Staska.Net

April 23 was one month since I relaunched Staska.Net. It’s a good time to follow my own advice, sit back, look at the results and decide of how to proceed further.

On March 23, before my “Happy birthday John Chow dot Com” post, Staska.Net had 1 post, did not have any visitors, inbound links, Technorati or Alexa ranks.

Last 30 days results:

• No. of Posts: 24
• No. Comments (including trackbacks): 228
• No. of RSS subscribers: 52
• No. of unique visitors: 25 101
• No. Pageviews: 30 625
• daily visitors: ~200
• Alexa rank: 257 484
• Technorati rank: 17 383 (304 links from 220 blogs)
• Google Webmaster Central incoming links: 17 780
• Yahoo Site Explorer inlinks: 5172
• Income: $18.20

Not bad for one month. But if not for my Top 30 Wordpress Plugins post, they would have been much worse. This single post is responsible for 90% of my Technorati and Google backlinks and it still accounts for 75% of my daily traffic. It really shows the value of “killer content”.

I should probably make more posts like that. Problem is - the buggers are awfully time consuming. My Top Plugins post took 20 or even more hours to write.

And that brings me to the key problem with staska.net. Time. I have lots of ideas for what I think will make good posts and will help me grow readership pretty fast. I know I have a lot of fun posting here. The problem is, I am not ready to spend enough time needed to do it well, on regular basis.

When relaunching Staska.net on March 23 I set myself a goal: “for next month make at least 5 posts a week“. With 24 posts in a month, I managed to keep up with this goal on average. But quite a few of the posts were just a fillers, posted for the sake of posting and keeping up with the self imposed milestone.

I like writing for Staska.net. It’s actually more interesting then running my commercial blogs, which sometimes starts to feel like another job. Still, I want to get my commercial blogs to self sustaining level, where I will be able to afford to hire additional writers and turn these blogs from a job/solo enterprise into a small business. And that’s where my focus will be for the next few months.

So I will keep posting here, but I am not setting any posting frequency milestone. In fact, I am not setting any goals for staska.net right now.

I’ll keep working on “pillar” articles. (I actually managed to write 2 of them in March, when I was not obsessed with this 5 posts a week thing and none during April). I will post here whenever I have something to say and have time to do it. And I’ll provide my monthly earnings updates.

Just don’t expect any regularity for now. But that’s what the feed readers are for, after all. Just hit “Subscribe” button and you won’t have to keep checking in vain.

And when I have enough “pillar” articles, filler content and time, I’ll sit back again and decide how to proceed with staska.net further.