In Volume 1 I was pretty new to the blogging game. I’m still new in terms of “hard-time” but over the last half-year more lessons have become apparent.

Here we go (in no particular order):

Good friends can be made - I have talked to countless people since I started this site; some just starting in the blogging world, some established and well-known. All have been great to converse with and a few have become personal friends. Just last week I met up with Paul, from BlogPaul.com, while I was in Florida to discuss some new projects and let our cute kids hang out. I also have plans to visit Chicago before the summer is over to meet another fellow blogger.

Unexpected things can happen in an instant - This site receives a respectable number of hits per day but a few weeks ago things went a little wild. In a 48 hour period jemmille.com received 55,000 hits. When I first noticed the spike in traffic hits were around 10,000 - I was ecstatic but confused. I quickly learned that a post I had written the day before found its way onto the front page of Digg.com. For a while I couldn’t even log into my server. I had to strip down the front page to a bare minimum so the server didn’t overload. The traffic trickled back to normal after about 4 days.

Some posts take on a life of their own - I have written a couple of posts that get about 50 - 100 hits per day via traffic from search engines. They are posts that were written some time ago but the topics seem to be related to popular search terms. Two of the posts focus on the LG Chocolate phone and one is on the popular children’s toy Webkinz. Seeing what posts remain popular over time is very helpful in finding a focus for your blog. To steal (and alter) a line from a great movie, “If you write it, they will come.”

The Law of Diminishing Returns - You would expect that the more effort you put into a project the more returns/progress/rewards you would see. I found this to be false. I was spending so much time and energy on this site and related blogging exploits that I was making myself physically and mentally defunct. I have found that patience and persistence bring a far greater return than spitting out 2-3 mediocre posts per day. I now focus more on picking a topic, researching it fully and then reporting. I find myself at times spending hours - and a couple of times, weeks - on one post. Now I am shooting more for quality (as well as my sanity).

Expect the unexpected - New sites, new ideas and new opportunities for business ventures can all be gained by participating in the Blogsphere. I now run two sites, co-author another and have amassed a small collection of domain names that I might someday develop. I started a company, which is still very small, that incorporates just about everything I have ever wanted to do in my life in terms of computers and computing. I hope in a year or two I can focus all of my energies on the business and be my own boss 100% of the time.

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Filed under: Blogging, Lessons Learned, Tips