In Retrospect

I began blogging almost one year ago, shortly after Christmas. When I began blogging, it was a creative outlet for me and a way to vent some of my frustration with my then current employment (or lack thereof) status. I had not expectations with blogging as I had no experience. I had no idea where it would take me or how long it would last. I also had no idea how much information I would need in order to keep my blog going.

It's certainly easy enough to begin blogging. This blog server (blogger.com)is one of the easiest to use. That, for me, was never the challenge. The challenge comes with improving my knowledge about increasing the popularity of my blog. Increasing traffic isn't that difficult either. At some point during my blog education, I hooked up with a few blog surfing sites, one of which I frequent on a regular basis. Although blog surfing will increase traffic to your blog, while you surf other blog sites, the quality of the traffic isn't always the best since other bloggers are surfing to earn extra credit so others will read their blogs. It's a catch-22 situation sometimes, but in all fairness, I have also garnered some regular readers from that traffic. It's kind of like speed dating inasmuch as you have to go through a lot of blogs in order to find quality writing enough to want to make you come back for more. I hope I have achieved at least that much interest with my writing style and with the information that I share with you.

So if earning more traffic isn't the answer, then what is? The bottom line is page rank. In fact each page of your blog has it's own rank determined by how many times reader go to that page or post. If you have a site meter on your blog you can check the page rank of each page. By monitoring this I can determine which subjects are of more interest to my readers.

It goes without saying that getting your blog "out there" can not only increase traffic and page rank. Have you signed up with any blog directories yet? Do you belong to a blog ring or blogging community? Have you exchanged links and left comments on other blogs to increase the popularity of your own blog? These are all the things that bloggers need to thing about in order to increase both traffic and page rank.

What I have learned over the past year is that blogging is an ongoing education in and of itself. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not offered as a college course in the future. Thankfully, there are lots of wonderful and generous, experienced bloggers who have helped me along the way. I hope I have done the same for some of you.

Thanks to Link and Blog for the writing challenge.