2006 has been a really wild year for me, both on this blog and in my offline life.

I launched The Bargain Queen on February 22nd, as a hobby to keep me sane while I was on extended sick leave. I figured it would be a good antidote to all the serious I.T. stuff I do at work: something girly and fun and frivolous to occupy my spare time. It’s turned into much, much more than that…

I started The Bargain Queen for free using Blogger, so I could learn to blog. I installed a very basic free stats package (StatCounter) to see whether anyone read it. In February, 108 people visited — more than enough to convince me to keep going.

So I kept on blogging, and the blog kept growing… 603 visitors in March, almost 2,000 in April. May was a bumper month because I hosted my favourite blog carnival, the (now-defunct?) Carnivale of Couture. Almost 4,000 people stopped by to read it. (If you missed it, you can still read my Carnivale of Best-Ever Bargains.)

By July, my Technorati rank had soared to around 40,000 — meaning The Bargain Queen was already in the top 40,000 blogs worldwide after less than six months. I spent $0 on it to get to that point, so I decided to see how big it could get with a tiny budget. I bought a domain and a year’s hosting from BlueHost for US$95.40 (AU$127.83). I then spent US$10 (AU$13.14) on iStockPhoto to get some great illustrations that I customised to give The Bargain Queen a unique look. I also switched to Wordpress because Blogger wasn’t doing what I needed it to.

I moved to the new domain, www.thebargainqueen.com on August 7th. I hoped the site’s visitors would come with me and mostly, they did: I had 3,302 visitors to the old domain in July and 2,778 to the new one in August… and the second figure is probably underestimated because the two numbers come from different stats packages that calculate things slightly differently (I switched to Awstats when I moved the site).

The site kept growing and I kept making minor improvements to it.

Unfortunately, the site’s growing popularity brought it to the attention of spammers, and I was spending time each day deleting comments with links to porn sites and illegal online pharmacies. The problem got bad enough that I wrote about it on August 15th, and my friend Dave (from CafeDave.net) came to the rescue. He told me about Akismet, I installed it, and it’s caught 8,448 spam comments since then. Without it, I probably would’ve given up blogging. I just don’t have time to delete that much spam.

Along the way, I was actively avoiding publicity for the site. In May, Mr BQ wrote a press release, but I wouldn’t let him send it. I didn’t think the site was ready, and I’m pretty media shy anyway. He asked again in June, July, August and September. Each time, he got the same answer: “I’m just going to fix up these dozen things and then you can send it”. In October, time ran out. National and international media outlets started emailing me and I wasn’t ready to answer their questions. What’s the site about? Um, it’s a hobby. How did it get started? Um, as a hobby. How popular is it now? Dunno, let me check my stats…

I told Mr BQ: “If they’re calling me, I guess I’m going to have a media profile sooner or later, regardless of what I do. But why do the big guys have to get in first? Why can’t I start really small and get used to all this before I get the opportunity to make an idiot of myself in front of the whole country?”

I’m very lucky that Mr BQ is a professional PR guy and knew how to handle it. He sent a press release to the local paper, the Inner West Weekly, and they wrote a story about my favourite place in Ashfield: the local fish shop. (I seriously love the fish shop. We eat gourmet seafood dinners a couple of times a week because we can get the ingredients there cheaply — usually less than $5/head each time.) The photo shoot also turned out well, which I’m pleased about. I wore just enough makeup to look like an aging drag queen so I looked completely natural in the photos.

The first story led to a second one: Take 5 magazine called the day the Inner West Weekly story came out and asked to buy my life story. I agreed, so I’ll be in their January 10th edition.

Then radio 3AW in Melbourne called to ask for some Christmas shopping tips (I still have no idea how they found me) and I spoke on the air with Nick McCallum. It was live to air and I didn’t say anything idiotic, which is a great confidence boost. The Inner West Weekly also called again, this time for some Christmas shopping tips. I wound up doing a photo shoot outside the local Westfield shopping mall holding a giant Christmas present, smiling and trying to look friendly while staying absolutely still so everyone around me was blurred but I wasn’t. I have newfound respect for professional models!

That’s the entire promotional effort for this blog so far, and it’s grown to over 20,000 visitors this month. I’m astonished. Maybe this is normal for blogs; I don’t really know. But as an I.T. professional, I worked on web sites where millions of dollars was spent to get a similar number of regular visitors… so getting there on a tiny budget with only one person working on it part-time has been an eye-opening experience.

