Happy New Year everyone! How is your Christmas/New Year holidays? For me it is a matter of staying at home, playing with kids, enjoying the family time and not doing anything (including blogging and updating my websites). Life will hopefully get back to normal tomorrow when I head back to work, and I will hopefully pick up working on OzBargain again.

While it is still the New Year’s Day, let me pounder on what OzBargain has achieved in 2007, and what my goals are for in 2008, in a similar fashion as my post last year.

2007 — Out!

2007 is the year where I moved this blog to its current URL, which reflects the direction I am taking for OzBargain and this blog. It used to be my blog where I shared bargains I found with my readers. With a full time job as a Software Architect and 2 kids, this arrangement simply does not scale, thus the birth of OzBargain in November 2006 where everyone can post deals. Throughout the year I started to post less and less deals here, and this blog has shifted its focus from bargain sharing, to my soap box to announce updates on OzBargain.

2007 has indeed been a year of growth for OzBargain. The growth has been slow but steady. In January 2007, there were 10,000 visits and 5,500+ unique visitors. In December 2007, there were 125,000 visits and 50,000+ unique visitors — almost 10 fold in traffic! It had no RSS subscribers back in January, and now boasts 660-700 daily RSS subscribers.

Some of the most visited deals:

• Big W’s Toy Sale back in July, almost 14,000 hits. Somehow it came up in Google for that specific term, although it was not a highly rated deal.
• Domino’s Pizza Coupons posted in May, getting 9,800+ hits this year. Domino’s coupons have been great, which had made me eat more pizzas than I should…
• Dell 2407WFP for $778 delivered posted in June with around 9,800+ hits as well. It has been linked by various popular forums such as Whirlpool and OCAU. You can now get 24″ LCD monitors for less than $600 now, even from Dell! (E248WFP is currently at $599).

Reflecting last year’s plan,

• Focusing on OzBargain.com.au — big tick on this one. In fact I felt sorry for the readers here that I have been neglecting this blog for a while.
• Giving away more prizes — more than $2,000 cash/gift voucher prize given out to 57 different prize winners this year. Thank you very much for participating!
• More community — OzBargain has really grown into a community of its own. There are people actively participating in discussions every single day! I have also personally made quite a few friends here. Thank you everyone again!
• I need a new theme — well, you are still looking at that good old theme when this blog started more than 2 years ago…

It has been an enjoyable ride, but enough of yester-year. Let me spell out the plans for this year.

2008 — In!

Some of my 2008 plans for OzBargain:

• Spend less time on the community — yes I think I had spent too much time blogging and looking after OzBargain in 2007 where I should have been working and spending time with family and church. I have to tell myself that OzBargain is just a hobby. Sorry I have to put the priority right :)

  I have appointed my very first moderator on OzBargain last week — JeffreyM, and hopefully more later on during the year to help out keeping OzBargain a useful place for bargain hunters in Australia.

• Developing new features — another reason why I want to withdrawal myself partially from community work is because, hmm, I am not that good at it. I rather spend time doing what I am better at, i.e. coding and developing the website, than blogging and building the community.

  I have a big pile of TODO’s for OzBargain but I am not sure whether I can find time to implement them all. However I am hoping that for 2008, OzBargain is not just a great community to find cheap stuff, but also a great web application platform to find good bargains.

Yes, I know that the description is a bit vague. You might have expected things like “2 million unique visitors per day” or “$20,000 advertisement income each month” but sorry I prefer to keep things a bit vague for the moment because (1) no big disappointment later this year (2) plan changes all the time (3) it is only a hobby site, after all.

I do hope, however, that OzBargain can continue to provide a useful service to you, the bargain hunting community, that everyone can have a great 2008 saving money from the deals we share together.