The State of the Darren-Sphere

In this post I’d like to give an update of the different sites that I work on, how they’re going and what I’m working on with them.

3 questions that I get a lot are:

1. You seem to do a lot of ‘stuff’ – can you give me a quick overview?
2. I know you from (insert blog/social network name here) but today discovered you also are at (insert blog/network here) – what else do you do?
3. How is your business going – you used to give us income updates – can you give us another update?

As a result today I want to create a post that attempts to summarize all of the activities that I’m actively involved with these days (ie it doesn’t include about 30 blogs that I have previously owned or blogged on which today are dormant).

I’m not going to give an income update as such except to say that revenue from my blogging related activities remains well into the Six Figure bracket (annually) and that each year since I’ve started blogging as an income source has seen it grow in healthy increases.

I hope that what follows is of use to those who’re interested:

My Blogs

These days I own three active blogs. They are visited collectively by around 2.8 million people per month, subscribed to via RSS and email by around 480,000 subscribers and have social media network between them of around 110,000 people. Let me break it down from largest to smallest:

Digital Photography School

DPS has enjoyed continued growth over the last 12 months. While finding advertisers has been a little difficult in this climate (although we did run a very successful campaign with Lenovo earlier in the year) I’ve seen increases in income as a result of more effort in affiliate promotions but also AdSense and Chitika.

I have seen a bit of an increase in expenses though as we’ve hired a number of writers as well as a community manager for the forum area.

Redesigning the site, adding new areas for cameras and post production tips and getting onto Twitter have all helped to grow DPS. The future looks really bright for this community – I’m particularly looking forward to the release of the communities first products (two ebooks) later in the year.

• Monthly Traffic – 1,960,612 Visitors viewing 6,571,151 pages (based upon the last 30 days – Data from Google Analytics)
• Subscribers – 311,813 (made up of 200,000 newsletter subscribers and 111,000 RSS subscribers)
• Forum Members – 60.644
• Twitter Followers – 16,074 followers
• DPS on Facebook – 2,277 fans

ProBlogger

Traffic wise ProBlogger’s growth has been less spectacular than DPS but steady.

The release of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook earlier in the year was an amazing learning experience and a profitable venture.

The Job boards have also continued to grow both in terms of ads being listed and also traffic/subscriber numbers. It’s certainly not my biggest earner but it’s a daily income that has risen and that is quite passive.

The main income streams from ProBlogger have been direct ad sales (we’ve been sold out for a long time although I’m told we have one slot open at the moment) and healthy affiliate promotions (I’m lucky that there are so many quality products related to this blog).

In the coming weeks ProBlogger will expand with the launch of ProBlogger.Community.

• Monthly Traffic – 531,804 unique visitors viewing 866,093 pages
• Subscribers – 123,000 RSS Subscribers
• Newsletter Subscribers – 29,890 (across a number of different lists)
• Twitter Followers – 76,273 followers
• ProBlogger on Facebook – 15,242 fans
• ProBlogger Job Boards – around 2000 RSS subscriber

TwiTip

My newest blog and seeing a steady growth. Written mainly by a group of guest posts TwiTip has done fairly well. I’m about to launch a redesign of the site which will give it a more professional look but also add some great new features.

Income has been a little tougher on this one – mainly due to my lack of time to actually go after advertisers. Having said that – I’ve run a couple of affiliate programs that have done pretty well (still room for improvement though on the ad front).

• Traffic – 256,430 Visitors viewing 326,484 pages
• Subscribers – 21,512 RSS subscribers

Other Interests

I try to be active on a number of social media sites, networks and maintain an interest in a variety of other projects including:

• LinkedIn – 1940 Connections
• LinkedIn Professional Bloggers Network – 1200 members
• Personal Facebook Page – 5000 friends (the limit)
• Personal Blog – 5000 Visitors a Month (I really should post more)
• Publications – ProBlogger The Book and 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
• Co-Founder and Shareholder – b5media blog network
• Co-Founder – Six Figure Blogging (now fairly inactive)
• Speaking/Training/Media – I’ve had a real increase in the number of invitations to speak and teach at a variety of conferences and do media appearances (interviews/write columns etc). Due to me being in Australia I am not able to do many of them but it’s something I’ve been enjoying when I can do them locally (or occasionally overseas).

Looking Forward

In the next few months there are a number of new things that will add to this list (because I have so much spare time):

• ProBlogger.com (a community site for bloggers)
• Two new ebooks for Digital Photography School (I’m working on two which will hopefully be released before the end of the year)
• Possibly another ebook for ProBlogger – working with another blogger on this
• A New Site with ebook – I can’t say too much about this but I’m looking forward to collaborating with another blogger on a new site that will relate to both ProBlogger and TwiTip.
• One more Bigger Secret Collaboration with a couple of other bloggers – Hopefully with an October launch

All in all I’m fairly busy. While there are opportunities arising every day or two that I could do more on if I had the time (or if I decided to hire a staff) I’m attempting to keep things relatively contained (you might not think so from the above list but it’s the tip of the iceberg of what I get asked to do).

All in all it’s a fun business to be in, a profitable way to make a living and it does still give me flexibility to spend time with my family, friends and community groups that I belong to – doing the things that are important to me.