The PhoneBoy Blog

I sat down over the course of the past week or so to try and articulate what I’m thinking I’d like to do about my blogging in 2008. It seems to have taken on a life of it’s own this year thanks to becoming a blogger for Creative Weblogging and getting a bit more involved than I originally thought I would. I have several conflicting thoughts in mind, which is making it difficult to sort out.

Since this post is a bit more navel-gazing than usual, feel free not to hit the jump. Honestly, I won’t be offended. However, if you do hit the jump, please provide some feedback. Half the reason I’m doing this post is I’m looking for it!

The main reason I started working for CW in the first place was I needed some extra money to deal with real estate issues. The major part of that hurdle has now past, so while I don’t need the money anymore, having some extra money around makes things a little more comfortable.

After reading Andy Abramson’s thoughts on the VoIP News Top 25 VoIP Bloggers list, of which CW’s VoIP Weblog was on, I realized something important–something Andy pointed out in his post. While The VoIP Weblog was mentioned on the list, the fact that I wrote it was not. Possibly an oversight on the author’s part, but I felt that part of my brand or identity may be getting lost by writing for someone else.

The next logical step is to figure out what phoneboy.com is worth compared to the blogs I do for Creative Weblogging. While I’ve looked at my web statistics before, they aren’t exactly something I keep close track of. Since part of my pay is based on driving more page views to a couple of CW blogs and they are using Google Analytics to track this, I figure I should start using it on my own site to do some “like” comparisons.

It will take a month or so before I am able to get a complete picture, but my suspicion is that phoneboy.com gets more page views than the blogs I am currently working on for CW. At one time, the page rank for phoneboy.com was higher, but I just checked and some of the CW blogs rank now rank higher than mine. Maybe they adjusted the algorithm again, or maybe my work is having some impact. Who knows.

I guess it boils down to one basic question: Do I continue doing what I’m doing for CW or should I focus on my own thing? If I can generate enough revenue on my own sites, I’d prefer that over blogging for someone else.

Of course, if blogging becomes part of my day job, that could potentially throw a whole different wrench into things.

What do you think, dear readers? Leave a comment or contact me privately. I’d love to hear from you, and I hope your 2008 is propserous!