Can you believe it, folks? One year ago today TNAStars.com was officially opened up to the public and, lo and behold, we made it an entire year! I’ve been at this internet wrestling game since April 1996 and I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun owning and operating a wrestling website as I’ve had in the last twelve months. Honestly. The first year of operating this site has been wonderful for a variety of reasons from the expansion and growth of TNAStars.com’s audience to the ability for this website to provide truth and fairness in an internet wrestling scene filled with lies, assumptions, and innuendo. Here is a brief list of the first twelve months of TNAStars.com.
Major Accomplishments
Growth of the Mailing List: You folks are constantly barraged by my incessant posts on the website about joining the Mailing List. Well, my harassing seems to have paid off as we ended 2010 with just shy of 300 subscribers to the Mailing List. In an internet age where we’re bombarded by Web 2.0 and social media, it’s very hard to get people to sign-up for e-mail based mailing lists any more. However, I’m so proud that we were able to generate nearly 300 subscribers to the TNAStars.com Mailing List. Be on the lookout for more giveaways, by the way!
Working with The Product: One of the highlights of 2010 for me was working with the great guys over at The Product. For those of you that may not remember, The Product debuted the theme song for TNA Wrestling’s Final Resolution pay-per-view right here on TNAStars.com. In fact, you can read a special message from the band to the readers of TNAStars.com right here! My dealings with The Product were nothing less than professional and a lot of fun – I wish them the best in their soon-to-be explosive careers in the alternative rock universe!
Putting Together a Top Tier Staff: As you’ll read below, one of the greatest accomplishments for TNAStars.com over the last twelve months was assembling a staff that is, I believe, the best on the internet. You can read some more thoughts on the staff members below, but this really is one of the best teams that I’ve ever worked with online.
Listed as Other Websites’ TNA News Feed: In terms of building the site’s brand power and long-term sustainability, I was very pleased to become the TNA news feed for a variety of websites. Currently, we’re listed as the TNA news feed for:
– eWrestling.org
– bugbytesWallArts.wordpress.com
– XHeadlines.com
– TBLWrestling.com
– JerseySmarts.com
And sure, while I own a few of those websites that doesn’t diminish the fact that TNAStars.com is becoming a go-to source for the best news, results, and opinions on TNA Wrestling. In fact, the owner of bugbytesWallArts sent me the following note about TNAStars.com’s news: “It’s always refreshing to hear reliable news about TNA stuff than to read on a bias site that weaves more rumors rather than facts. With TNA Stars i know that it’s reliable and the owner puts truthfulness and accuracy first before anything else.” You got that right. Thanks! Hey, if you’ve got a professional wrestling website and would like to feed TNAStars.com’s news to your readers, let me know!
Statistical Performance
Biggest Day of the Year: We opened up our online doors on January 2, 2010 and had a whopping 2 visitors that day. After some hard work and the creation of a dedicated set of contributors, we made it to October 11, 2010 – the day after Bound for Glory and the day of the year where we had the most hits in the site’s short history. We went from 2 hits on January 2nd to 8,487 hits on October 11th. Not too bad for a site that was less than a year old!
Year-End Statistics: And while we hit our single-day visitor record on October 11th, our story throughout the entire year is even better. We had a total of some 8,395 hits throughout the entire month of January 2010 which ballooned to 44,791 hits in December 2010. Better yet, during all of the Bound for Glory and JWoww frenzy a few months ago, we had 75,247 hits in October 2010. In total for 2010, TNAStars.com generated 395,963 hits. That’s phenomenal for such a young website!
Individuals to Thank
There are always a lot of people to thank when you put together a professional wrestling website so if I forget anyone it’s not out of spite. I’d like to begin these thanks with the former webmaster of TBLWrestling.com – Eddie T. Eddie has been engaged in my crazy internet pursuits for the better part of the last ten years and I’m thankful for his friendship. With respect to TNAStars.com, I’m thankful for the open ears and eyes he lent to me while I was designing the site. Thanks, Eddie!
Whenever you start an enterprise like TNAStars.com, you have to get the right people on the bus to help you out. I put out a call for columnists and received some great applications. However, I was very pleased to have both Adam Smerecki and Chad Roberts join the team early on. And while both Adam and Chad are no longer writing at TNAStars.com, their impact on the site (no pun intended) was strong enough to help us grow during the early months. Thanks guys!
The other opinion writer that was brought on board early on was Dillon Avery. Dillon has been an exceptional contributor to TNAStars.com between writing his occasional opinion column, adding a few news items from time to time, and promoting the website out there on the interwebs. Dillon and I had a great e-mail conversation some months about some a few new features that we’d like to bring to TNAStars.com, so stay tuned to see what we’re cooking up! Thanks, Dillon!
Aside from opinion columns, there are two core functions that every professional wrestling website must bring to the audience. They are quality news stories and event results. I’ll write it now like I’ve written it before – TNAStars.com has the best iMPACT! reporter on the internet with Jarrett Cox. Each Friday morning I look forward to reading through his iMPACT! results to not only get another person’s perspective on the show, but to get some of Jarrett’s opinions mixed in and clearly delineated from the results. Jarrett’s weekly iMPACT! results is one of the features that makes this site great. Thanks, Jarrett!
The other core function of a professional wrestling website is to bring the audience quality news stories. William B. West and I go back a number of years when he was a contributor at TBLWrestling.com and I was very glad to have him volunteer to help out at TNAStars.com. William brings a clarity to the news and rumors which routinely swarm around the internet that you just don’t find on many other websites. The ability for William to read some news reports and separate fact from assumption is what makes his reporting great and helps to set this website apart from its peers. Thanks, William!
But most of all, the entire group of contributors at TNAStars.com and I thank you – the readers of this website! Your constant interactions via the built-in comment system and your e-mails make running this website fun. We’re glad that you like what we’re doing here and we hope that you continue to stick around in 2011 because we’re just getting started!
On a final note, I never write these types of columns so don’t expect to see one of these every year. However, I thought the impact (there’s that pun again…) that TNAStars.com made in the internet wrestling world was worthy of this column. Thank you all for visiting and please enjoy all that TNAStars.com has to offer!
– Joe
joe1897 [at] gmail [dot] com
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Nice, feel good read 🙂 Keep up the good work, im a regular visitor to the site and its a great site.
Thanks for the comment, Nay. I’m glad that you’re a regular visitor to the site – enjoy!
Joe thanks for the compliments. As you mentioned earlier we go back a number of years (2002 I believe). My web partner and I modeled our site at that time(WrestlingScene.com) after TBL. No pop-up ads, no over ad saturation, honest reporting, and no blind links to crap and we had a fairly successful run.
It was nice to see you kept the integrity over the years that you started with and I was more than thrilled to join in on the fun here. You’ve got a great group going with what appears to be zero egos. I think your site will continue to grow and in my opinion is the greatest site on the net to get TNA news and opinion.
A lot of people think running a website is zero work after you put it up by I know that is not the case, the more it grows the more you work. So I want to give a big thank you from myself and the other TNA fans that read your site every month. Here’s to 100,000 hit’s a month in 2011!
No problem, William. I appreciate all of your contributions at TNAStars.com. I didn’t realize that you modeled WrestlingScene.com after TBL, but that’s high praise – thanks!
I couldn’t agree more about the group assembled here. It’s like I said in the opening paragraph – I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun running a website as I’ve had in the last year with TNAStars.com!
Onward and upward!