Blogging About Blogging

In the 3+ years I’ve been blogging, I’ve written over 500 posts. If I had more free time, I would have enjoyed writing even more. I didn’t quite realize the volume of my writing until I printed out all my Japan-related posts from January through July (for my 94 year old grandfather to read) and it came out to a 2 inch stack of paper.

Back in May, I looked up toppa.com on Alexa and was astonished to see I was coming out ahead of the Japan Visitor Blog in the traffic rankings. It’s a great site, updated daily by regular contributors from all over Japan. Since then I’ve dropped precipitously on Alexa. At first I figured this was probably because my posts have become much less frequent recently, and with a less consistent focus on Japan. But after looking at my own weblogs, I can’t make sense of it, because my reports show a dramatic increase in traffic during July (up about 30% from June). That riddle aside, my traffic typically goes up by a few thousands visits every month. I now have roughly three times the traffic I had a year ago. And all that has happened with very little self-promotion and no search engine optimization (the only thing I’ve done is to start using Technorati tags).

I forget in what grade I read Oliver Twist, and I don’t remember most of the story, but there’s one passage that’s stuck with me over the years. This is from chapter 3:

It was the critical moment of Oliver’s fate. If the inkstand had been where the old gentleman thought it was, he would have dipped his pen into it, and signed the indentures, and Oliver would have been straightway hurried off. But, as it chanced to be immediately under his nose, it followed, as a matter of course, that he looked all over his desk for it, without finding it…

In my case, what I’ve failed to notice all these years, right under my nose, is the value of my blog. I’ve poured a great deal of energy into it, simply because I enjoy doing it. Only now has it occurred to me that I could actually get some compensation for all that effort. So I’ve finally joined the rest of the internet world by putting Google Ads on my site. We’ll see what comes of it.

I intend to make some time for revamping my site. It’s in need of a new, cleaner look, and given the depth of content, better navigation options. That, in addition to the Picasa plugin I’m working on, probably means I’ll continue to be short on time for writing posts. It’s a short term loss for a long term gain . I’ll still be posting, but probably only once or twice a week for the next month or two.

According to my weblogs, my most popular posts are the ones I write on programming techniques. That surprised me, considering the rather small number of such posts I’ve written. It’s a topic I haven’t pursued often because it seemed to me that it already had saturation coverage on other sites. But apparently there’s more than enough demand, so I may start writing more in that area. Stay tuned…

[tags]AdSense, Alexa, Oliver Twist[/tags]