I started blogging on September 4th of last year.

I had an internet presence prior to that (content that received several Slashdot mentions, along with a half-decent number of inbound links), but I didn't put up content with the regularity of a blog -- largely as a function of the hassle involved -- and I didn't have RSS, Atom, or any other feed technology (and thus wasn't aggregated into other feeds).

It was just a random hodge-podge of random pages prior to putting it into the structured form you see today.

All-in-all the past year has been a very, very rewarding experience: A very credible number of people visit, and from a search-engine perspective the results have been extraordinarily successful. Strange seeing several dozen people a day from my hometown coming by just because I happened to mention it in a blog entry.

To quote from a September 4th entry-

The question I am pondering, then, is whether the only way one can remain internet credible (in search engine terms) is to integrate heavily within the blogging community, quid-pro-quoing endless links and trackbacks, ingratiating oneself with other bloggers, posting meaningless comments about every posting every other blogger makes (which they will of course do in turn). It's a sort of super-pyramid scheme, but with no bottom level.

Thankfully I've never had to quid-pro-quo or ingratiate to maintain PageRank. In fact I think I've maintained a fairly antagonistic approach to many of the popular blogs and bloggers, and I've seldom resorted to inventing "material" out of mentioning other blogs.

Which brings up an interesting topic - I was chatting with a peer about blogging and the effort/reward ratio, and they asked if I felt that I had "succeeded" in this venture: Sure, they pondered, I'd gotten a lot of mentions, along with a couple of heavily visited pages, but overall I still sit quite low on the list of bloggers. My Alexa rankings stink (though I should mention that Alexa rankings are laughably useless outside of the top internet sites. Alexa ratings are culled from users utilizing the Alexa or A9 toolbars, which is a vanishingly small number of users, clustered into certain demographics. Just a couple of users occasionally visiting with the toolbar has an absurdly large impact, so if I wanted to shoot up in the rankings, I'd just recommend the toolbar every month. As a case-in-point, at one point I noticed that my Alexa ranking had jumped considerably, but became suspicious that a disproportionate number of visitors visited the webstats page...which of course only I visit. I realized it was me that was inadvertently impacting the rankings when I had installed the A9 toolbar, so I removed it), and I'm not even among the top 1000 bloggers (by one metric I'm #5,269).

I have something like 118 bloglines subscribers, versus say 21,000 for someone like JoelOnSoftware (bloglines is only one of many aggregators, and Joel has far more subscribers overall, but it's a metric that is meaningful in a relative sense).

Yet I am thankful for every single reader, and the success of this blog is worlds beyond what I imagined. More important than quantity is quality, and some of the feedback leads me to believe that a great group of people have decided to drop by every now and then (even though many don't use feed readers, and just added it to their bookmarks for a once-a-month browse. That's the same technique I use for most blogs). Sure, complimenting your readers is a suspect activity, and is often driven by egotism above all else, but I really mean it: I couldn't have asked for a better readership.

And perhaps this will come off as cheap or like sour-grapes (which it most certainly isn't -- I set out expecting an occasionally accidental search visitor, and never anticipated the success this has seen), but there are some pretty easy ways I could have modified the message a bit to build and maintain a much greater blog presence, but that wasn't my goal.

I could...

• Blog more frequently. As it is, with two pre-school children, it's ridiculously difficult finding time to get posts in, but sometimes I just have to get a thought out there so it's a great exercise.
  
• Blog a more consistent message. No thanks. One of the things I love about this is that I can blog about a .NET video codec one day, Wikimedia on Windows the day after, HTML compression the next, SSIS packages the next, and my opinion about work environments after that.
  
  Occasionally I hestitate, wondering "will the people who subscribed after {X} hit the front-page on Reddit really care for this?" -- for instance when putting up navel-gazing entries like this -- but then I realize that's getting caught in the classic trap of limiting oneself to a narrow range of topics. With readers and browsers, people can just hop past things they aren't interested in, and while I'm sad for anyone who unsubscribes or /dev/nulls this blog, that's preferrable to diluting it to a serve-everyone-but-really-noone message.
  
• Blog a more generalist message. I certainly don't mean to be elitist with some of the entries, but it's the nature of the beast that some of them aren't going to entertain or cater to generalists or technical tourists. Compare this to almost all of the top blogs in this space -- apart from a couple of very rare exceptions, most seldom venture outside of the realm of easy, accessible observations and pondering. The "colour of the shed" sort of entries that everyone can add their voice to the chorus with their opinion.
  
• Blog towards retention. This is really achieved by keeping a general, accessible, non-threatening topic going, consistently pounding the same theme, or by creating controversy and debate where none really exist, but it's also built by minimizing the number of outbound links, and maximizing the number of internal links. This has never motivated the way I author posts, and if I lose a small percentage of users with each outbound link as they go off exploring Wikipedia or Seth Godin or anything else, that's something I'm very happy about. Having said that, the number of internal links seems to be increasing on here as of late -- as I've built a larger and larger volume of content, it just seems like I'm a pretty good resource to reference!
  

None of these techniques are secrets, but they're only acceptable modus operandi if your primary goal is, well, blogging. That isn't my primary goal by a long shot, and I have no ambitions of becoming a professional blogger. Instead I'm motived to talk to, and hopefully influence -- and maybe even impress -- intelligent and influential people.

In the coming few months (or more correctly weeks) I have several very, very exciting things that are going to come out, including the most exciting and innovative web idea I've ever had. It's only going to get better.

But I'll never compromise the message, and I'll never let metrics and stats give me misdirected motivation.