Reviewing our first full year with this website. Re-Cap of 2012!

Home Information Guru was created in January 2012. Michele and I wanted a way to share our passion for home improvement. Initially the website was going to be purely an information portal for learning more about your home and garden. Similar to; Better Homes and Garden Magazine format. We had the understanding that Tom would do most of the research and web construction work because he had much more expertise on the computer. In turn Michelle would concentrate on the design aspects and coming up with new material to post.

In the very beginning we started with using Google AdSense to try and bring in enough revenue to at least cover the web hosting cost. We will get more into this late.

Neither of us had ever written any articles before and together we had almost no clue about how the Internet worked outside of general use.

Through out the first 4 or 5 months I read these books about web business; KaChing by Joel Comm, Why now is the time to Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk, Internet Riches by Scott Fox, The Adsense Code by Joel Comm, How I made my first million on the Internet by Ewn Chia, The McGraw-Hill 36 hour online marketing course by Lorrie Thomas, Web marketing All-In One for Dummies by Robert Skrob and Finally Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet by Jay Conrad Levinson.

You can visit our page: Books we have read that have influenced our lives. Click Here!

With in each of these books came slightly different ideas and suggestions of how to structure an online business model. Many of the teachings were solely based on the idea of selling or promoting products of one form or another. This was not really our intent. Although these books do offer a great deal of information about how these different people had built up a mass following and in-turn a mass income online they did not help us understand the under workings of how to operate and grow a successful website.

Michelle kept up on constantly trying to update the look and feel on the website, of which I had to keep learning new methods and understanding of how to implement them, While I kept working on getting as much good quality related content up as possible.

We started to collect more and more information about whom we were competing against in the, “LIFESTYLE BLOGS”, area. We arranged a data collection system that collected page views, color schemes, keywords used, website statistical data, and demographics data from as many as 200 other competing websites. After very carefully picking through all of this information we came up with what we believe to be very important common factors with the top rated website and we started to implement as many of these features as possible into our own site.

If you by chance had been following us over the last 12 months you would have noticed at least 6 different major design changes. As we have learned more, the major thing that we understood that we needed to be is much more personal and show more about ourselves and our own DIY projects.

As for using Google AdSense, like I had mentioned earlier, we did put the code in place in the very beginning. We played around a little bit with different ad style and sizes which made very little difference in revenue generation. We came to the conclusion that we want to use AdSense but, we did not want it to be intrusive in the reading of an article.

As our traffic has grown over the last year; Starting at only about 300 visitors in January to over 12,000 visitors in December we had steadily increased our ad revenue. We are just now making enough to cover general operating expenses. I will be very honest; websites are not a way you are going to make a lot of money overnight. It is a lot of hard work, very time consuming and you will be amazed at how much you do not know and need to learn.

For 2013, we will be focusing on bringing a whole new website experience to our viewers. We will be working hard to share much more about our own DIY passions along with other Lifestyle items from our lives. We also will continue to bring a large amount of information about every aspect of Home and Garden. As we learn more and understand more about what our readers want we will continue to share more of our ideas on answers to your desires.

by: Tom Corliss