Looking Back at 2008
The start of the end of the year is always exciting.
Many companies close down their offices for a few days in December and it’s no different for the NGO who employs me! We close for a month from the second Friday in December. So I have been on holiday for nearly two weeks already! Time sure flies faster when you are at home rather than work!
I brought along my 2009 diary, incase I got in the mood to start planning for the New Year. Each year we get a diary and each year I start off with good intentions of getting down to time-planning. By March entries become more scattered, until June when diary entries all but dries up!
December though is for relaxing and perhaps looking back over the year…and what a year it was!
I got my feet wet in January with my first blog at blogs.24.com. What an easy way to learn the ropes for someone who hadn’t even considered reading a blog! It helped that the regulars over there were friendly and helpful!
By July I was ready to move on to a blogspot blog. This blog gave me a bit more freedom to write without the obligatory reciprocal visits that community blogs necessitated.
Finally I migrated to a WordPress blog with my own domain. Wow! is all I can say! The freedom to do and write as I please is very attractive for someone who likes being in control of their own destiny! It does help that my webhost Afrihost, made the move so easy!
In between the blog moving:
I learned a lot about internet marketing and even earned a few Rand for good measure. After trying different affiliate programmes, I ended up mainly promoting Bidorbuy directly and received a monthly payout each month since September 2008.
I read everything I could, especially through subcribes to RSS feeds of favourite blogs. Microsoft Outlook 2007 was the best thing to happen to me and my enormous amount of incoming feeds! I have now stopped at a few mostly international technology and local and overseas general news feeds, because there is just so much information one can process in a day. For internet marketing, a local one I read is at iMod.
Towards the end of the year, I received some valuable advice : to go with my own experiences on my blog. I was told that most of Tech news is there for all to see – on aggregator sites. Great advice that turned out – and also a turning point for me.
Google tools like Analytics, Adsense, SKtool, etc. came in handy and added to the thrill of blogging.
And then there was the US elections featuring glamour candidates Barack Obama – as in Obama Cool! – and Sarah (Say it Aint So Joe!) Palin and the run up to our very own South African elections in 2009! I love the drama of politics, but politicians…not so much – except for Obama of course!
Bring on 2009…but not quite yet.
