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On April 9th, 2012, I decided to seriously start blogging on subjects that were of interest to me such as

• Globalization, including summaries of Economist Intelligence Unit webinars about various global hot spots
• Integral Theory, which promotes problem solving through looking at a problem from multiple perspectives
• Toastmasters
• Project Management
• History (of Middle East in particular)

and other sundry topics, such as the Transformation Fitness program I am currently going through.

I got a few hits here and there, but my readership really started taking off this summer.   I took a project management certification prep course put on by PMI-OC, and I found that the blog was useful for putting the notes from our study group online so the ones that couldn’t make the group meeting any particular week could still reference what we had gone over that week.

However, I was soon getting people interested in Project Management and the other subjects I talked about from different parts of the United States, and then from different parts of the world.   Today I checked my statistics and over 5,000 people have read my blog, but the statistic that delights me even more is the fact that these people come from 100 countries.   Most readers come from the US, but the next countries that have the most readers are India, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

In terms of how far this blog is reaching, it has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.  But producing a blog post every day has been a discipline that has paid tremendous dividends.   I tried a blog post or two when I first started towards the beginning of the year, but then on April 9th, I just decided to commit to the project and do a blog post every day.   I have an “idea journal” where I sketch out ideas for posts in the upcoming weeks.

Most of the posts in the past months have come from the courses I have been taking in project management (during the summer) or the Green Belt Six Sigma class (which I am taking now).

However, I try to also include articles about the Toastmasters program, or my Transformation fitness program, or other topics that come up from time to time.   The ones that get the widest readership are those that have to do with reports on global hotspots such as Myanmar, Africa, or the countries of the Middle East that are experiencing the “Arab Spring.”  So I try to keep it balanced between my professional interests, and more personal interests.

There are bloggers out there that have been doing this for 6 years, not 6 months, and these are the people whose prose just blow me away from time to time because they are such good writers.  Just like in Toastmasters when you hear a great speaker, reading a great blogger can inspire you to improve your craft.  But you can only imitate their style; the real thing has to come from your own voice, and you won’t know what that is until you practice tapping into it on a regular basis.

Good writing doesn’t require that the subject be controversial, such as a political blog.   I think the most challenging thing for me in writing about project management was trying to explain a concept to people in our class that were having a hard time grasping the answers to questions.   Their non-comprehension forced me to think of creative ways to explain the subject using metaphors or diagrams that would be more intuitive than the prose contained in the textbook.  And when I would come up with something that made the proverbial light bulb go off, I had a sense of satisfaction.

So incorporating visual elements such as diagrams or tables to explain concepts is another element of blogging that I have learned about that I hadn’t considered at first.   It’s like an illustrated magazine article rather than a newspaper article, to use an analogy with old school technology.

The other thing I learned was editing in a hurry.  My father was a reporter, and he would always be against some sort of deadline.  You would like to craft a really good piece, but the time constraint is always, always in the back of your mind.  So you end up making decisions in a hurry.   Every once and a while, you catch yourself saying “I could have done a better job on that post …”, but that perfectionism now is usually squelched by the thought, “yes, if I had more than one day to do it, but I didn’t, so it’s okay.”

The last thing I realized is that the vast stretches of time on a weekend are your friend.  You can prepare articles ahead of time so that when you get to a time during the week when you are going from 5 AM to 10 PM and literally have no time to blog, you still are able to publish an article every day by preparing ahead of time and using articles you prepared on the weekend.

In short, blogging has been an investment of time over these past 6 months, but I have learned so much about the world in general and the professional world of project management, and other topics related to manufacturing during that time.   I hope that in trying to express what I have learned, that it has been helpful to some people out there.   The more than 5,000 people who have read what I wrote are hopefully a testament to my faith that it would be a worthwhile investment.

I can wholeheartedly say that it has been, and I look forward to continuing with the blog no matter what I decide to write about!

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