On September 1st 2009, the first post to Tutorialzine was added! Since then, without exception, every week brought a new web development tutorial for you folks to enjoy.
Today I decided to take the opportunity for a quick review of the past few months. You can view a dedicated stats page set up for the occasion, and grab the Google Analytics PDF for March from the buttons above.
First, the blog
Tutorialzine is a tutorial blog created and run by me, Martin Angelov. I am 21, in my second year of college, and I used to work as a full-time PHP/MySQL developer.
If you’ve come round before, you probably know what this blog is about – easy to follow, step-by-step web development tutorials.
And if you come round often, you’ve probably learned a lot of interesting techniques. However, you folks are not the only ones who have been learning. Although being primarily a coder, during the course of running this site, I learned a thing or two about design, presenting information, marketing and social media. Those are skills much different from programing but increasingly important in this social age.
You Can Read Over 30 Tutorials at Tutorialzine
The stats
Tutorialzine saw some nice growth in the last couple of months, with 2010 being a great year so far. Undoubtedly, social sharing gave the site a nice boost, along with features in many fellow design blogs. The most popular referring social sites:
- Stumble Upon
- Delicious
- Hacker News
- Dzone
Stumble Upon refers almost twice the traffic of twitter, but this must be taken with a grain of salt, as most twitter traffic does not come directly from twitter.com. I won’t be surprised if twitter is actually first.
Interestingly, Digg is not in this list, maybe because it is not as popular as it once was, or maybe it is due to the nature of Tutorialzine’s content (include more naked women in tutorials, note to self).
As of non-social referring sites, the undisputed leader of traffic is Smashing Magazine. Tzine tuts found their way in three of their latest roundups. Even now, nearly a month after the last of these posts, Tzine still gets around 300 unique visitors per day from them, which clearly speaks about the monstrous amounts of traffic these guys are getting.
Google Analytics PDF
The users
But it isn’t all about the eyeballs. It is how engaged users are with your content. And this is going rather well, actually. The average time spent on the site by users is nearing 5 minutes, which, for an educational site, is a small feat.
If you can rely on Alexa.com stats, the audience of Tutorialzine is primarily men between 18 to 34, which is consistent with the IT industry as a whole. This, as strange as it may sound, means that talking about jQuery will not get you to meet many women.
The readership of the site is also slowly increasing. We recently passed 5,000 readers across all our feeds, and 2,000 twitter followers. A big thanks to each and every one of you!
The question
Some people often ask me “Everything sounds nice, but do you make any money out of it?”. And my reply is always the same: “Not yet, but I am trying mom and dad!”.
Joke aside, the greater things in life like love, friendship and kindness do not actually pay your bills. And facing the risk of having to find a real job, some advertising might eventually find its way into the site.
An advice I would give to those of you just starting out with their own blogs (especially in the design niche) is to concentrate on their site and their content alone. Be prepared to invest some months in creating posts, answering readers’ questions and learning new material without desperately looking to fill up your ad spots. Everything with its time.
Love from Pixel2Life
The future
Some of you might have noticed the ZineScripts banners that have been running on the site. This is a project that I’ve been working on in the last couple of months. It puts into code what I love about web development – creating innovative and practical applications, dedicated to one purpose only – making users happy.
Needless to say, a big giveaway is going to take place once ZineScripts is opened. Till then, be sure to subscribe for the launch to get a 50% discount on all the scripts.
I also have a number of fresh ideas about Tutorialzine (including a redesign) but these will have to wait for another post. Till then, happy learning!
24 Comments
Congratulation, Martin! Continue your great work and provide us more beautiful code as you are doing. TutorialZine is now has a nice rank on Alexa, that's awesome! I'm always glad to support for such awesome content like yours. Cheer!
Congratulations Martin. Keep up the great work. Your tutorials are amazing, and I'm really amazed at your bounce rate, 30% for a site like this is really great.
Hope to see more awesome things from you in the future.
Congrats. Keep doing it on same level standards.
Congratulation!, Your tutorials very helpful for me. Keep up the great work for great content.
Congo Keep marching and keep rocking
Martin - your work is top notch. I refer many friends and colleagues to your page for design ideas. As a fellow programmer/developer I frequent your site for ways to improve user experience. Your tutorials are well constructed and the content is quite relevant to what many customers are asking for. I look forward to www.zinescripts.com as I'm sure it will prove as useful as this site has.
Cheers,
Ryan
Your site is really a great one!
I´m starting my own small internet site, and hopefully I´ll be making cash somaday soon, to buy cool code from your ZineScript project, untill then: Thnx for the the free tuts!
Keep up the good work, and you will be rewarded!
B
Wow :D Good luck with everything, I friggen love this site.
Congratulations!
Keep up
Congratz!!
I am addicted to this website man. Can´t sleep without checking this website at least once a day. lol :-)
Great work you´ve done so far and I hope you continue!! God Bless!!
Cheers!!
A German Addict ^^
Congratz on getting six months. It is an impressive feat. It would be nice if you could offer us this theme for a price or free :) since you are planning on a redesign. Thanks and keep the tutorials coming.
dude we have the same age, lol I envy you..
keep it up , :) , you tutorials are top notch , that's all I can say
and congrats
Congratulations mate - you deserve it! The tutorials here are truly innovative and very well written, well done.
Keep up the great work and this blog will grow even more!
Congrats, you're doing a good job !
Congrats, Martin!
Just keep up good work with custom "real world" tutorials ;)
Thanks You
very cool...I agree with Kenan about the "real world" comment. Congrats!
Great work and thanks a lot the for nice tutorials , keep up the good work ...
keep spirit...
go ahead...:-bd
Good job :) you people are doing good keep rocking :)
Congratulations dude, your content is always well thought out and always come back to real applications. And a thank you!
Congratulation : Keep it in high level.
G luck.
Congrats, keep up the good work fellows
Thank you for re-reminding me why i love web development...
I just found your site last month as i was learning more about JQuery. i just want to thank - and praise you & your work, as I find your mission (user happiness) and general open, giving, fun attitude inspiring.
Dude - your in this ART FORM for the right reasons - and at only 21, I think it's pretty safe to say - your parents won't even remember asking you about the $$ aspect (which I relate to) 5 years from now when you'll be among the rare class of developers who managed to achieve amazing success while following their heart, and dreams.
Keep it up man - Many thanx, and all the best!
Congratulations! This is a great site/resource for those of us wanting to learn the tricks of the trade.
I know a lot of bloggers try to stay away from advertising, and I understand that, but to bring in that little income to help improve or increase the quality of the resources you should def check out buysellads, even if you just have one ad, it might make life a little easer.
I do have one request.... You should have a suggest thread, I am not saying you are going to run out of ideas, but if your readers get a chance to suggest subjects and topics, well you get to know what they are after and they get the solutions they are after?
Great site, I have learnt so much already and look forward to learning more!