This Blog Is 5 Years Old
I cannot believe that this blog is already 5 years old! When I first started, I did not know if I will have much to write. I just wanted to write about financial planning for early retirement because a bunch of friends and colleagues asked me for it. I thought I would be done in about 15 to 20 articles and stop writing. But here I am still continuing the tradition all thanks to my readers. As I kept writing, different people asked for different topics like home schooling, health, fitness, my hobby projects, sustainable living and so on. I started writing about varying topic and the blog evolved to what it is now. But every beginning has an end and so I am not really sure how long I will continue. There is absolutely no dearth of topics, but time is something that is hard to find.
In these 5 years I have written over 400 articles including various kinds of calculators which will help you do your own financial planning. If someone starts reading my blog today, and picks up one post per day, it will take more than a year for them to completely read everything. Which is why I categorized them and linked those categories in my start here page. But it has been a long time since I updated it and I don’t plan to actively update that anymore. So you will have to use the crude search if you need to find somemething.
There are 190 subscribers and it has remained stagnant there. Not sure how many of them are actually reading my blog, but they must be getting my email when I publish a new post. In the last 28 days, about 250 users visited my blog.
Unfortunately though, the number of readers have been trending down lately. Perhaps early retirement is not on their minds these days? It was all the craze pre-COVID and then started declining.
Most of my readers are from India as expected. The next major traffic is coming from US which is also sort of expected I guess given that there are a lot of Indian citizens in the US who eventually want to retire.
I have “earned” $0.42 this month from ads and a grand total of $38 for the life time of this blog. On the point of ads, I’ve heard from someone that some ads are a little bit inappropriate. I am sorry about it, but I tried and blocked any ads that I thought may be inappropriate. Please drop me a line if you see such content. I will try to find a way to block them.
Coming to the costs front, the domain name costs Rs. 1,015/year to renew. The cost of running the blog on a Google compute instance varies every month but it is not that much. That is all folks! On to the 6th year of blogging.