Its Been A Year Since Starting Evolutionary Designs

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Wow! The year went by fast. It feels like only yesterday I started researching design niche blogs and if I would be able to do one. After a few weeks of research, I changed my mind and decided to go a little broader and start a new media blog. When I had started Evolutionary Designs, I had only been blogging for about a year and eventually I let that blog go. I still own the domain and the site is still up, but I no longer update it and the traffic is next to nothing. I do not consider that site a failure, but a learning experience, that someday I might reopen that chapter in my blogging life and try and see what I can do with it…

What I have Learned In the Last Year of Blogging

Over the last year I have learned a lot. There are few people and places I must mention and give them credit. A few months before starting Evolutionary Designs I was introduced to Blog Engage social bookmarking site for bloggers. The creator, Brian, created a great community full of bloggers that wanted to help out the blogging community. Through Brian’s site, learned a lot and I met Hesham of Famous Bloggers and now I consider him a close friend and blogging buddy. I like his work so much, I now write for him regularly and help him out whenever I can. I also found Extreme John’s site through Blog Engage and learned a lot about social media, running a business, and I got a good laugh from his occasional rant. Through Extreme John, I found John Sullivan of Pot Politics / BloggerLuv. He is a great guy and spends a lot of time help out the blogging community with helpful articles and building a community that is designed for bloggers to help those bloggers who need a little help with their site or promoting a new article. I also have to mention John Paul Aguiar, the creator of Twitter Dummy a Twitter guide that will help get more retweets. I received his ebook and used his strategies to double the amount of ReTweetss I get.  About a month ago I spoke with him about possibly working with him on a new project with him. After that meeting we starting talking about different things and he gave me some advice on how to safely build your followers without being flagged by Twitter or having Twitter followers getting annoyed by following and unfollowing them over and over again. I highly recommend his Twitter Dummy ebook to help you get more followers and get more ReTweets. I can’t thank you guys enough for the hard work you put into your sites and helping the blogging community.

What is Needed To Build A Successful Blog

As mentioned before, in the last year I have learned a lot about blogging, SEO, and social media. I want list a few of the things I learned, I won’t  go into detail about each topic. If you want to learn more about any of the topics please use the contact form and request it. I will add those requests to article idea list. I learned that that there are at least 15 factors to work on when building a successful blog. And those are:

• You need more than good content to get traffic, regular readers, and comments on your site
• Make it easy for your readers to share your articles
• Having lots of comments isn’t all that important as long as you have traffic back to your sites
• On-Page SEO is very important and is an easy way to get regular traffic to your site daily
• SEO isn’t only about on page work, but its also important to work off-page as well.
• Commenting (good contributing comments) is key to getting your site discovered. Commenting on your site is important as well.
• Backlinks are important and have as many high quality backlinks as you can – DO NOT PURCHASE or JOIN LINK EXCHANGE GROUPS! Search engine hates these type of backlinks. They like/love natural backlinks. If you purchase or ask, it isn’t natural and the search engine will eventually find out.
• Having a mixture of DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks is a good for SEO
• Social media is important part of blogging and one of the best ways of getting your articles shared by others.
• Make friends and building alliances is great way to get help and give back to the community.
• Social Bookmarking sites are great way to get traffic and backlinks to your site
• Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon are great sites to get traffic from, but it takes time to build up your network on those sites.
• Blogging isn’t, its hard work and takes time to build a successful blog.
• Adding images to your articles helps break up the text.

All About Evolutionary Designs

In December of last year I started working on Evolutionary Designs but I really start concentrating on article creation until the end of December of 2009. After a month of article creation, social bookmarking and spending hours commenting on niche related blogs I still only had about twenty to thirty unique hits daily. Since then, the numbers starting rising. Now after all the hard work I put into the site, we are averaging about 250 unique hits a day with spikes up into the 500s.

