On January 29th, this blog will be five months old. I wrote my first post on this blog on August 29th, and it blows me away that it has already been so long since its creation. Today, I wanted to talk about how far this site has come thanks to the great writing staff and my friends and supporters.

If you aren’t interested in blog statistics and figures, then feel free to skip this post.

Post Stats

There are nearly sixty posts on this blog, meaning we’ve been able to push out more than ten posts per month. The average post contains over 1500 words, and gets a little over three comments. This site now has over 90,000 words in its combined posts contributed by nine different writers.

While I have written the most posts, the person with the highest word count contributed is Steve Aitchison, a blogger I’ve come to know and respect. The other featured authors on this site include Niki Fears, Molly G. and Stefanie Fogel. We’ve also had a few guest contributions from people like Deb Ng, Phyl Good, Bambi Blue and Chris Garrett.

While comments have been a little slow, this blog has already received over 200 from various people, and I am grateful for each and every one of them (except the spam ones…).

Traffic and Metrics

Since starting, this blog has seen more than 200,000 unique visitors and over 250,000 page views. More than 300 people have found LifeSnips by searching for terms like blog ideas, blogging ideas and lifesnips.

Our biggest traffic sources have been StumbleUpon with holykaw.alltop.com coming in second, and Twitter coming in third. Nearly all of the traffic coming to this blog is from the USA, with only a few percent coming from Canada or the UK.

The RSS subscription rates have always been interesting to watch as they grew from nothing to peaking as high as 251 people on this past Friday. They continue to grow at a reasonable rate, and I am hoping through some great articles, an increase in publishing pace, and a little nagging that LifeSnips will quadruple that number over 2010.

Some of the most trafficked posts include: What Are Your Eyes Giving Away?, 100 Ways To Find Ideas For Your Blog Posts, and Best Password Practices Guide.

Blog Software and Plugins

This blog runs the latest version of WordPress, and utilizes twenty-two different plugins to make everything here happen. I am always looking for new great plugins to add to the functionality of the site, and removing plugins that could be better served through my own limited PHP knowledge.

I am continuing to try to add new features to the site through the use of custom coded additions like the Top Life Hack Blogs list, and services like Feedburner for e-mail subscriptions.

Goals

Some of my upcoming goals include pushing the content creation schedule a bit harder by hiring on more writers, getting my current writers to write more great posts, and trying to add more content myself. I’d like to see traffic continue its path upwards at a reasonable rate, and I also hope to start making efforts towards making this site less of a financial drain on me. Balancing the expansion of the content with the revenue goals should be an interesting challenge.

I hope that if you aren’t already a subscriber that you’ll sign-up today, and join me on this journey. I hope to find ways to make people’s lives better and provide content that people want to read. If you have any suggestions, please let me know, and I hope you are all happy and well as we begin what should hopefully shape up to be a great year.

One of my favourite things about the end of the year is the lengthy roundups that people create of the top blog posts over the course of the year. Some lists are short, only having a few links to their most prized articles, while others are laundry lists of nearly every post each month. Either way, these lists can be great tools to find some of the best life hack and productivity tips.

Here are some lists from a few life hack blogs:

Best of Awake@TheWheel 2009
Get Rich Slowly’s Greatest Hits (2009 Edition)
Best of Art of Manliness 2009
The 90 Best Lifehacks of 2009: The Year in Review
The Essential Zen Habits of 2009
Mental_floss: Our Top 5 Stories of 2009

If you are wondering where the LifeSnips year in review is, I’ll remind you that we’ve only been around for four months now, but here are some stats from our first quarter in existence and, hopefully, some insight on what you can expect form LifeSnips in 2010.

Thanks to the great writing staff here, we’ve had 170,000 unique visitors, and 211,000 page views. Over fifty people have found us from searching for our name in search engines. We’ve had as many as 217 RSS subscribers following our feed, and we’ve published over 50 posts. LifeSnips is one of the only blogs in the Life Hack niche to track the stats and rankings of the other blogs in its own niche, a helpful, value-added script that gets a fair bit of traffic, and hopefully gives those other sites some new readers as well.

I am looking forward to an amazing 2010, and I hope you’ll all stick around. If you have come across a productivity, lifestyle tips, life hack blog with its own 2009 roundup, please let us know in the comments below.

So, I’ve finally finished getting the updated Top Life Hack Blogs list together for you all. This new version takes into account Technorati authority, Compete scores, as well as Google PageRank and Alexa rankings. Combined, I think these give a good picture of the order of the blogs in this niche, and will be a helpful resource for those looking to find such information.

For myself, and the bloggers on the Life Snips staff, we will use this list to find great articles on top tier blogs, as well as a measuring stick for our own continued improvements.

If you’d like to get added to the list, please contact me, either through comments on this post, or via the contact page, and I’ll look into adding you. I probably won’t let the list go longer than one hundred entries, as it is very rare for anyone to need more than one hundred of the best blogs in any niche, for any non-spam purpose.

That doesn’t mean I won’t accept more than one hundred people to submit their blogs though, as some of you will hopefully rise up through the ranks as well.

I hope you’ll all check out the Top Life Hacks Blog list, and let me know what you think of it.

Welcome to LifeSnips, a site that will be covering a variety of topics under the umbrella of enjoying a better life. You’ve seen many sites that give general overviews, long lists of less than helpful ideas, and try to convince you that their idea is the only idea, but here at LifeSnips we are going to dig deeper into what can make your life great.

About Me

My name is David Peralty, and I’ve been a blogger for a very long time, and for the last four years, I’ve been blogging full time on various sites. I’ve run a large number of successful sites, and have always been interested in lifestyle tricks and tips.

At one point, I owned and ran LifeSpy.com before selling it to Bloggy Network, a company I worked for as the Director of Communications.

That was over two years ago now, and I’ve learned a great deal since then. I’ve learned that building a hugely successful site is as much about content as anything else, and will be looking for the best content in the life tips niche for publication here on LifeSnips.com.

Who Will Write Here?

Other than myself, I hope to hire some amazing writers to be staff writers for this blog. I recently put up an advertisement on the Problogger Job Board, and have been receiving a great response towards it.

I will be announcing new writers as they get hired, so that you can all get a better understanding of their backgrounds, writing styles and what they’ll be bringing to this site.

Want to Write for LifeSnips?

While I am hiring staff writers to bring consistent, valuable content to this site, I am always going to be looking for guest columnists, and other writers. The pay per approved submission is $50 via Paypal.

Any submission that isn’t approved is yours to publish wherever you like. If your submission is approved, you agree to grant unique publishing rights to LifeSnips.com.