One of the first questions that gets asked when blogging is mentioned as a topic is how quickly it will be successful. And the honest answer is impossible to give without several factors which are completely individual to every business. Do you already have a media presence? Can you devote time and resource to creating great content? And most importantly, what consititutes success? Are you looking to drive awareness, engagement, interaction, sales, ad revenue?

But at the same time, it’s handy to have something to benchmark against, and most online comparisons are flakey at best when compared to actual analytics. So I thought I’d share some recent figures for one of my personal projects, OnlineRaceDriver, as it recently celebrated a first anniversary.

To give some context, OnlineRaceDriver and its new sister site, FPSPrestige, are experiments in extremely niche targetted content, driven partly by a shared passion for videogames by everyone involved, and partly by my desire to be able to build a small media business which allows me to continually experiment and evolve all the digital content and marketing skills any business or client can benefit from. Both are done in the spare time available to me and the other contributors, and the only financial investment has been in paying for hosting and a custom blog design (Both use the now-replaced Metro theme from StudioPress) – they both use WordPress as a free CMS system and PHPBB3 as a free forum solution, with Google Analytics providing measurement above what is available straight away from WordPress.

So, after 12 months of spare time work, how has ORD done?

• 215 Posts (The biggest sign of the time constraints – ideally it should be a lot more!)
• 204 Comments (Just under one comment per post isn’t too bad..)
• 46,831 Page Views (Could have been more with a little more focus on high traffic posts and promotion)
• 30,705 Unique Visitors (Again, this is an area where we probably could have done a lot more with more time)
• 1,100+ Youtube Views (This is all from press release videos, and is a somewhat painful process a lot of the time!)
• 59 Facebook Fans (The biggest challenge here is that Facebook Notes is increasingly broken, requiring manual updates which sometimes get forgotten!)
• Cited as a reference source on Wikipedia (One of the nicest recent developments has been that someone working on Wikipedia has started referencing some of our breaking news on the site)

In terms of monthly figures, in the first month of ORD we had:

• 334 Visits
• 713 Page Views
• 205 Unique Visitors

And 12 months later, and with 5 more days to go in January, we’ve had:

• 4,175 Visits (Up 1,150%)
• 5,352 Page Views (Up 650%)
• 3,678 Unique Visitors (Up 1,694%)

1000% growth for something in a very experimental and low-key first 12 months isn’t too bad. Good enough that FPSPrestige launched and has achieved slightly better figures in its first month.

There’s no real conclusion here – in terms of success, both sites are around where I expected and hoped in the first 12 months, and all the graphs are ‘up and to the right’, so I’m happy there’s a lot more to come, even as I roll out more features (The forums for both sites have just launched, for example).

But as a simple guide – if as a small business with no budget, you could do something which puts your brand in front of 4000+ relevant people every month in exchange for some time, that could really start to change things. If you leveraged all the connections you have, that could change things a bit more. Through in some relevant promotion, and that moves it on further…

I recently scared myself when I realised that across this site and the other 3 or 4 main sites I’m playing with in my spare time, one bloke at his kitchen table now reaches over 10,000 people and growing every month.And with constant attention and improvement that number will hopefully keep growing. Of course, 10, 20, or 500,000 visitors might make a ‘successful’ website, but it doesn’t make a successful business… That’s another piece of the puzzle…