CT Biz Blogs

How time flies, as they say. CTBizBlogs is one year old today, August 13th.

When I started, I’d already been blogging sporadically in other blogs, hosted by Blogger, for over a year. But I was ready for more control and more options. So I plunked down some money, bought a few domains, got a web hosting provider and started posting.

I picked WordPress for 2 reasons — it was free, and my hosting provider, Dreamhost, offered a one-click installation.

Since then I’ve learned a lot about WordPress, web hosting, and blog writing.

When I started, I was full of pent-up posts, so it was pretty easy to pick any topic on blogging and just start typing. Sometimes that resulted in a good post, sometimes not.

Also when I started, my day job was in the doldrums, and I had not much outlet for my creative energy. Be careful what you wish for there — now I have more ideas and projects than time. That’s why I’m still using the older version of the Journalized template.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned over the last year:

• I work better when I have a challenge than when I have no deadline or particular goal. I had quite a creative whirl during the 20 blog types marathon.
• Bloggers do look at stats — sometimes I remembered to use the trackback feature, sometimes I didn’t. But whenever I linked to a blog or to a post on a blog, I always clicked that link myself, from my own post, to make sure I didn’t mess up the web address. I’m sure that’s how several bloggers found out I was writing about them — in their stats, they saw a link from my post.
• Enthusiasm and pent-up creativity looking for an outlet will get you started, but it won’t keep you going. That takes planning, thinking, and just plain writing when you don’t always feel like writing.
• An RSS reader is key! You have to read blogs if you want to blog — I read all sorts of blogs — business, marketing, technical, financial, blogging, political, and just plain for fun. Bloggers are all over the map, and it’s good to know what’s going on, what people are doing, trying, and writing about. And you can’t track blogs effectively without an RSS reader of some sort. My most popular posts were about RSS (thanks to Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion nod).
• Stats don’t tell you the whole picture. My post about Judy’s Book continues to get read, but when I compare the numbers to my Spam Karma results, I see that 90% of the comment spam I get is on that post. So don’t take those stat numbers as gospel. Spammers are clicking your links, too!
• Google still loves us bloggers. I am always amazed when I see this blog listed on the first page for a whole range of search terms.
• Blogging means meeting great people both face-to-face and virtually, such as Valorie Luther, Liz Strauss, Antonella Pavese, Molly Lavik, Janice Myint at Technorati, J.D.Iles, Heather Platt, and Andrew Ewalt.

I’m happy I’m still here blogging, and I hope to continue for years to come.