Split out from my first post, here’s a more personal reflection on 2088.
The Bad
My company was troubled with a few trademark cease and desist notices. This forced us to take a good hard look at our own trademarks and exposure therein, hire a good IP/trademark lawyer, and deal with some of the not-so-fun parts of business. Though I must say it has been interesting. I’ll share more on those as things progress.
I finally put a bullet in Bumpzee.com. Or maybe a cryogenic freeze is more appropriate term. I tried to keep it running on auto-pilot while we regroup on that front, but spammers ruined those efforts.
The Good
At MechMedia, we’ve grown from two people to five in the past year, which is in itself an accomplishment.
But more importantly, this team has done a bunch of great work. Here’s the major stuff:
Our bread and butter, Costumzee.com, got an overhaul early last year to be settled in and ready for the 2008 Halloween Season. We saw record traffic, and were even named as one of the top visited websites in October by ComScore.
Retail — apparel sites grew 13 percent to more than 67 million visitors as people searched for Halloween costumes, early holiday deals and the latest seasonal apparel in October. The category was led by BuyCostumes.com, which witnessed a 107-percent increase to 9.5 million visitors. Several other costume-related sites also experienced gains in October, including CostumeSuperCenter.com (up 110 percent to 2.6 million visitors) and Costumzee.com (up 161 percent to 2.1 million visitors).
ShoeHunting.com has been one of our important websites for years. It started out as a price comparison site for shoes, and a pretty darn good one. It never did get much traction in natural search, and while we did very well with paid search, the minimum bid prices rose higher and higher. We converted it to a fashion/celebrity blog while we went back to the drawing board.
After many months of development, we relaunched ShoeHunting.com as a social shopping website. It’s gained the attention of many shoe lovers, bloggers, and online personalities and is finally on its way to big things.
The ShoeHunting redesign brought with it the platform that it was built on. We did that in such a way that we could drop another niche on top and with less and less effort each time, launch some new social shopping communities.
As a result, our next community site was Mompicks.com was just launched a few weeks ago in December.
Mompicks.com is a social site for moms to share their favorite products. If you’re a mom, check it out.
2008 was a great year for MechMedia. We had record revenue and profits. Much thanks to the team behind all these great accomplishments!
On a more personal note, I was honored with a number of award nominations in the Affiliate Marketing community:
- finalist for an Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Marketing Advocate.
- runner up for a Linkshare Golden Links award for Most Vocal Affiliate.
- won the 2008 Exceptional Affiliate award from ShareASale, just a few weeks ago.
- just this week, named a finalist in two categories for the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards (Best Blogger and Affiliate Marketing Legend).
Third time’s a charm as they say.
If not, I understand that Shawn and Missy will be introducing a new award next for 2010. The Susan Lucci “Always a Bridesmaid” Award, for which I’m a shoo-in.
Congrats and good luck to all the finalists.
Last but not least, the Jangros have been blessed with a new son, Jason. He’s going on 5 months now and doing great. Three kids are more than enough. So I think we’ll just focus on getting these guys right in the new year, if you catch my drift.
Happy New Year!
If you missed it, read part 1 of my 2008 review here.
