Here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year and thank you for all the support, comments, and readership in 2008! By the way, photo credit goes to j.towbin on Flickr for the awesome macro shot!

2008, the Year in Review…

Last year, I shared a recap of major lessons learned on this blog and thought I would do so again in 2009.

• Lesson #1 – Color Outside the Lines.

Strangely, the popular posts of 2008 weren’t even about entrepreneurship. For example, my posts about decluttering your desk and Twitter backgrounds via PowerPoint brought a lot of new subscribers and received a majority of the traffic in 2008 (as evident by the spike in traffic around mid and late April). Even posts about unique business card displays and cheap laptop stands received some nice traffic.

Anyway, if your blog is about QBasic programming but you want to write about taking cool pictures of your desk, then do it! I found that as long as someone finds value in what you’re creating and sharing, then it really doesn’t matter if the topic falls outside the boundaries of your blog.

• Lesson #2 – Make Use of URL Promoting Opportunities!

My home office set on Flickr was featured as Unclutterer’s Workspace of the Week in May, and by chance I included a link to my desk decluttering blog post in the photo’s description—which Unclutterer included in their write up.

Flickr, Instructables, YouTube, Twitter, StumbleUpon and a ton of other sites allow you to add URLs of your choice to profiles and descriptions so take advantage of the opportunities to promote your killer posts!

• Lesson #3 – Twitter Can Bring Traffic in Strange Ways.

In November, Brian Solis twittered about the aforementioned Twitter background via PowerPoint post and it brought in some great traffic. Three days later, the same post made it to delicious’ front page which brought in even more visitors and subscribers.

Anyway, I know a lot of people promote their blogs through Twitter and that’s cool, but alternatively you could try writing articles that people on Twitter might find useful and retweet for you.

• Lesson #4 – Patience is Key.

I used to constantly check my site stats to see if anyone was reading my posts, but then I realized that you never know when a blog post will bring in visitors. For example, the blog post about Twitter backgrounds via PowerPoint was written in August, but it didn’t really get much attention until November; and the same can be said for all the popular blog posts of 2008.

• Lesson #5 – Give and Share!

I would be lying if I said that site traffic and subscriber count wasn’t important. Honestly though, I care much more about sharing things that readers find valuable than I do about site traffic and subscriber count; all the site stats tell me is whether or not I’m doing my job, capisce?

In Conclusion…

If there’s anything I’ve learned in 2008, it’s that you should give and share as much as you can and the rest will take care of itself!

Here’s wishing you all an exciting and prosperous 2009!

Sincerely,
The Closet Entrepreneur

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