June 2006 marks my one month blogging anniversary. I realized that just now, and sat back to reflect on the year. While I originally started blogging in Jan 2002, I stopped for a while. June of 2005 is in fact when I started blogging seriously, with the intent of doing it as a career, as an extension to my regular writing career. But unlike the successful Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, on his one year blogiversary, blogging has not yet become a success for me. So why not?

I actually know the answer to that, and the primary reason is a lack of focus. Instead of focusing on one blog and making it successful, I applied my old print-media writing style and started blogging about multiple topics right up front. It’s just my nature, as I have an interest in many things. But while it may work in print, it’s hard to pull of for blogs, since it’s difficult to post regularly to multiple blogs without wearing yourself down.

The secondary reason is that I focused on topics that are not particularly popular. I know that now. In fact, I’ve often ignored a lot of the technical topics I do know and gone the easy route by writing about topics I could do easily and quickly.

For example, after working in restaurants for the last four years to pay the bills while my writing career got off the ground, I could come up with recipes at the snap of a finger. In fact, early on in my problogging, my cooking blogs (4 archived, one active) initially earned me most of my daily Adsense ad revenue - as little as that was.

However, that’s not the case anymore as I’ve tried rectify my lack of focus by swinging back to technology, which I’ve been told I write about quite well. So I’ve picked more niche topics lately, and that has produced some higher per-ad-click earnings. The problem with niche topics, however, is that even though there are not many competing websites/ weblogs, there also not many readers.

So to rectify that, I’ve started writing more general articles about these new technologies for a website (owned by someone else) that gets high traffic. The result is that several of my articles have been bookmarked simultaneously by multiple social bookmarking sites such as the well-known Digg, but also numerous sites that I had not previously heard of.

The bulk of my first several articles received 300-1000 pageviews each, in a single day. This is something that none of the articles on my own sites have ever achieved - not even in total, over a year’s time.

The downside is that each article’s popularity seems to be short-lived. My intent was to create general articles about new technology, in hopes of creating a new audience. No success to date, but it’s still early yet.

But back to my own weblogs. There are other reasons my websites have not yet become successful, and I’m still learning them. I’ll reveal them when I learn what they are. There are a lot of factors that have to be executed simultaneously, and it’s hard to do when you’re not just writing for multiple sites but managing the analysis of them as well.

On the plus side, however, several positive things have happened. I’m constantly learning how to be an efficient writer - a necessity considering that I’m writing for my own blogs plus six others on request, with a few more possibly to come.

As a result of wriing as much as I do, my blog writing has improved. It’s not the same as writing for print. You are writing for both human readers as well as for the search engines. There are factors such as “organic SEO”, which helps ensure that you rank high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This is an art in itself, and despite having once been the webmaster of one of the very first search engines on the Internet, it’s a whole different game these days. You learn as you go along, make loads of mistakes, and keep trying. If you don’t keep trying, you give up. Which I have no plans to do anytime soon.