Evolutionary Design gets most of its traffic from Google and the rest is from social media sites and other blog that mention an article or two. Having high organic traffic has always been a goal for me and my currently strategy is working, but I would like to get more traffic from other sources and I will have to change up my traffic building strategy for 2011.

If you are regular reader, you will notice that there really isn’t a schedule for posting. Currently, I work on articles whenever I can, and I try and post two or three a week and one over at Famous Bloggers. But with my current work schedule its been pretty stressful and busy over the last few months that I haven’t been able to stick to that schedule.

As for articles, I try and mix it up each week. I try and post about SEO and social media once or twice a week and do a design related post sometime during the week. With a mix of social media and design news updates whenever I catch early enough to post about it.

Goals for 2011

Of course I am turning this article into a New Year’s resolution and I will mention a few personal and few goals I  have for Evolutionary Designs.  But only a few, the rest if they are successful, will be a surprise for my readers.

Evolutionary Design Goals for 2011

Having goals for your business / website is a good way to keep your site going and build a better community. Out of all the goals for Evolutionary Designs, the one I feel is most important is to build more traffic and get more returning readers. You can never get enough of this and I need to spend more time working on marketing the site.  I also want to work on a custom theme or get a premium theme. I am looking into using Thesis, Headway, or Genesis Framework. Then get a premium skin and add my custom touches to it. Once I get the site customized, I plan to make this site 100% DoFollow and add several new plugins that do not work with the current theme.  While working on my new theme, I will also be working on getting  a services page up and free and premium resources page up.

The one thing that I haven’t been doing is commenting on enough blogs. My goal is to comment on at least five different sites a day and if I can do more I will. But I need to spend more time commenting in the right places otherwise its just wasting my time. I also plan to to spend more time working on my social media networks such as; Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, and several other sites.

I need to setup a posting schedule and try and stick with it. I haven’t figure out if I can write more than two a week. So far, its been a struggle to post three articles a week and post one for Famous Bloggers. So my goal is to figure out a good schedule for posting and try and post at least two a week and eventually move to three week plus one for Famous Bloggers.

Personal Goals

In order to accomplish my goals for Evolutionary Designs, I have to set goals for myself as well. I realized a few weeks ago that the last few months have been a little stressful and just to busy for my own good. Over the Christmas break, I realized just how tired and stressed I was. Between work, freelance work, and school I have been doing to much.  One of the first things I decided that I wanted to do for the new  year, was go back to working full time and leave freelance alone for now. I will only do that part time or do work for friends, family those I might have worked with in the past. Freelancing was great experience, but it can be stressful and I do plan to go back into when I have a little more experience and larger portfolio to work with.

Outside of work, I have set goals to better my health. Working in the IT and website design industries for so long, I almost never get outside and when I do its only to walk to my car or working on my truck.

I believe to be successful with your professional life, you need to have an active and healthy life as well. If you exercise regularly (40 minutes to an hour a day) eat healthy foods, and get at least 7 hours of sleep, then you will feel better. After a weeks of practice these life style changes, then you will feel better, loose weight, gain muscle definition, and feel better. Once you feel better, then you become more productive, your brain loses that foggy feeling, and you start to be more creative. As bloggers and designers, we all know how important it is to be creative.

Final Thoughts

Overall, building and running a successful blog has been a learning experience. Although I do not consider my blog very successful right now, I know it will be in the future. Besides, I made it past the first year mark. Most new bloggers do not make it that far. If I double or triple my traffic and get more requests for guest writers, then I know my site is a success.

Even though, I am planning to go back to working full time for someone else, I plan to work on this site daily and eventually work on other online ventures. But I also know that working full time, being in school, and have an active social life will take away time from working on Evolutionary Designs. Because of this, I really need to get schedule so I know when I need to work on the site for upgrades, articles, and marketing of the site.

The last image I used is by a flickr user by the name of Craig Quimby and he is also the one that came up of with quote I added to the image.

Image Source: Flickr