I’m now taking the blog more seriously. There’s a lot I could offer if I could work on it full-time, but to do that, it would have to make money. I started fiddling with ad networks and affiliate programs a few months ago, and there’s a slow steady trickle of money coming in now. Mr BQ has also just become my ‘pimp’: he’s talking to some big media organisations that have expressed an interest in what I’m doing. We’ll see what happens in the new year… hopefully something exciting!

2006 in numbers for The Bargain Queen

• Launched: February 22nd
• February traffic: 108 visitors
• December traffic: 20,072 visitors
• Posts to date: 218
• Visitor comments: 574
• Spam comments: 8,448 (plus lots that I deleted manually before I got Akismet)
• Advertising budget: $0
• Total spending on site: under US$150 (AU$200)
• Moved to current URL: August 7th
• Newspaper stories: 2
• Magazine stores: 1 (due out on Jan 10th, 2007)
• Radio interviews: 1
• Media enquiries before I was ready to handle them: a few
• Money made blogging: very little
• Planned revenue for 2007: enough to keep me in shoes, a la Kristopher Dukes!

2006: My offline life

So what else happened for me, the person behind the blog, in 2006? Between personal challenges, bureaucratic dealings and new design adventures, it’s been an exciting year… and also an ‘uphill battle’.

For the first few months, I was bed-ridden. I have a chronic illness and over-work in 2005 triggered a bad flare-up. It took quite a few months to recover, and blogging in bed on my laptop kept me sane.

In May, we had to move house on short notice, and the best option was to move into a tiny apartment Mr BQ and his brother bought as an investment 10 years ago. It’s in a crumbling heritage-listed Victorian mansion that was a boarding house from the 60s and split into apartments in the 80s.

The building had a few problems. Rising damp and leaking gutters had destroyed the paint work. New guttering and a damp extraction system had been installed a couple of years ago, but the paint still hadn’t been fixed. Plus there was a fire safety order over the whole complex — the local Council had deemed it unsafe to live in without a large, elaborate, expensive alarm system.

We had to tackle the fire alarm system first, but it didn’t go entirely to plan. The fire safety contractors we hired were the kind that give all contractors a bad name. I spent months working with the other owners to resolve the problems, and in November, we finally got the resolution we wanted: the contractor agreed to install the system for the price they quoted and repair the damage they did to the building. In the process, I learnt far more about fire safety regulations than I ever wanted to know.

While all that was going on, I was delegated responsibility for getting the building restored and re-painted. One of the other owners, who has his own contracting company, found a good painter; it was my job to create their brief and get Council approval. So I researched colour schemes for Italianate late-Victorian mansions. Then I photographed every well-restored building of a similar style in the area and got all the owners to vote on the colour scheme they liked. I designed a colour scheme for our building, based on the building they liked. I then taught myself architectural rendering skills to create full-colour illustrations of the building, showing how it will look in the new colour scheme. The scheme was immediately approved by the Council’s heritage expert with only minor modifications, so I must’ve done a good job. Now the painters have almost finished the job and the building looks stunning. I’m really pleased!

The switch from designing web applications to designing buildings has been interesting, challenging and ultimately rewarding. Standing in front of a building and saying ‘I designed that’ (even if it’s only the colour scheme) is completely different to designing a big web site.

Another challenge this year has been working out how to live in a tiny space — and again, my design skills have been useful. Our apartment is 42 square metres, or about 450 square feet, and desperately in need of a new kitchen and bathroom. For the first few months I called it “dump sweet dump, there’s no place like dump”, but I actually like the place now. After rearranging all the furniture twice and culling everything we can live without, we now fit comfortably in the space… just in time to move out and renovate.

It’s almost a shame now that the place looks good, but we’ll be renovating it in the new year. I’ve spent the last few months creating plans and blueprints; now I’ve just got to finish my artists impressions (to show what it’ll look like post-renovation) and we can start getting quotes.

In between all that Mr BQ and I celebrated out first wedding anniversary. We’re still happily married, despite moving to the ‘burbs and renovating (as well as my illness), which is a very good sign.

I’ve somehow also squeezed in some freelance web work on the side… no wonder I’ve been so busy!

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