Liliputing at 7 months

It’s been almost 7 months since I launched Liliputing. And the site has grown beyond my wildest expectations. According to Google Analytics, Liliputing received well over 300 thousand unique visits in October, and 572 thousand page views.

More importantly, I feel a real sense of community growing around the site. Netbook enthusiasts are contributing to the Liliputing Forums, where I’ve gotten some of my best story ideas from. I receive tips (and corrections) regularly from readers who are just as interested in this stuff as I am. And I see great discussions taking place in the comments, thanks to the excellent Disqus comment system I use.

I already knew there was a community of netbook users out there when I started Liliputing. After all, I’d already been posting to Eee Site for a few months and I was a regular visitor to the EeeUser forums.

But then something funny happened. The netbook market practically exploded. Today almost every single major notebook maker has a netbook on the market. And plenty of companies you’ve never heard of are involved as well. So as much as I’d like to toot my own horn and say that Liliputing is growing due to my efforts alone, the truth is that I was in the right place at the right time. The site is continuing to grow. Every month I see more page views, more RSS subscribers.

And thanks to my advertising partnership with Technorati Media, and some revenue from Google AdSense, Amazon affiliate links, and a few other places, Liliputing is also making up a larger and larger percentage of my income as a freelance writer and journalist.

Anyway, I was reading Duncan Riley’s post about how his new site, The Inquisitr, is doing at 6 months. And I thought I’d share a bit of news about Liliputing. I won’t go into the level of detail that Duncan does. But I will say that our two sites have experienced similar growth over the past two years by taking two very different approaches. Duncan has decided to focus on a variety of topics he’s interested in, including technology, entertainment, and media news. I’ve decided to focus on crafting a blog that covers one area as thoroughly as possible: netbooks and mobile computing. Apparently both approaches can work.

The other major difference between our two sites is that Duncan has a team of writers working for him, so while The Inquisitr is bringing in some money he has yet to turn a profit, or even make enough money to pay himself. While I’ve been fortunate enough to trick, err… convince several excellent writers like Kristin Shoemaker and Lee Mathews to write the occasional post for Liliputing, for the most part I’m the only person running the site. So the question isn’t really whether Liliputing is profitable, but whether the time I invest in the site would be better spent working on something else that could net me more money. So far the answer has almost always been no. And that goes back to the days in April when I was making just a few pennies a day. Because when you write about what you love, it’s… well, it’s still work. But work is a lot more fun.