It's been a good year here at ImAFish, traffic has grown by 20%, we've built a successful Facebook page and added over 50 blog posts. The year has been dominated by travel photography with my four trips abroad (America, Florence, Milan and Amsterdam).

We have said goodbye to our iPodHistory and AutoKnock sites after two successful fourth quarter sales. It's been a hard year in the advertising market as rates have plummeted.

Here are some of the best blog posts of the year:

Five Essentials for any Online News Website (most popular of the year)
My Top 6 Trance Podcasts
My £683.78 Phone Bill!
10 Best Firefox Plugins for Web Developers
All New Switchweb Web Hosting
Blog Money Making in 2009
Selling sites on Flippa.com
Bonfire Night - Weston Park Photos
Shopinsky - Direct Local Marketing
Top 10 Back to School Products

As always many thanks to everyone who has contributed to ImAFish in 2009.

Snowman we built this evening:

The Google Chrome beta for OS X is out and I've been using it for a few hours - here are some of my thoughts:

1. Dislike: Not being able to see the full page title is annoying

In all other browsers the page title is shown on the top bar of the window, this isn't such a problem for sites such as ImAFish where the title doesn't change but for Google Mail for instance the title changes when you have new mail.

2. Like: The speed is awesome

The whole experience in Chrome feels fast, pages load quickly and the interface is snappy. Compared to Firefox this is a huge improvement (scrollbar lag has been driving me crazy recently in FIrefox), the speed seems to be on par with Safari.

3. Dislike: No status bar is annoying

When you mouse over links in other browsers you can see almost the full address of where the link is going in the status bar. However in Chrome you just get a little box appear at the bottom which shows you a truncated version of the link. Again I don't see what Google hope to gain by not showing the whole link.

Above: When putting your mouse over the title of the article only part of the URL is shown.

4. Dislike: Tab Mess

Often at work I will have at least 15 tabs open with various projects on the go - Google Chrome makes it very hard to distinguish between them when you have a lot open.

Adding in lots of tabs doesn't scroll them or add them onto another line - you just get lots of little tabs.

5. Like: Maximum Real Estate for Web Page

By removing titles, the status bar and other parts of the browser it does mean you have the maximum amount of space to see the actual web page, though as I've pointed out this does have its downsides. 

About two months ago I sold my first website on Flippa.com, a site dedicated to buying and selling websites and domains. Launched earlier this year by a team from the internet resources site Sitepoint the marketplace is like Ebay for buying and selling websites.

The site I sold was www.ipodhistory.com, I originally bought the site from the Digital Point Forums about 18months earlier for $180 (£90 at the time), it was my most expensive site I had bought and was a relatively big gamble. Over the following year and a half I invested in search engine optimisation, added new content and grew a community. In this time I tripled the traffic and advertising revenue. 

I listed the site on Flippa and immediately received interest and a number of offers. After around two weeks the site sold for $2000 (£1300). I was paid through PayPal and the transaction went very quickly and smoothly. 

You can list sites on Flippa either with an auction style listing or where people submit private bids for a site. Flippa charge a listing fee with various optional extras (about $28 for my site) plus a final value fee of 5% (with a cap of $498). 

It's sad to see the iPod History site go from my portfolio but I'm more than happy with the return on investment. 

2009 has been a tough year for Bloggers to make money compared to 2008 but there have been opportunities and ad networks have matured to become better accepted by marketers. Gone are the large amounts of money for private ad sales in favor of link exchange agreements and PPC amounts have tumbled.

Here is how some of my sites have fared over the past year for monetization.

Sponsored Reviews

Sponsored reviews have fared well in 2009 with advertisers keen to show their products in a natural way to consumers and search engines. They are often criticized for degrading the quality of a blogs content but I've found a sponsored review mixed in between a number of good quality posts to perform well. Strict new rules for Bloggers in the US may mean some good opportunities for non-US blogs in 2010.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

It's been a rough year for Pay Per Click marketing, the amount made per click in 2009 has plummeted on a number of my sites, hopefully 2010 will see the PPC market performing much better.

Google Adsense - Has been a reliable income throughout the year though relies heavily on people clicking high value ads. Adsense performed well on my iPodHistory site before I sold it however has failed to do well on 12stix or ImAFish.

Clicksor - Has replaced Adsense on a couple of sites where they are not suitable for Adsense or have been banned. The amount per click is fairly poor even compared to Adsense.

Monthly Ads

Monthly ads are where you are paid a set amount per month for an advert though these often base prices on Google Page Rank and Alexa ranking. There are a number of key players:

TNX - Has been a consistent payer throughout the year but relies on paying a small amount for a lot of adverts.

LinkLift - Recently out of beta, LinkLift is one of the newer players but has shown good growth throughout the year.

Linkworth - Advertising revenue has dried up significantly from Linkworth over the past year.

Text-Link-Ads - TLA has paid consistently low amounts all year.

Teliad - Has paid consistently for higher Page Ranked pages.

Private Ad Sales

This time last year there was a lot of money for private ad sales however this has declined significantly. Companies are now turning to link exchange programs rather than paying directly for ads. Even the better paying gambling sites have been cutting back on their advertising budget.

Conclusion

Hopefully we are over the worst in 2009 with the slump in the advertising market. There are plenty of opportunities out there for Blog monetization but Bloggers need to work that extra bit harder to attract the advertisers.

In May 2002 ImAFish setup our forum using the newly released PHPBB2. Seven years later and we decided it was time to for an update to the latest version of PHPBB. In this time there has been close to 40,000 posts spread across 2470 topics.

With the update we get some cool new features including atom feeds, global annoucements, sub forums, birthday alerts, user warnings and new moderating features.

Check it out at: www.imafish.co.uk/forum