After stopping blogging completely, I finally had the time to start writing again.
However, odds were not in my favor because once you stopped like how I did, your momentum will disappear, and you have to start all over again.
Typing has never been harder, and my ideas do not come as fast as they did when I was blogging last time but despite all that, I went through with it and started picking up my old pen again (Or Keyboard in this case).
In this post, I’ll share about my experiences on building back my long-forgotten website from it’s hibernation.
Time for some Quick Stats!
I remembered the time when I used to write monthly reports every month.
I then went into a one year hiatus because I was so busy opening up my gaming outlet but today, I’m picking back that commitment again by covering the months of June 2018 and July 2018 since I started to write again last May.
As you can see, I had only about 4,350 web visitors and that’s an accumulation from both months which can be seen from the Google Analytics stats above.
My best was 5,310 web visitors in one month and to see how far my website visibility has dropped over these past months is certainly devastating.
Websites are like wine – They age better through time and supposedly, the older your website gets, the better authority you have which makes it easier to rank.
Despite the drastic drop in traffic, my sales are somehow still surviving…
It’s Little, But it’s Still There!
$476 – That’s how much I earned within these two months.
Here’s a screenshot of my June 2018 earnings…
And this one’s for July 2018…
It isn’t much but its good knowing that my contents still work and I have visitors who support what I do.
That’s the thing about blogging – your articles are your online property and as long as it is there on your site, people will still read as long as it’s beneficial to a problem that they are looking an answer for.
And the best part? -Is that your contents last forever.
I have blog posts that I’ve written 3 years ago and I still have people reading them!
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can write and relax – Google needs to see that your website is active as there are millions of other websites on the web so if you are halfway there with your site, don’t stop like I did.
Instead, just continue writing and you’ll be halfway to reaching successful rankings because in the online world, although content is still king, consistency is key.
As for the monetary part, I earn through an Online Business platform called Wealthy Affiliate.
It is a one-stop center for people who are interested in starting their own business venture, or simply grow an existing one.
The lessons on SEO and content creation are golden and they work well, because I’ve been implementing it on my other businesses here in Malaysia which at one point I decided to open up a shop.
The tools you get once inside also helps in finding specific niche and keywords to target and focus on, or simply find new and untapped niches to delve into which I would say is one of the plus points not to mention the awesome community inside.
As of now, I earn by promoting WA to my readers and I do regular reviews too for them to decide on their own which programs are to their liking.
- WA earnings – $476
- Uber referral earnings – RM800 ($200)
- Kitamen Shah Alam salary (My Gaming shop) – RM3,000 ($600)
- KAMIRA Event Management salary (My event planning company) – RM3,000 ($600)
Total for June and July 2018 = $1,876
Although it isn’t much, it’s more than enough for me to travel on a vacation 😉
As of now, we can definitely see that my blog earnings are not as high as my working salary but my goal is to bring my sales back up to a point where I can earn more than my day job.
Things That Kinda Kept Me Up
These past few months had really got me going.
1) FIFA World Cup events yo!
First point was because of the FIFA World Cup season which got the whole world busy.
When that happens, I got busy too since clients would call me to hold events which mainly revolve around FIFA 18.
As I also run an eSports company, we had malls calling us on that day to organize tournaments in conjunction with the Fifa season so I ended up handling the Ace Series at eCurve Mall in Damansara.
The event was for 2 weeks which got me and my team pretty exhausted.
2) Raya events all around!
Raya Event with Media Prima also took some of my time.
In Malaysia, one of the biggest events of the year in celebrating Raya after 30 days of fasting during Ramadan.
On Raya, everyone is on celebration mood and it is not the Malaysian way for companies to not celebrate it hence the Raya event that we had to handle for Media Prima.
Handling equipment is of course a must in almost all my events but one thing I absolutely love on the event day is the free buffet of Lamb, Ketupats, Lemang, Satay, Dim Sum, Laksa, Soto, and just about all of the wonderful Malaysian dishes you could think of.
Amazing day with wonderful people, friendly artists, and of heavenly cuisines.
3) My Kitamen Contract ended.
Also, I have fears that this year might be the last year I’ll be with Kitamen.
You see, my gaming hub Kitamen Shah Alam is just a franchise contract whereby Kitamen is the name of the brand, and Shah Alam being the city I am at.
We’ve had a one-year worth of fun but unfortunately for me, I’ve reached the end of my contract.
We recently had an Annual Grand Meeting with all the outlet owners and we voiced out our opinion on contract continuation but for the HQ, all they think about is money so they charged us a huge sum of money to renew our contracts.
We objected saying that paying for nothing when we are expected to do everything ourselves is completely outrageous and for that royalty, we should at least get a unified system for events and operations not to mention marketing.
I have no problem in paying them but 6% monthly Royalty on top of the RM10,000 licensing fee for nothing is something to think twice on.
The eSports hub as a business just started in Malaysia and daily sales aren’t that high as we need to do events in order to get more projects and those events are up to us to look for.
Since it’s a B2B sort of project, we are not relying on B2C much and that beats the idea of franchising.
4) My friend’s supposed baby shower.
Okay this may not be much, but we were pretty occupied planning for my friend Dan his baby shower.
He just got out of the bachelor era and man, you should have seen the look on his face handling the baby!
He was a train wreck and although it was a lot harder than expected, we ended up taking him away to get his mind off from work and had a short get together doing all those manly stuff we used to do.
We had a pleasant stay by the beach playing Frisbee and cooking delicious barbecue while talking about how we’ve grown and how work has treated us.
Sometimes, we need to take a step back to evaluate ourselves before going further.
Final Word
If you think about it, the FIFA World Cup last month was actually a golden opportunity for Online Entrepreneurs.
I’ve had malls asking us to host tournaments, universities asking us to stream, and bistros renting gaming equipment from us but if you think about it on the Online Business point of view, we could do a lot with anything related to football as search traffic spiked way up high last month.
Alas, I only cover the Blogging niche and gaming niche so I missed out on that wave.
I’ve certainly had a lot of events last month due to the World Cup season but now, I’m ready to kick start August with a new goal of $300, a higher goal of $400 for September, and $500 for October!
Will I be able to make it? Find out on next month’s report! Thanks for reading 😀
Good for you for getting back in the saddle. It is a good testiment to your writting that you have been seeing sales even without paying much attention to your site in so long. That’s really impressive and I hope you continue to write. You’ll see all kinds of earning if you do, I’m sure.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the support!