Broken Secrets: Phase 2
July 8, 2010 at 5:00 am Chad Upton 10 comments
Today, I want to talk about Broken Secrets — where we’ve been and where we’re going.
I started this site back in November of 2009. The first post was You CAN Use Foil in the Microwave. In fact, if you want to see a list of all the secrets, checkout The Secret Archive.
For those who don’t know, my name is Chad Upton and I’m the creator of Broken Secrets. I’m a 31 year old guy, living in the Midwestern United States. I have a pretty normal day job and I write this site in the evenings, usually after dinner or when my wife Kristen goes to bed.
A lot of people ask me if I make money from Broken Secrets. The answer is a vague, but accurate, “not really.” Technically, the blog generates a small amount of money through amazon referrals (if you buy something) and through kindle subscriptions. Frankly, I’ve spent more on the site than it has brought in, so I think it’s fair to say that I don’t “make” money from the site. Which is fine, I didn’t start the site because I need the money — it’s a hobby.
I don’t believe most people think about the time it takes to research, write, edit and find photos or videos to make a single entry come together. But, most posts take 2-3 hours to create. There are some exceptions, a few posts were created in less than 2 hours and a few took more than 3 hours (especially some of the videos).
Creating content and promoting the blog is a lot of work, but I’ve been lucky. The site quickly gained in popularity. It now gets more visitors each day than it got in the first month of operation.
All of the readers have different tastes and expectations. Some people love the really long, very detailed posts. Others prefer the short, sweet and glossy ones. Therefore, the topics and lengths of posts vary widely. What some readers find useful, others find elementary. What some find informative, others find useless. It all depends on your perspective, and everyone’s is different.
It’s tough to please everybody and that’s OK, the response has still been overwhelming. Up until now, I’ve written every post and delivered one every weekday for the past 9 months (166 posts). That makes for a long workday, every day.
Although the pay is negligible, the rewards are priceless.
Broken Secrets recently won a Webby Award for best personal blog/website. It has been featured by local and national media around the globe. It’s highly ranked in the Amazon Kindle store for blogs and between Facebook, Twitter, Kindle and email, there are thousands of people who subscribe and read daily. Frankly, it has exceeded all of my expectations and passed all of the milestones more quickly than I could have imagined.
The Webby Awards are by far the biggest compliment, they’re like the Oscars of the Internet. They’re the highest award a website can win; I’m honored to have won and had the support of so many of you. At the award ceremony, I got to meet Jimmy Fallon, Buzz Alrdin, Jason Bateman and many other great people.
All of this success means that it’s time to make the site bigger and better. The first step: more high quality content. As I concentrate on more quality content, the site will continue to get updated several times per week, but I may have some other contributors helping out. This will be great, we’ll have some fresh ideas.
I appreciate all your feedback, suggestions and support. You can always contact me by clicking here.
As always, thanks for reading.
Broken Secrets | Chad Upton
Subscribe on: Facebook | Twitter | Kindle
Photo: zagatbuzz (cc)
Entry filed under: Blog News. Tags: broken, contributor, job, secrets, writer.
Broken Secrets 
1.
Nikola Malesevic | July 8, 2010 at 8:13 am
Great work, Chad! Thank you for bringing us all the secrets so far, I surely found many of them very useful!
Greetings from Bosnia and Herzegovina!
2.
George Siotas | July 8, 2010 at 8:58 am
Keep up the good work, Chad! I am reading you from Europe, Greece and I find your articles very interesting. I prefer the short – length articles but that’s just me.
Some of your secrets concern only USA, so may I suggest that you add more secrets with themes from around the world. Thank you again for the information. Bravo!
3.
Valerie | July 8, 2010 at 9:07 am
Good Morning Chad, from suinny Southern Manitoba! I only found out about you from a link thru the Webbie Awards…thanks Webbie!! LOVE your blog..find your ‘info.’ really interesting and wish you all the very best in your future entries! Keep up the excellent work! Cheers, Valerie.
4.
Charyl | July 8, 2010 at 9:53 am
You must really love writing your blog to devote so much time and energy to it. I enjoy reading it each and every day. Some of the entries are information that I already new but most times your information is something that I really had no knowledge of. You continue to blow my mind.
5.
Malina | July 8, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Hi Chad. I always find the most unexpected information on your blog. Love it … Thanks for all your work!
6.
Elbyron | July 8, 2010 at 1:03 pm
I love visiting your site each day to see what new secret you have to share! Too bad you won’t be able to keep up the pace. It’s good that your looking for additional writers, but you should also consider “guest posts”, where someone writes just a single article and submits it to you for review/editing. This would help fill in the gaps and save you the writing and research time.
Also, please don’t post on random days of the week, I’d much rather you had a routine so that I know which days to come and read the new article!
7.
Chad Upton | July 17, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Thanks for the feedback. We’ll see how it goes, but if the schedule changes there are some tools that might help you stay up to date more easily. You can subscribe by email. You could also add the RSS feed to google reader (or some other rss reader). They keep track of the posts you have read and only shows you the ones you haven’t read. Most blogs and news websites provide RSS feeds, this can make it easy to read all your favorite sites in one place.
8.
Koen | July 13, 2010 at 5:18 am
Great blog! I check it weekly and scroll through all you have written, when I see something that interests me I stop to read it and surprisingly every time there is something new and interesting to read. Keep up the good work and thanks, mate.
9.
JasonP | July 16, 2010 at 9:19 am
i love the RSS feeds i receive every day and share quite afew with my colleagues. i look forward to receiving new an interesting entries from your assistants.
10.
minnie | July 17, 2010 at 5:29 am
I was just introduced to your site by vickyandjen.com “What really matters”
Congratulation on your webby award
My favorite saying is “If it’s not broken don’t fix it ” I will be going back into your archives for more great facts