A trip back in time, how 5 major bloggers looked when they started.

March 5th 2008

A trip back in time, how 5 major bloggers looked when they started.

by Paul Anthony

Everyone starts somewhere. The websites we know and love, mainly have started from nothing and grown to immense proportions. The same is true for the major bloggers within the blogosphere. The following is a bit of an insight into the hows, why’s and where’s. I’ve used the wayback machine for all this research, so if the main men themselves want to jump in at any point to correct my assumptions feel free.

1) Problogger

I get the feeling from looking at the wayback machine that Darren knew very much what he was doing from the start. If nothing else he had focus wayback (excuse the pun) at the start of his problogger website career. Focus as we all know is extremely important with a blog, as you can hope to carve out a niche for yourself, in terms of visitors, and in direction for the site. The site first started getting archive away back in 2005 - but was still focused on making money with a blog. ‘Helping Bloggers Earn Money Online’ was the title back in the day, which has now changed to “Blog tips to Help you Make Money Blogging”. What can we learn from this title change - well there are now two phrases being targetted - “Blog tips” and “Make Money Blogging”, as opposed to “Earn Money Online”. Again, this provides more targetted traffic (bloggers - as opposed to people who want to earn money online), which is extremely important. You can see the old problogger logo, which to be fair wasn’t at all bad for 2005. Wordpress was (and still is) the preferred weapon of choice for Darren. And what was Problogger reading in 2005? - Check these links grabbed from the source code of the archives. Some links may or may not work..

2) Copyblogger

Copyblogger’s first indexed page in the wayback machine is for March 2006 although the site began from small beginnings in January 2006. The title that they decided to use was “Copywriting tips for selling with blogs and RSS from Copyblogger”. This has now changed to “Copywriting tips for online marketing success” - not so much a more search engine friendly type title change such as Darren’s but more of a it reads a hell of a lot better - which is what the site is all about. Brian too was using Wordpress - and a hacked K2 template - the site still runs WP but is significantly modified now. Interestingly some of the links still work - a tip to remember with SEO is to minimise 404’s as much as possible and keep existing link structures if at all possible. Take home that lesson from this article if nothing else. 2006 to 2008 whilst a two year period is pretty good going for site growth. If you need blogging inspiration and a reason to keep it up and keep doing it - see below. Zero to hero in two years is an amazing achievement.

3) Dave Naylor (DaveN to his buds)

Daves original site goes back to Thursday 9th of Dec 2004, ran Wordpress (1.2.4) to be exact and has been perfectly preserved in the wayback machine. The site was well coded for search (a slight byproduct of Wordpress?), with CSS layouts and such. The majority of people are only really waking up to css based development now, so that in itself was pretty good going. There was a bit more of a focus on conference talking, but overall still a personal space to blog. I’m guessing he’s a fan of ego searches..The site ranks quite well for his name. As it stands now feels a bit more black hat seo, although thats just my own perception of dark sites = shady areas online. The old site had a few SEO tools created by the man himself, so attempts to get link traffic for these tools was there. We can put a tick in the “Knew what he was doing, with the art of blogging” box.

4) Graywolf

Michael’s site goes back also to Monday 12th of July 2004 (was this the big year of blogging?) but interesting has changed from a personal feel to being SEO / Internet focused over the years.

“Rant, Raves and Ramblings of Graywolf on the internet, media, movies, music and anything else thats on his mind.” is what the site leads with back on the time machine. Site was powered by Blogger, long since left behind in favour of Wordpress. The Feedburner links seem to have gone, perhaps Michael tracks RSS subscribers some other way, or is past caring because they are so plentyful. Either way its just another interesting change. The title tag also has moved to a more SEO focused one. SEO Blog looks to be the keyphrase in question at the minute, and who am I not to try and aid in that pursuit of staying to the top. The design has also changed somewhat…I am loving that purple colour scheme.

Honest.

5) John Chow

John Chow is indexed in the Wayback Machine back as far as 2000, and has all the qualities of a site we remember for the era.

Created in front page…Complete with Flash Intro, MIDI music, and HTML gear guestbooks, and Animated Gifs…ah..those were the days. Now before I get caught up in nostalgia, going from this, to over 20,000 subscribers via RSS alone, again is an amazing feat. In fact the “Wired World of John Chow” didn’t even begin to get a Search marketing, Internet feel about it until 2005.

<meta name=“GENERATOR” content=“Microsoft FrontPage 4.0″><style><!–

A{text-decoration:none}

A:hover{text-decoration: none; color: red}

.s { font-family: Arial; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 10pt }

–>

</style>

<bgsound src=“http://thelovezone.com/moto/Chris3.mid” loop=“-1″>

So..What can we learn. Dedication is one of the most important things when developing an online business, whether it be consulting, developing or blogging. Keep at it and keep your focus, and regardless of your skills now, you will learn.

Web Design Ireland