes and also my failures so that others could benefit from them. The biggest lesson learnt is that nothing comes easy and nothing happens overnight. The #1 reason why blogs aren’t successful financially is because the author expected too much too fast. In the first few months you will receive only a handful of visitors and be working essentially for free. Be patient — it will take time to build your reader base but if you are persistent at it, you will succeed. This site started off with no visitors at all in January to now with hundreds of thousands and more coming every day…if I could do it, why can’t you?

What’s Next…

As I mentioned earlier, I only have about eight weeks of full time employment left before I’m leaving for school and I will be working harder on this site than ever before. By next January, my goal is to be completely supported financially through my online ventures.

I have started work on a second blog which I will provide more details on in the coming days. The site will be completely new with no reader base whatsoever and will be a true experiment in blogging for profit. I will be applying all of the lessons learned so far and will document the entire process.

Thank you to everyone who has visited this site, contributed an article or posted a comment. It wouldn’t be where it is today without your support.

Stay tuned for the latest in making a living 100% online!

Matt

Permalink