The first day of 2007 is almost over. The blogosphere over the last two days has been filled with posts reviewing 2006 and welcoming 2007. I think I shall do the same.

2006 — Out!

2006 has been a year of growth for OzBargainBlog. It wasn’t even called OzBargainBlog when the year started, and it was hosted on my good old home server on my ADSL connection at home. In January 2006 I was getting 1182 unique visitors on this blog, but everything is good — I was having fun sharing some bargains with some close friends.

Then came the change — I registered the domain and hosted the site on Jumba, back in April. Traffic started to pick up, and I found myself spending more time on this site. I moved again in late November to a VPS so I can configure the server the way I wanted. Traffic flooded in in December in preparation for the holiday season, and I got 9,000+ unique visitors in that very last month of 2006. Not bad for my little side project :)

2006 has been the year of “over-committing”. Besides OzBargainBlog, I am also trying to write for my programming and web hosting blogs, starting up new websites, etc. On the bargain hunting side of things, I wrote a small price comparison site for online pharmacy and launched OzBargain.com.au, a collaborative bargain hunting site for the Aussies.

I felt grateful that I have met many great minds through this blog — some are readers, some are shop owners and some are website operators. Thank you guys!

2007 — In!

Many big changes are happening in 2007. I think the biggest one for me personally is the arrival of our second child in late March. Yup, we are very excited. But that also means I will be very busy and very tired in less than 3 months. That implies I will not be able to blog in my current capacity (not that I am writing a lot these days).

That is one reason why OzBargain.com.au has been set up — it is a community site where everyone can come and share the great deals they found, so that I don’t need to do too much work :) Okay, here are my 2007 plans:

Focusing on OzBargain.com.au

OzBargain.com.au will be my main focus in the next two months. There are quite a few to-dos under my list, mostly require quite a bit of coding. I will also have my own procrastination to fight against. We shall see how it goes.

That also means I will pay relatively less attention to this blog. In fact as most deals I find I will post on OzBargain.com.au first, there will be less posts on specific deals on OzBargainBlog. Instead, I would like to write about the bargain hunting itself, reviewing other bargain hunting sites, and more on “tips of getting a good bargain”. Fewer longer more useful posts, I hope.

Giving away more prizes

I have just given out $150 in our previous contest, and there will surely be more this year. In fact I have one ready sometime this week. Competitions are fun for both the organiser and the participants :)

Just in case you haven’t realised, this blog and OzBargain.com.au are funded by advertisement (AdSense + Text-Link-Ads + ClixGalore). I don’t make much — they are more like an exercise for me to understand how Internet advertisement works. So I thought maybe I’ll pour the money back into the game for some fun :)

More community

Honestly, more I read about other people’s stories more I realise that I am not a good bargain finder. I must have started this blogsite at the right time to get that much attention.

Anyway, one goal for me in 2007 is to write less and create a community. I rather have all the “pro”s contributing than myself blurbing the good deals I scrapped off some newsletters. Ultimately I would like to get the community rolling, so OzBargain.com.au can go into auto-pilot mode after March when I will definitely get very busy. A bit ambitious, but I will give it a try.

I need a new theme

A new theme for OzBargainBlog is always something in the back of my mind. I am hoping to nail it down in the first half of the year (that means 6 months for me to work on this one :) I like the orange theme, but it is certainly getting more cluttered with all the ads and sidebar items.

Others?

There are more, but I think they will be revealed at appropriate times. OzBargainBlog and related websites will continue to be my hobby sites, and I have no intention to turn them into my “second job”. A rule of thumb goes like this — when your hobby becomes work, it will become boring.

That’s it for the 1st of January. We’ll head down to Moore Park Supacentre tomorrow to buy some furnitures. Hopefully there will be some bargains somewhere…