Staska.Net

Well, it’s been almost a week since I started regularly posting on this blog. It took off nicely and I think a little introduction is in order.

My full name is Stanislovas, but friends usually call me Staska (it’s like William and Bill in English). The staska.com was taken, so I had to settle for staska.net here.

I was hooked on (pro) blogging in 2005 and started my first blog on Dec 31, 2005. It was a joke site and I did it more as a test and to get my feet wet. It worked.

In February I was ready to launch my first tech blog. It was newsy, computer related blog, writing about laptops, desktops and other PC things. It started quite well and by June was doing 2000 pageviews a day, mainly through search engines.

Encouraged by this experience, at the end of February I started my third blog. This one was planned to be all things wireless. It started a little slow and was doing about 700 pageviews a day by June. But for this blog I found an interesting and rather unique source of information for my posts and started getting some “scoops” one or two times a month. I even got my first digg in April.

I started three more blogs at the time, but I was not able to keep up continuously updating them so I let them just sit there with a few posts.

AdSense earnings started growing and in May 2006 I made $450 from it. By June 2006 I felt confident enough that I may be able to do this for a living and decided to run with it.

I already had an offline business, but was really bored with it. I’m probably not a very good CEO and the way the business was running it felt more like a job then a business. Worse, I had all the responsibilities of the owner and had to work more like a hired employee.

So in June I put all my blogs on hold and set out to restructure my offline business. It took much longer then I expected, but I managed to do it by the end of 2006. There’s a new CEO there, I resigned from active management position but stay as an owner and advisor. And it still provides me with a living income until I start earning enough to live by from my Online Activities.

Meanwhile for the second half of last year my blogs were lying dormant and traffic started to fall off. My PC blog went from 2000+ pageviews a day in May to less then 200 in December.

My Cell Phone blog did a little better. I kept updating it only once or twice a month. But most of the posts were “scoopish” and managed to attract quite a few baclinks. In September I got a nice scoop on Apple, made it to Digg front page and got a ton of backlinks. That actually helped to achieve 1000+ pageviews a day traffic level for a few weeks. But after a while traffic started dropping as well and I finished 2006 with about 500 pageviews a day on this blog.

Interestingly enough, after initial drop, my income from blogs remained rather constant at about $300 a month from August to December.

My total earnings for 2006 were:

1. AdSense: $3611.07
2. Chitika: $484.48
3. Text Link Ads: $120.17
4. Affiliate sales: $30

Total: $4245.72

And, as of January 01, 2007 I consider my online activities my primary occupation. I started updating my blogs with multiple posts daily and could see result pretty soon.

You can see my Q1 2007 Online Earnings Recap here.