Strategize and blogging: 9 years later

It's been some time since I've posted and quite some time since I posted with the frequency that I used to post before.

With that having been said, the blog continues to generate pageviews of over 400 per day with an active subscriber base of over a couple of thousand -- most of the daily traffic is driven by search engines due to my lack of posting.

When I first started blogging it was more for myself and the interactions and subscribers happened because I wasn't trying all that hard to garner traffic.  Then I experimented with things like book reviews and posting tips and tricks and it yielded more traffic to the point that I became obsessed with the metrics; for a while there I even tried advertising on the blog, which ultimately became a bad choice.

After having not blogged for a while, I've come to find that I miss doing it.  The more that I blog, the better my writing is and I enjoy the freedom of expression that it provides to me.

Following some careful thought, I gutted the old Blogger template and applied a new, optimized template today that gets rid of most of the color and makes the blog easier to read.  While I've kept the name "strategize",  I've changed the description of my blog to simply that of "The personal blog of Ross Hollman."  Not that I've restricted myself in the latitude of my posts before, but more as part of the general clean-up, I don't want to have a limited scope in the description that makes readers confused about what I'm posting about.

We'll see how it goes as far as posting.  If you're interested in what I'm up to, I typically will fire out bursts of Twitter updates and you can follow me on Twitter here if you are interested.

Lots of people are saying that blogging is dead and that there's now no real reason to start or re-engage.  I disagree, perhaps because my motivations are different than the average person trying to build a blog now from scratch and engage an audience for some sort of profit motivation.

I've also been reminded that I work in a cool business that some people would probably like some visibility on, so I'll try to sprinkle in some of that information as well.

Finally, I'm a lot older than I was when I started and I've developed my own opinions on things that I used to, in the past, agree with and re-post opinions from great guys like Tom Peters and Seth Godin; not that I don't still agree with guys like this, but I have enough experience now to throw those things out there without needing to start with words from someone else.

Enjoy -- at the very least I've got a daughter that can read this now, so, at the very least, I really can claim that this is for her.