I stumbled on your post on blog carnivals earlier this AM as I was doing some research on reigniting an old fitness and fat loss blog I’ve had up since 2009. It brought back a huge memory rush, which only intensified when I came to this post.

I too ran a personal finance blog, Debt Free. I eventually grew it to an Alexa ranking of under 20K, and had it in the Top 20 on the Fire Finance PF blog rankings. Seeing the names of so many of the PF blogs from the old community brought a tear to my eye. (We really were a small group back in the day)

I also used blog carnivals as a cornerstone of my traffic strategy. It worked very well and traffic grew steadily. 75% of my traffic was from organic search rankings. In the early days of social, pre Facebook and Twitter, blog carnivals were a social media of sorts. The better ones had good followings, so referral traffic was plentiful, in addition to the all important backlinks they provided. I at least varied my anchor text, which may have helped somewhat.

Unfortunately for me, I never had the chance to see a precipitous SERP drop due to Panda or Penguin. I learned a bitter lesson about backing up everything. While I regularly backed up the blog, through ignorance I neglected to do likewise with the MySQL database. On July 18th, 2008 I logged in to do my regular post, only to discover I couldn’t. Sadly, I was never able to resurrect it. In retrospect (and especially after seeing what many of the other PF blogs sold for soon after) I should have invested in paying someone to rebuild the database. Live and learn…

Thanks so much for the trip down memory lane. I hadn’t thought about Consumerism Commentary, GetRichSLowly, and FiveCentNickel in years.

Have an excellent weekend,

Steve

Ya never know :)

Nice! Not too familiar with that site myself over here (except from hearing you mention it), but it’s good to have big dreams :) Can’t chase one if you don’t, right?

Well, $10 and a lot of smarts/patience to wait for the big pay off in the end and not sell out too early :)

Oh man, the good ol’ days haha… most people don’t know/pay attention to the history settings even today!

HAHA! Oh gosh that’s hilarious. And yes I remember I didn’t know how to clear the internet history. :D

Surely it would be harder to make money from a website offering it for free – isn’t paid subscription the backbone of the industry…if you’re only attracting visitors who don’t want to pay then you’re shooting yourself in the foot.