Mashable is a news blog created by Pete Cashmore in 2005 and is now one of the top blogs in the world. His success story can become a lesson for all bloggers who are eager to learn how to make money blogging online. It is one of the blogs I visit to get blog layout ideas and news on new blog improvements. Although his blog is a Wordpress blog and mine is based on Joomla, the thought process behind blogging is the same: content is king, good layout will keep readers from leaving and social media buttons will increase the loyalty of your visitors. Today I thought about looking how Mashable looked like in 2005 when Pete published his first posts and how his Wordpress blog was developed during the last 5 years.

I have just finished uploading the new design of my blog. All seem to have gone smoothly and up to now everything looks normal, fingers crossed. I don't blog a lot lately due to the fact that I was experiencing a couple of issues with my gambling blog and wasn't satisfied with blogging stuff, such as SEO, layout and template tweaks. My blog's template had started to show its age and, since I love perfection, I couldn't bear the thought of adding new articles to a blog that was far from perfect. It was something I was planning to do months ago, but I can't complain looking at the final result. I hope you like it too and feel free to let me know of your opinion and suggestions.

I expect the new blog design to motivate me into writing new and useful posts, keeping it up with the look of the blog. It is true that my latest posts hadn't been up to my standards and it has been months since I can remember publishing a helpful article. On the other hand though, life has speeded up a little lately and I try to complete every little task I want, such as trading online, playing poker, blogging and launching new blogs, like Trading Graphs and the Greek Stoiximaonline.com. In case you missed my news, I got married a month ago so if you are still waiting for a reply to your email, I can find tons of excuses!

I finally found again the motivation to get occupied with my blogs and websites after 1 month of inactivity. One of the immediate actions I had to do is creating my one Facebook Fan Page, as it has been something I planned to do a long time ago. Writing and adding content in various scattered blogs online, I needed a place where I could publish all my posts without thinking the correlation among them. A Facebook fan page was just the thing and additionally it helps promoting the stuff and interacting with the readers much more efficiently.

Being an online gambler for several years but just a rookie blogger, I often wonder whether there is more money to be made in the blogging business than in gambling. I decided to do some calculations and find out if I should blog instead of gamble the last 5 years. The result was extremely promising and I am now considering changing the path of my career! Or maybe not...

For the past 18 months I have been writing articles about betting and gambling for the Betfair Greek Blog. Due to limited budget and the so-called financial crisis they had to end several partnerships, one of which was mine. That didn't come as a surprise actually but was the spark that was needed to get a new betting blog going. My new betting blog, Stoixima Online, is in Greek and will be my new home for the forthcoming betting posts targeting the Greek gambling market.

Well, it's not even 48 hours since I wrote that I was considering creating a new blog for my online trading blog posts, and here I am welcoming my readers to Trading Graphs! The blog will contain only trading related articles, covering stock trading, forex trading and Betfair trading topics, at least in the beginning. I won't be moving or copying any of the trading posts found here, so the content will be original and fresh. The blog is very new and I have done my best in testing it, but if you find a bug, please let me know. So, welcome to my new blog and hope to see you there if you are interested in online trading!

Posting your winnings or losses in your blog won't increase visits. Usually a gambling blog includes the gambler's trading or betting tips and their results. Winnings tend to be more often posted than big losses, proving that the gambling blog's owner is a winner in online gambling. Do readers care though for your performance or should you not publish your P&L? I believe your blog's traffic would increase if you posted something for useful for the casual gambler than brag about your profits.

Blogging is fun, but what about live broadcasting of sports trading, betting or online poker videos? Live streaming of me trading, betting or playing online poker fascinates me but what about my gambling blog's readers? Would they be interested in joining and viewing such a live broadcast if it was available? After all, I should not bother at all unless someone is watching. So, here is your chance to let me know if you would watch that kind of a live event.

How was my gambling blog's traffic in 2009? According to Google Analytics my gambling blog was visited more than 71,000 times, each visitor viewed 2.71 pages, they usually stayed for less than 4 minutes and more than half of the visitors came from search engines! My blog's average bounce rate was about 60% and 62% of the blog's traffic were new visitors. Here are the traffic statistics of my trading, betting and poker blog for 2009.

Placing banners and selling text ad links to monetize your gambling blog comes down to attractive advertising rates. Very often I get asked by other bloggers how much to charge for an advertisement and it was something I was trying to figure out a couple years ago. Even after a thorough search there is not a real and useful answer written anywhere. Advertising rates do seem to fluctuate and depend on the blog's niche and supply and demand. So, how did I do last year?