One Cent At A Time

A Personal finance blog for saving money and earning more and thus having a better life

A Look Back On the Year 2011

38 Comments

It’s end of the year 2011, a year in which OCAAT was born and started flourishing. During 2011 we’ve seen 153 posts, 2,480 comments, and over 40,000 unique visitors to the site. OCAAT has also attracted over 12,00 subscribers.

It’s been a fun year. I’d take this opportunity to reflect a bit on how OCAAT got started.

For almost 5 years, I have only been reading other blogs. I was a regular reader to personal finance blogs like The Simple Dollar, Get Rich Slowly and Consumerism commentary. I thought, hey, if they can do it, I can do it. Enough of reading was done, I thought now it’s time to have my own blog to write on.

I was new to this country and it took time to understand the personal finance aspects over here. The credit rating system, the investment tools, the retirement saving options and the stock market were so different than what I saw in India.

Though stock markets around the world run the same way, and, the dynamics are similar. Still it took time to get familiarized with the companies and funds. Apart from the blogs, CNN Money and Yahoo Finance were my other resources to learn how finance is managed in this country.

I was very skeptical in spending money upfront on my blog. Still, I wanted to have my own domain with a free template, and pay for an inexpensive hosting package. I got my cheap $5 logo designed on Fiverr. Being a former coder, I decided to do the little tweaks here and there on my own with respect to blog design. Throughout the year, I’ve tweaked the site theme and logo a few times.

For less than $100 I was up and running with a domain, one year hosting package, a template and a logo. John Chow’s (from johnchow.com) team set up WordPress on my site for free as I used their affiliate link to open host gator account.

The first three months were pretty quiet around here. I wrote around 2 articles a week, but no one stopped by to read it. That all changed in June when I joined yakezie network. Till that time I wasn’t even aware of carnival concept in blogging.

The awesome fellow Yakezies started visiting and commenting on my blog. I started getting more motivated with each of my posts. Till date yakezie effect continues. Come new year, I will be a formal member of this bloggers group. Yakezie taught me the intricacies of blogging. With every success of fellow Yakezies, I got more drawn in to blogging.

A wonderful thing happened in September, when OCAAT was nominated as the best new blog of the year 2011, In Plutus awards. Eventually I did loose in the finals but, the nomination worked like a tonic. I started producing 4 articles a week. My guest posts were published on many ‘A’ list blogs. My Traffic rank started going up and Google awarded me a page rank, which now, after another round of correction stands at 3.

Till date, I have received very little media attention, which I am planning to focus on in year 2012. My Twitter, Facebook and RSS follower numbers started growing. I am now having over 2,500 twitter followers, over 600 Facebook likes. I started outsourcing few of the work like editing and proof reading my posts.

On my personal finance side, I became more aware of my spending habit, my net worth increased at a better pace this year. At work I started putting more focus on building and leveraging relationship with my colleagues.

These are all the fruits of blogging. I expect to see many more sunshine on this blog in coming years. There will be ups and downs on the way, there will be days when I don’t receive a single comment. There will be days when I would get tired of responding to each comment.

True success comes with time, but I look for little successful moments too. My goal is to make this blog a successful A list blog. I have developed friendly work relationships with many A list bloggers, and, I know they are as human as I am. If they made it, I can make it too. My success is not dependent entirely on me though, it depends on each one of you, readers!

This started out as a small post to mention the achievements in the year 2011, and as usual, I’ went on. I appreciate every single one of you who follow OCAAT. In the New Year, I hope to reach even more followers by being more active on our Facebook page, on Twitter, etc. If you happen to be a part of those social media networks, I hope you’ll join me and share the things you like.

I hope you’ll make 2012 the year you get out of debt, reach your savings goals and accomplish your personal financial aspiration. Talk to you again next year.

Grow richer every day, one cent at a time!

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About the Blogger Hi I am , a personal finance enthusiast with a career in software development. I am an immigrant to the USA since 2005, after being born and brought up in India. This 40 something technocrat lives and breathes personal finance whenever he gets time from the day job, job as a husband and a dad

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Comments

  5. Nice historical overview of your blog! You are doing really great and I won’t be surprised if you become an A list blog sooner than you expect. Kudos to you!

    Reply

    • I expect it would take at least half a decade, if at all I become one. I would accept anything lower.. 🙂 Thanks for your encouragement, wish you all the success and happy new year ahead.

      Reply

  8. Congratulations on what has turned out to be quite an amazing year for you. I am new to reading your blog, but look forward to more informative and entertaining posts in the coming year.

    Reply

  10. What an inspiring post! Congrats on a fantastic 2011. We’ll be there on Twitter with you. I have to get busy about Facebook….too many places to be at once and it’s hard to tackle it all.

    Hope you have a wonderful New Years! Here’s to a prosperous 2012 for OCAAT.

    Reply

  13. Congratulations on your year. Most bloggers would be envious of your success! I will be watching to see how your blog continues to grow; 2012 should be great! What would you attribute as your most successful way to grow subscribers?

    Reply

    • Thanks Melissa. Wish you the same for 2012. I don’t know if I achieved anything spectacular yet to become envious. Hope to do it in 2012 though. Happy new year!

      Reply

  14. A nice look back. Sounds like you’ve had a good year to me. Well done.

    You’re right “true success comes with time” but success can be built organically and incrementally.

    Take the small victories as they come 😉

    My goal is to continue to grow my blog and, for today at least, figure out what the heck is going on with my right-hand margin! Ugh, never seen that before. Ah well, I will fix it.

    If the A-list bloggers can make it, so can we.

    Will try and stop by more in 2012, I hope you can too!

    A very Happy New Year to you. I hope it rocks!

    Reply

    • Have rocking new year. Thanks for the comment, I am sure to visit you. Actually I didn’t know much about your blog as you seldom post on Yakezie forum. I see that your right hand margin is now fixed.

      Reply

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