Happy Birthday

This is going to be another decidedly self-centred and introspective entry – but I make no apology for that, because this blog is now one year old tomorrow.

That’s right, a year ago, Old Mother Blogger reluctantly opened her pock-marked, cellulite-riddled legs and, after screaming blue murder, out slid "A Football Trader’s Path", all covered in verbal diarrhea, a bloody wash of unrealised ideas and urine-stained trading thoughts. Thus this blog was born.

Yes. It may be that you consider this blog to be the after-birth of all blogs out there in the world today but, as ugly as this one is, I’ve slowly grown to love her. And it's her birthday.

So, let’s get down to the introspection then shall we? Laughably, one of my most popular posts remains Guaranteed Winning Betfair Strategies. When I think of some of the other posts that I’ve put out which - even if I say so myself - have contained some decent analysis of football-related matters and data, it does make me shake my head to see how continually gullible and downright lazy people are. Everyone wants the “secrets” of trading all handed to them on a plate, so they won’t bother reading-up on decent material, they won’t bother putting in the hours, days, weeks, months and years of practice in to learn how to trade. Oh no. Instead, let’s just Google winning strategies and see if some nutter is going to give away all their secrets. I initially put the post up as a joke just to see if the title would attract more visitors for that week – but the joke is on me now as it sits comfortably in fouth place of most read pages.

Easily beating this, however, is my Correct Score Overview, which even now attracts a continually large number of views each and every week. Personally, I don't think I have put up anything groundbreaking or new with this post, but I suppose it’s a decent source to get a group of strategies all in one place. Second place goes to the Poisson for Dummies post, which ties-in nicely with a lot of my other posts on ratings.

Okay, well this is a birthday celebration so I’m going to rejoice in my numbers now. I think I mentioned a few posts back that, when I first started this blog up there were virtually no readers, and it’s taken me a while to build-up a reasonable level of visitors. Now, however, on the blog’s first birthday, I’m closing-in on 70,000 visitors and am currently getting between 9,500 and 10,000 visitors each and month. Considering that betting/trading is something of a niche market, and also taking into account that there are already some other very good and well-established betting blogs out there, then I don’t think I’ve done too badly really.

I’ve crossed swords with a few of the other bloggers too – although I like to think this was kept at gentle ribbing stage and no more. All the blogs that I may have criticised or directed jibes towards are all good contributors to the blogging/betting community, and I hope they continue and go from strength to strength.

As has been mentioned on several occasions by several bloggers (and it’s true), maintaining a blog and coming up with interesting and entertaining material on a regular basis is no easy task, so my hat goes off to those who have managed to keep their blogs going and making them so good to read. My blogroll of honour is up on the right side, and you can pick any one of them and get something of value out of them.

So, thank you for allowing me to be so self-indulgent in this post (actually you had no choice in the matter), and wish me all the best for the good ship Trader’s Path in the future. Oh, and thanks for reading.