We’re well into April now and for those of you who might not remember that far back, this month marks FreelanceSwitch’s 1 year anniversary. Yep that’s right, it’s our birthday! Seems like only yesterday that Cyan and I thought to write a blog on freelancing, but to be sure it’s been a good 12 months. A little later this week Skellie’s got an awesome celebratory competition for you, but today I thought I’d wrap up a few of the highlights of the year that was:

1. April 2007, FreelanceSwitch launches and is very warmly received. A month later and the blog has well over 3000 readers. At the time being blogging newbies we were shocked and excited by the awesome growth. The original design was my very first Wordpress theme that I’d built from scratch. You can see a screenshot of that old beast here.
2. May 2007, The rather strange, and now defunct, BikiniZero (tech news read by women in bikini’s) mentions FreelanceSwitch much to everyone in the office’s delight.
3. June 2007, Back in the early days one of our writers was Leo Babauta of the now phenomonally popular ZenHabits. In June he wrote up one of his trademark super popular posts, about how you can make laziness work for you.
4. July 2007, We launch the second of our resources - the subsite Not By The Hour - that documents lots of ways for freelancers to make passive income to supplement their regular work. Part of our commitment to helping freelancers in whatever way we can.
5. August 2007, The Freelanceswitch Forums are launched and readers take to the new Vanilla powered discussion boards like ducks to water. Months later there are almost 2000 threads about just about everything you could imagine.
6. September 2007, Ivan Brezak Brkan (who has been promising me for more than a year now that he’s going to launch a blog) writes our most popular article ever - 35 Absolutely Essential Mac Apps - still receives tons of traffic months later
7. October 2007, the FSw team (Cyan, me & Leo) take a lead role in organising the hugely successful nonprofit initiative Blog Action Day
8. November 2007, FreelanceRadio our official podcast hits it’s sixth episode. Thanks to the hugely talented John Brougher and his team of indomitable freelancers, the podcast goes on to win Best Blog Podcast of 2007.
9. December 2007, Uber artist NC Winters publishes a special Christmas edition of his long running FSw strip Freelance Freedom … He’s almost hit his 50th strip now.
10. January 2008, How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer hits the (virtual) shelves after months of writing and sells like hotcakes. In related news, we’re now close to releasing the second edition, and have found a publisher to take it to bookstores!
11. February 2008, FreelanceSwitch gets an awesome new editor when Skellie joins the team and she’s been doing a fantastic job if I may say!
12. March 2008, Social Media jedi master Muhammad Saleem starts his epic 10 post series on social media essentials - the longest we’ve ever run.

Some Stats!

And of course there have been lots of other highlights - we launched a job board, a rates calculator, a client analyser, there was the time we posted about a design competition and the time I thought we should sell templates via the site. We’ve had 50 spectacularly talented freelancers give their writing time and skills and from their contributions we’ve compiled some amazing statistics, just look at these:

• We’ve had 3 million visits over the last year. 3 MILLION, that is a lot of visits Not to mention the 6.5 million pageviews!
• We’ve had 500 posts to which 13,000 comments have been added (and a good 80,000 spam comments, thank you akismet, without your spam catching ways we’d be lost)

And of those visitors:

• 65% have been using Firefox, 12% Safari, 10% IE7 and only 8% IE6 - which is good because I’ve left numerous IE6 bugs in the code!
• 70% have been on Windows, 27% mac, 3% Linux, .1% iPhone Heck there were even 150 people who visited from their Nintendo Wii’s!
• And of course the visitors came from all over the world, in varying numbers. From the 1.7 million US visits to the 250,000 Brits to the 15,000 Croats down to the littler countries - 1,000 Maltese visitors, 500 Paraguayan visitors, and 1 guy (or gal) in Turkmenistan

Long Live Freelancing!

So from all of us here at FreelanceSwitch, we hope you enjoyed the blog this last year. I’m sure the next year is going to be even better! Thanks to all the readers who’ve commented, participated, linked and bookmarked the site.

I hope that the site has helped freelancers everywhere get that little bit better at what they do. Heck even if it’s just our one Turkmenistani freelancer who gets something out of the site, then it was worth it!

Long live freelancing!!!