A Year in the Blogosphere

This blog was launched on December 29, 2004, which means it just turned one year old. So allow me to wallow in a bit of reflection, please.

I'd delayed blogging for a long time, because I'd thought that to be taken seriously, a blogger needed to post daily. I even tried to organize a group of non-blogging marketing pundits to each take a day of the week in a communal blog. That effort went nowhere, but I think at least three of us now blog regularly. Once I realized that many bloggers post once a week or less, I knew I could handle it.

I started the blog with a few agendas. I wanted to:

Create a platform for my ideas and rants, of course

Open a doorway to a syndicated op-ed newspaper column (a dream I've had for decades) Support the Business Ethics Pledge campaign

Become more widely known in the worlds of business ethics and progressive politics

Develop new readers who would then buy my books, subscribe to my newsletter, etc.

And in fact, in the spring, I went through my blog entries, selected seven or so, polished them, and submitted them to four different newspaper syndicates--all of whom turned me down. But I'll keep trying.

The blog has veered away more often than I'd have expected from what I'd originally thought of as its core topic: business ethics. But I already have a platform to talk about that: my newsletter, Positive Power of Principled Profit.

It's also hard to tell what impact it has, or where people are learning about it. I get very few comments, and many of them are from people I've steered to the blog via a post to a discussion list or one of my newsletters.

So, this year, one of my goals is to build more traffic to the blog, which will be mirrored both at blogger.com and on my own PrincipledProfit.com site.

There have been a few signers of the Pledge that I believe found me via the blog, and a few useful contacts. Hopefully, over the next 12 months, I'll be able to know for certain that the blog is helping to shape the discourse.

And meanwhile, there's revamping the PrinProfit site, hosting my radio show (which I hope to syndicate as well), getting publicity for the Pledge, selling more foreign rights, and tons of other stuff. somehow, I find time to do at least some of it, between client copywriting and consulting projects.