Happy New Year everyone! This time of year is very exciting because so much of it is spent with friends and family. I’m very thankful for all the friends I’ve made this year due to this website and I’m excited to finally meet some of them in 2014. I wanted to do kind of a year in review post to show everyone the current state of the website, where it came from, and maybe where it’s going.
Year In Review
I use Google Analytics, Clicky, and a few other metrics programs to track number of visitors, page views, and other data. I’m very interested in the idea of what makes for a good post and want to appeal to everyone the best that I can. All Day Ruckoff was started as a Tumblr blog in the middle of February, 2013. The purpose of it was to be a place to post my workouts and to have a community to hold myself accountable for the goals I wanted to accomplish. As you can see from the following chart no one really found that interesting… which is why you don’t see posts of my daily workouts anymore. If anything I’ll send it out in a tweet or a Instagram picture or something similar.
Things didn’t really pick up until GORUCK started getting involved. As you can see they re-tweeted my GORUCK Heavy 009 AAR and ended up contacting me about posting it on their website. Things continued to pick up and eventually there was a pretty massive website re-design. After that visits steadily increased until GORUCK dropped the news that they were doing a BOGO offer on all of their Good Livin’ events.
Since this website follows GORUCK and rucking so closely it only makes sense that the ups and downs would somewhat follow GORUCK announcement and involvement.
Success?
I don’t use these numbers to track “success” or anything weird like that. The way I track success is through the emails and messages I receive. When people send me a message and just say thanks or keep it up that means a lot because it tells me that the website has actually helped someone. Although All Day Ruckoff is a small business I don’t ever see it being profitable in the sense that I’ll make money from it. Everything I’ve made so far from the Store has gone back into trying to provide a better experience for you, the reader.
Here’s one example… the website was originally hosted by NameCheap through their “Professional” plan. Now their “Professional” plan didn’t seem too professional to me when the website was experiencing multiple hour+ long outages. I was paying about $7.50 a month for this which is dirt cheap but it really wasn’t cutting it. People are buying things from the ADR Store as a way to support this website and what does it show them if I use that money to pay for awful hosting? I did some research and ended up switching to WP Engine. Now WP Engine is not the cheapest hosting around (lowest account level is $29 a month) but as long as the Store still brings in money there’s no reason why that all shouldn’t go back into the website. NameCheap gave me ~5 hours of down time in 2 weeks and WP Engine had about an hour of downtime over the course of an entire year.
The Coming Year
In the coming year I hope to produce more gear reviews for GORUCK built gear and gear for GORUCK events. I’m excited to cover GORUCK’s new HCL event and think that those will be a blast to follow. One of the things I can’t wait to see are the between event pictures coming from them. There will be 3 – 5 hours between each event so you know people will be posting pictures and updates.
There’s a chance I may be traveling for some events in 2014 as well and I am every excited to meet some GRTs who aren’t from the Seattle area. I’ll be posting my travel plans well in advance in the event people want to meet up for a beer or something.
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