Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

I’ve been quite busy these past days, as I have a lot on my plate. I am still spending several hours per day working with Bloggst, and apart from that we also have a few assignments at University that has to be done. Infact, I am working on one right now, but writing this post during a break, so I think we can safely assume that this will be a long post!

I’ve you’ve been following Bloggst these past weeks since the launch, you’ll know that it has been growing quite nicely. Today we just reached the 1000 posts “milestone”, which I am pretty happy with. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that huge, but for a one man project like Bloggst, I think it is more than decent in less than three weeks.

The member count is currently at around 180, which is also pretty decent. It has stagnated a bit the past week at about 5 to 10 new members per day, but that’s mostly because I haven’t been as aggressive with the promotion as I was in the very beginning. Right now we’ve got a nice base of posting members, which is the cornerstone of all online communities. Hopefully the members who have settled in will stay around and keep contributing, because if that’s the case, it’s a very good stepping stone for future growth.

As I mentioned I’m not as aggressive in the promotion as I was right after the launch. This is mostly because now that we’ve been able to establish ourselves with a decent base of contributors, and a steady influx of new members, I can take some time to focus on working with the parts that I want to improve on the site. Yesterday I finished up the draft for the new front page, and I have sent it off to my designer. I’m now awaiting confirmation that he’s started the job, and hopefully he’ll have it finished by the weekend. Once that goes live, I’m going to implement a similar style to the content sections, as I feel they need to be more seperated from the forums in terms of style and organization than they are right now. As it stands now, they are also a bit unorganized, and could definitely benefit from a facelift.

The campaign we are running with “Today’s Featured Blog” has been a very successful marketing tool, and as of right now more than 50 inbound links from blogs are already registered in Technorati. There are still a few spaces left, but I am pretty sure that once I do one more post about it, those remaining spots will be filled, which of course means more backlinks for Bloggst as well!

It seems the contest has also picked up some momentum, and I have gotten some indications that a couple of the members are there to participate in it. It’s of course nice to see this, but once this contest finishes, I have plans for a new one that I hope will work even better. The new contest will be based around viral marketing, and hopefully it will help draw in even more contributing members! I will also try and get some more attractive prizes for the next contest, so that members will have more incentive to participate.

The next and final point on my list for this post is the question of monetization. I have been asked many times already if I don’t plan on monetizing Bloggst, and if I’m just doing it for the fun of it. The answer is pretty obvious, yes, I do have plans to monetize it. However I feel that trying to monetize it from the very beginning would be pointless and counter effective. Right now we are getting around 300 - 400 visitors per day, and I have promised myself that once we start touching the thousands, I will start thinking about making money from the site.

To help keep me focused and constantly working on Bloggst, I have set a few goals that I hope to achieve within certain timeframes, and I thought sharing them with my readers would be nice, because that way you can remind me of them if you see me slacking off! The goals are:

• 5000 posts by the start of June. That means around 55 posts on average per day since the opening, and as it stands right now, we should be on track in this department.
• 500 registered members by the start of June. This is around 5.5 new members per day on average since the beginning, and we’re also on track here. I want to keep this goal modest though, since a lot of communities stagnate a bit after the initial opening hype. If we manage to keep up the current trend however, this shouldn’t be a problem to reach.
• Have at least 100 subscribers to the Bloggst feed by the start of June. Right now I am not promoting the feed very well, but it has still attracted a few subscribers. I need to take full advantage of the powers of the feed, and promote it more actively, as it has come to a stand still at around 30 subscribers for the past few days. This goal shouldn’t be too hard to reach, but I definitely need to promote the feed more actively.
• Earn at least $100 USD from Bloggst in the month of June. Again, modest, but I expect that by the start of June I will begin to monetize the site, and for the first month I would be very happy if it would bring in at least $100. If everything goes according to plan though, we’ll have some decent rankings for the domain and in the search engines by that time, and I will probably be able to bring in the $100 on text links alone.

Those are the goals I am working towards so far. Of course, should anything go terribly wrong, or even terribly right, I might have to adjust them along the way. Right now with the current growth though, these goals are reachable, and still something to strive for. Right now I can almost hear that assignment calling for me, so I guess I should get back to work!