Happy 2010!

Hope the new year is treating everyone well!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting very sporadically over the last year. It’s entirely possible, though I haven’t counted, that I had more guest posts in 2009 than posts by me!

The good news is, nothing bad happened to me. 2009 was perhaps the busiest year I have ever experienced, and I put in motion several major projects that are just starting to take off now. Among other things, I accepted a position as a regular contributor at Outright Entrepreneur, writing about issues related to freelancing. Outright Entrepreneur is a project of Outright.com, the online bookkeeping system I’ve written about on this blog (Take Charge of Quarterly Estimated Tax Payments with Outright). The marketing director there saw my post here (and another at FreelanceSwitch) and after a short correspondence asked me to write for them. There’s a lesson there for anyone who’s wondering why freelancers should blog…

In addition to starting my new gig with Outright Entrepreneur, I also pitched, built, and launched an ebook publishing platform at Stepcase Lifehack. I wrote the first ebook, Back to Basics Productivity, based on a popular series of posts I’d written the year before on personal productivity. I also edited the second ebook (forthcoming this month), and solicited contributions for the third. I’m wearing just about all the hats – managing editor, marketing director, acquisitions editor, copy editor, layout and production – so you know it’s keeping me busy.

And so on – life happens.

The better news is, I haven’t abandoned this site. I love The Writer’s Technology Companion – the other stuff is my work, but this is my baby. I can’t keep up the pace I set in the first year of the site’s existence, when I was posting 3 posts a week most weeks, and sometimes 5 or 6. But I’ll try to post on an at least semi-regular basis over the coming months.

Another interesting lesson: Posting here was never all that hard, but a weird thing happens when you get pulled away for a while. The bar raises – not “out there” in the audience, but in your head. The longer I didn’t post, the harder it got to post. I felt… I felt like I owed my audience something special for their patience. And I didn’t have the time for that. Coming back to the site now means I’ve had to really come to terms with the imperfection that a busy schedule imposes. It means posting shorter pieces (and that really goes against my nature…) and posting sporadically and not always making a Grand Statement.

And yet another lesson: Though it’s been over a year since this site was regularly updated, I’ve lost almost no subscribers and, even more surprisingly, very little traffic. I attribute this to a conscious decision made early on to write posts that would come up in Google and other search engines, following the strategy I outlined here. A lot of the content on WTC is “evergreen” – that is, people are constantly searching for help on the topics I cover. And when they do, my content comes up.

And that’s the bottom line: to write what you can and have an audience for what you write. What more could I ask?

See ya soon!