The title of this post may be seen akin to shooting oneself in the foot, but hear me out.

Quite a few bloggers today are envious of the “A-Listers” – the high life, the thousands of RSS subscribers, the millions of pageviews yearly. For me, I’m not jealous at all – in fact, the only thing I’d like to emulate are the earnings.

I’ll be honest with you – I’m quite happy with this blog size at the moment, and it is growing a bit too quickly. Why? Well, this blog has always been a strong community – look at most blogs that are bigger and you’ll see that posts on here tend to get far more discussion than even blogs that have 10x the RSS subscriber amount – that’s pretty cool, and that’s because my readers kick ass.

I’d love to retain that community aspect, but as a blog grows bigger, that’s harder and harder – at the very beginning, I could write page-long replies to comments left, now it’s getting difficult to even reply to them; this will only decrease should TUK grow. One of the best things about small-medium blogs is the personal touch – for example, I have most of my readers on instant messenger, and the ones that I don’t I usually check out their blogs. Can you imagine someone with 1,000+ RSS subscribers having them all on MSN? Insanity.

There is a catch-22 though.

Eventually I will sell this blog – I hope I’ve been transparent about that. Although I turned down a sizable amount a short while ago, something in the five figure range would be near impossible to, unless this blog was earning a lot more than that – the thing is, this blog will not be worth five figures unless I increase earnings (and the easiest way to increase earnings is to increase traffic and readers).

Does making it big really mean one has to start losing the personal touch?

Something I’ve been wondering about – I guess the only way I’ll find out is if (when?) TUK grows into a dominant force in the blogosphere. What do you think?

Blog Forum

The blogging forum should pass 300 posts (from 30+ members) today. Make sure you join if you haven’t, as there is quite a bit of interesting debate (and I’ll be sharing some tips for earning from your blog too, so all benefit. I’m also giving away a eBook that I wrote for free, which normally costs an insane amount of money :razz:

Check it out.

Advertising Updates

I rewrote my advertising page, as it was a little bit unprofessional before – anyways, I’ve added statistics. For a limited time only, you can buy links in the sidebar (nofollow) for just $10.00 a month… put up the right CPA offer and you’ll make much more than that. I also have one 125 x 125 available, feel free to contact me.

I am using the OIO Publisher plugin for Wordpress – although it costs $37, it is has a fair amount of options for the price. Due to me being a cheap bastard I managed to knick a hugely discounted (ie, free :razz: ) copy off the owner, and anyways – thirty seconds after installing it I sold one of the ads in the sidebar, making that an instant return on investment (had I bought it).

I will be reviewing it soon as they seem to have a good idea and unlike other ad selling services, you keep 100% – will let you guys know how I find it. To buy a link in the sidebar, use the link under Featured Sites (it’s automated) and to buy a banner, email me.

Contest

As you guys hopefully know, the contest is getting over tomorrow – I’ve been tallying the entries and there are already over 600, not including the RSS subscribers. With the RSS subscribers, there are well over 1,000 entries – luckily, most of the hard work is done. Would you guys like to see a live draw tomorrow at say… 5PM GMT, or should I do it the boring way?

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