2009 - looking back

Time for a short review of 2009, looking back at how this blog has evolved over the past 12 months and where it may be headed in the near future. Much has happened in 2009, much for the good, and hopefully, much good is in store for 2010 as well. This blog has seen quite a change during 2009 and by the looks of it, it is headed in the right direction (as far as I’m concerned), but will my readers follow?

Prolific posting

2009 saw no less than 175 posts, compare that to only 84 posts in 2008. It took me a while to get into the blogging spirit and finding the true purpose of my blog, which is establishing husdal.com as the gateway to supply chain risk research and literature.

Finding my niche

2009 also saw the narrowing of the focus of this blog, from a broad anything that interests me perspective to an academically relevant review of literature and research on supply chain risk and business continuity.

From website to blog

I have had my husdal.com website since 1998, back then with only sporadic “posting” (if you can call it that) every couple of months. It started out as a home page where I would publish my research papers and essays, starting with my MSc in GIS in 1999, and my older research in GIS is still accessible and while no longer among the most visited content, it still attracts a considerable number of visitors. 2007 marked the conversion of my website to a blog for easier content management, having gone through the pains of handcoding HTML, to FrontPage, and on to DreamWeaver. Unable to decide between which blogging platform to use, I started up with typepad.com, moved to wordpress.com and finally, in July 2009, I settled for wordpress.org. It has been a steep uphill learning experience.

Traffic

In the old days, I was all happy to have more than 50 people visiting my site  per day, now I get all frantic when my visitor count drops below 200 a day. Admittedly, traffic has slowed down to a trickle these Christmas days, but I’ve stopped worrying, since my stats are telling me that an increasing number of visitors are regulars, who come back again and again, which tells me that my niche has started to grow a following (perhaps among students too lazy to write their own literature reviews?).  Her is a more detailed review of the “top of the pops” on husdal.com: Traffic analysis 2009 – What are these people from India doing on my blog?

Networking

I’ve started to network with other blogs in my niche, e.g. Bob Ferrari’s Supply Chain Matters, Kevin Cornish’s @risk, Ken Simpson’s Contemplating…, or Paul James’ Agile Continuity, to mention but a few of those on my shortlist of blogs in supply chain risk and business continuity. I’ve also started to use LinkedIn Answers as a tool for networking, although the questions asked and answered there are getting more and more banal for every day. Twitter seems a much better tool. I’ve explored several blog directories, but I keep coming back to BlogCatalog as the best place to list one’s blog. While I get very little traffic from any of my blog directory listings anyhow, BlogCatalog delivers some 10% of my traffic.

Syndication and recognition

“Syndication” may be the right word for what is coming in 2010, since  I have been invited to join the community of Supply Chain Experts at Kinaxis as a regular blogger/contributor. The latter I attribute to my blog slowly beginning to achieve some recognition as a reputable and relevant resource in supply chain risk, as Matt Cutts of Google so aptly puts it.

Advertsising

Another sign of recognition are major supply chain players (i.e. consultants and software providers) asking for advertising space on husdal.com, realizing that this is where they may attract new customers, and advertisers relevant to my blog are always very welcome. This means that I can perhaps scrap the Google Ads that do not bring in much revenue anyway, and which may also hurt the integrity of this blog, since I do not control who advertises what.

2010 – what’s in store?

Frankly, I do not know. I can see that this blog will grow stronger and that I will continue to post as often in 2010 as I did in 2009. I foresee that the scope of the blog will narrow even more towards the academic side of supply chain risk. First by catching up on the many articles in my literature collection on supply chain risk and business continuity that have not yet been reviewed, and second, by finding more articles by the authors that have been reviewed already.

Best wishes for the new year and see you all in 2010!

Related

• husdal.com: Traffic analysis 2009