ProBlogger Turns 4 Today!

Today is ProBlogger’s 4th birthday and I’m not actually going to ‘see’ it.

ProBlogger as a blog was born on 23rd September 2004 when I imported a series of 40 or so blog tips that I’d been writing over the last couple of years on my old personal blog to ProBlogger.net

At the time I had a feeling that people would find it useful to see these tips on a blog dedicated to the topic rather than on a blog that also covered photography, spirituality, culture and more. I’m so glad I made that move!

The reason I won’t actually see ProBlogger’s birthday this year is that I am about to board a plane to Los Angeles (from Vegas) and then after a 7 hour layover will board another plane to Melbourne. I leave LA at 11.00pm on 22nd September and arrive in Melbourne at 7am on 24th September – we cross the international date line and miss a day in the process.

It’s already the 23rd in Australia (where the time stamp of this blog is generated).

My Birthday Speech

I don’t have a lot of time to reflect upon the last four years as my plane will soon start boarding – but I did want to mark the occasion and say thank you to a few people.

Firstly and fore-mostly I want to thank you the community around ProBlogger. You inspire me, inform me, teach me and drive me to produce content each day that helps bloggers improve their blogs and find ways to monetize them.

Secondly I want to acknowledge the hard work of the ‘techy’ people that have kept this blog running over the years. Rachel and Regan in the early days were involved with the blog’s design and hosting and more recently the tech team at b5media (we launched a new home page design over the weekend and celebrated our 3rd birthday at Blog World Expo) have been wonderful. Thanks to to Ben for designing the last version of ProBlogger.

Also a thank you to Lara who looks after the never ending task of comment moderation and other administrative tasks here at ProBlogger.

There have also been a lot of others who’ve helped with design, support, hosting advice along the way. There have also literally been hundreds of guest posters, many thousands of commenters (there have been 114,620 coments on 4,637 posts to this point) and many thousands of participants in competitions and projects over those years – thanks to you all!

Looking Forward – Things are about to Get Fun!

4 years feels both like a long time but has also flown by. I’ve had a lot of fun on the journey so far and learned so much.

While looking back at the past is fun – it is what is ahead that excites me the most. Over the last few days at BWE I’ve let slip a few times that there are a few things in the pipeline that will hopefully be launched in the coming months that will see ProBlogger expand quite a bit. While I’m not ready to announce them fully I will say that it involves the ProBlogger.com domain (at present it forwards to ProBlogger.net) and will be something new and something (actually a number of things) that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’ll share more in the lead up to launch and will probably give my newsletter list a sneak peak and chance to beta test it before going public with it.

Other than the new expansions ProBlogger will continue to go along as it has in producing the best content that I can on grow, develop and monetize blogs. I look forward to sharing that journey with you!

Thanks everyone again for making ProBlogger what it is. While I won’t see the birthday myself – have a celebratory drink and cake for me if you can!

My flight is being called – must run. I’ll update you on Blog World Expo next week when home and recovered.