I left a very brief comment on Kiesha’s post What’s Your Blogging Story and its had me thinking since then about how my blogging started and has developed over the years.

Let me tell you straight up, I’ve made a ton of mistakes since I started blogging.  Some out of inexperience, some out of ignorance, and some out of excitedly following some brand new idea without stopping to think about it first.

Back In My Day…

If you wanted to get technical about it you could say I’ve been blogging since 1999 when I had a little HTML website on some free hosting from my dialup ISP.  I would edit the HTML files to put my latest little “post” at the top of the home page.  I would scan in my latest photos that I’d picked up from the photo lab and embed them in the page, probably using Frontpage 98 or something equally as vintage.  I would even manually shift older content off to secondary pages, and set up my own archive pages as well.  If CMS’es existed back then I sure didn’t know about them.  I think that website lasted about 6 months before I stopped updating it, but I remember it was still there a few years later when I checked on it.

Fast forward to 2006 and I was devoting a lot of time to a few forums, and decided I wanted my own website again.  At the time Australian web hosts were giving away free hosting accounts as a marketing technique and they also ran regular domain name giveaways.  In one of these giveaways I won my very first domain name, so I signed up for a free hosting account and set about building a tech website on the ridiculous domain name capslockassassin.com.

Focus?  What’s That?

My efforts on capslockassassin.com could not have been less focussed.  I spent more time messing about with different CMS’es and designs than writing content.  I eventually settled on Mamboserver and wrote a mix of short blog posts and big long articles.  The content was vaguely IT related but covered everything from home PC tips to enterprise IT issues.  I had no web analytics installed and probably didn’t have comments enabled so I had no idea if anyone was even visiting the site.

After that rocky start I shifted the site to WordPress 2.0 at the start of 2007 and started blogging more about my day job in IT, which in itself covered a fairly broad set of topics.  I think by the end of the year I’d built up to about 1500 monthly visitors and earned less than $2 in Adsense revenue, but by that stage I knew I was hooked on blogging.

Getting Serious

In 2008 I threw myself into blogging and wrote more blog post and by the end of the year was averaging closer to 5000 monthly visitors.  At this stage I still had no idea about blog promotion, community, SEO, or any of the other things that we do these days to build traffic to our blogs.  I just blogged away in isolation and let the traffic dribble in.

However, as I did my usual end of year roundup post I realised that some of my blog posts were doing quite well in the Google results.  I was also beginning to find a more focussed niche within tech/IT and was blogging mainly about one particular topic.

During 2008 I also found myself talking to other bloggers more and helping them start their own blogs.  I quickly realised there might be something to that and so I started a second blog on the hastily chosen cranefactory.com domain name.  I wrote about WordPress and a few other things and started using Twitter.

The new blog started to get a little bit of traction and then had a big boost when I released my Twitter and WordPress Integration Guide.  In my excitement, and because I wasn’t familiar at the time with the concept of building an email list, I gave it away for free with no signup requirement.

I launched a short lived blog about Twitter applications, making some critical errors such as choosing a domain name that included a trademarked term and not doing any competitive research.  I lost interest pretty quickly and let that blog go dead until I eventually deleted it from my web hosting.

As I started to look at ways to improve my blogs I came across more and more premium products such as plugins, themes and ebooks, and thought about ways to make more money so I could afford them.  The answer came in an ad on the Problogger job board and I took my first freelance blogging job.

The Tipping Point

I spent the Xmas/New Year break for 2008/09 getting more familiar with tools like Twitter and developing ideas to take my online business to the next level.  2009 started as a very busy year, both professionally and personally.  We were building a new house at the time and also expecting our second child.  In those first few months things went from busy to hectic, and then to just plain crazy.  Aside from my blogs I was also servicing several clients and had also added another blog to my freelance commitments.

We’d barely settled into the new house when my daughter was born in May 2009 and my world turned upside down.  What little time I had for blogging and working on my business disappeared instantly.  I stopped offering blog development services, put one blog on hiatus, and kept the other going only as time permitted.

As the months passed I started to see signs of relief on the parenthood front and began thinking about my blogs again.  The time away had been good and I’d come up with a lot of ideas about content and products to try and get the blogs to the next level of success.  I took a hard look at how I was spending my time and cut out just about all television and other non-productive habits.  I bought a netbook and started writing on the train to and from work.

I relaunched my tech blog as ExchangeServerPro.com and then relaunched this blog as BloggingTeacher.com, both blogs now having a clearer focus and more defined niche, as well as a monetization roadmap for me to follow.

Not everything went to plan.  I caught swine flu at one stage and then a few weeks later the company I worked for went bankrupt and we all lost our jobs.  Those were both big distractions that tripped up my progress for weeks at a time, but I tried to regain balance quickly and keep moving forward.

Is 2010 The Year?

At the start of this year my wife and I sat down and I explained my plans for the year.  I showed her my two blogs and drew out a diagram for how I expect them each to develop into products that I can sell.  We agreed on a series of acceptable sacrifices and made sure that the important stuff like family still comes first.

To call 2010 a “make or break” year might be a bit of an exaggeration.  I would definitely say that I expect to build upon my previous successes, and improve my business to the point that it is delivering a meaningful benefit to my family.  Back when I started all of this I was probably thinking about the money I could make.  I still am, but I’m thinking more about how it can help pay for our kids school fees or get rid of the mortgage a few years sooner.

So thats my blogging story.  Thanks again to Kiesha for getting me thinking about how far I’ve come, and how far I’m yet to go.

What about you?  Do you have a blogging story to share?

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Blogging