If you are thinking of starting a blog today, have you wondered how far it could go? Earning some pocket money every month? A couple hundred ringgits per month perhaps? How about turning the blog into a Sdn Bhd after some time and employing full time staff whom you pay market salary? Perhaps even achieving a profit at the end of one financial year? This is possible. Let me share the story of kopiandproperty.com Oh yeah, there’s also that distinct possibility the blog became so huge that some super huge media house bought you up? Haha. Allow me to share a milestone that all of us could aim at actually. Two main ingredients? CONTENT and CONSISTENCY.
The Beginning: kopiandproperty.com was started in November 2013. Please take a look at the 2013 stats. After writing some articles, I shared the site to all my friends in Facebook, I ‘forced’ them to share it with their friends even if I have no idea how many of them did. Facebook referred easily 90 percent of all the traffic to kopiandproperty.com and I was sharing the page to as many property related Facebook pages I could find, everyday. I knew then that if my Facebook friends failed me, then kopiandproperty.com will just die a natural death. I may even stop writing without much readers. Then, I realised that I started to receive referrals from google search. 1,2,3 per day and the number very slowly trickle in. You can see that in 2013, total search engine referrer was 101 and 99 percent came from google. That’s around 50 per month or 1.7 per day. I am still surprised that I am still writing today, 4th August 2018. Haha.
The MILESTONE: Please take a look at the latest stats as at end 2017 then. Nowadays, most of the traffic comes either search engines and people who already know kopiandproperty.com. There are also a few friendly sites of fellow bloggers who referred some traffic too including bursadummy, dividendmagic, ringgitohringgit. There’s even many hundreds from forum.lowyat.net too. Traffic continue to grow not just from Malaysia but 25 percent of the traffic are now from overseas. Image shows the top 9 countries from where the visitors come from.
The SDN BHD: In October 2017, CoffeewithProperty Sdn Bhd (1244147-X) officially started. I employ a full-time admin staff and she helps with the invoicing, attending press conferences and even attending to all calls and following up on quotations. Yes, I pay ABOVE the market average. Haha. According to JobStreet.com Salary Report, the average pay for an Admin Executive is RM2,750 per month. Click here to view. So, if we assume it to be RM2,750, that’s still easily close to RM40,000 a year when we add in the EPF, SOCSO and EIS. Yes, from a small blog in November 2013, the sales revenue could now cover all these. 🙂 Let’s be very honest, I cannot rely on this yet as my full-time job. However, this is now more than the usual few hundred ringgit pocket money per month yeah. Let me share the 2 major things we must do and 8 other complementary things we could do when we are thinking of making a blog work. I will not list INTEREST yeah because if we are not interested with what we intend to write, then it’s impossible to do it for the long term.
CONTENT: Do we know enough about the things we are writing about? Do we follow all the happenings? When we follow and we write accordingly, the interest with the blog will grow in-tandem. By the way, do you know that most of the time, those who could write very well may not necessarily know the subject matter well. Those who knows the subject matter very well may not write that proficiently. For a blog to work, one has no choice but to WRITE and KNOW the subject matter enough. There’s no need to be an expert even if that’s a plus. The more content we have, the higher the chances for google to refer traffic to us.
CONSISTENCY: In June this year, I went to Australia for 18 days. kopiandproperty.com traffic dropped 20 percent. Haha. The reason? I published very few articles and relied on only the google search referrers instead of new articles which all my readers would usually click to read. Anyway, daily traffic was still over 1,000 visits which will still be the envy of many. In 2017, the average new article per day is 1.47 which meant that I would have written 2 articles every 3 days! The average is still around the same number for 2018. I am not advocating for you to follow yeah but at least an article every few days would help tremendously!
ALL OTHER IMPORTANT STUFFS: (of course, if you have $ to spend, the below can be achieved much faster!)
Friends power – Tell your friends about it, ask them to read, share and LIKE your Facebook page. Make more friends from the industry. Be sincere.
Blogs power – Help other blogs to grow their traffic and they will help you too. We are in this together. Everyone can be a friendly blog, not just those who are better than us. Stay humble.
Public opportunity – Are you able to get your blog to the public? Attending talks for a start and then giving talks in the near future? This will surely eat up some of your time but it is a must-do.
Design – Make sure the blog is mobile friendly. I realised my traffic was dropping and then my friend told me that on her mobile my site does not look friendly. I changed the template and the traffic returned.
FREE stuffs – Stop looking at the $ part in the beginning. Sometimes people may ask for help in promoting some events. Do it. Build up the traffic and the $ will come. Not the other way round. Most of kopiandproperty.com customers were those who read the articles somehow.
Gaming it with SEO? – Frankly, I have not paid anything thus far to google or Facebook. I also do not try to follow those tips and tricks on how to appear on first page. Thus, regardless of how the algorithm changes for both of them, it will not affect my site much. Do you know that there are sites which has collapsed simply because of algorithm changes? Read here.
Diversify – Instead of just Facebook, please also link the blog to as many other outlets as possible. LinkedIn, Instagram and even continue to comment on other pages. Yes, effort needed.
Target setting – This is very important yeah. Keep setting new targets so that we will have to think of ways to hit those targets. For example, in the beginning, hitting 5,000 visits per month in 3 months time. Understanding where those will come from and pushing it.
I wish you the best in your blogging journey yeah. Feel free to share your success stories too. I know that kopiandproperty.com current milestones could have been achieved much earlier. Would love to learn how to make it even more prominent too. Happy blogging. Please LIKE fb.com/kopiandproperty Thank you.
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written on 4 Aug 2018
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0 Responses
Awesome! Charles
Thank you Richard for reading.