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Firstly, I have to apologise for the lack of updates on my case study.  I’ve been down under for two weeks spending Christmas and New Year with my parents.  Despite being so technology savvy, I don’t know why my Dad never got himself a broadband connection – he’s got everything else…  Even though he does have dial-up, getting online at my parents’ house makes me wonder how I ever survived back in the days before broadband.  As crappy as our local broadband connection is sometimes, it is still better than dial-up – marginally.  And since Dad has a limited monthly dial-up package, which I could use up in one sitting, I figured I’d better avoid doing any heavy surfing while I was there.

Although it has been over a week since we got back, I didn’t expect to take so long for us to settle back into our daily routine.  After the vacation blues I had coming back to Earth after a truly enjoyable holiday, it took me a while to settle my son back into his regular routine and for me to recover from jetlag.  Yes, it’s only three hours difference but somehow I couldn’t seem to get out of bed after getting my son to sleep.  I even fell asleep in his cot a few times and woke up feeling rather stiff from sleeping awkwardly.

After reviewing lesson three from Blogmastermind, I’ve realised that I haven’t even completed the tasks that were due.  So I’ve decided I’ll spend the rest of this week (what’s left of it, at any rate) completing the tasks from lesson three and begin lesson four next week.  So for the rest of the week, I need to do five marketing activities – I’ve decided to concentrate on promoting my blog posts on twitter, facebook and carnival submissions for now – and write three pillar articles, although so far I only have an idea for one article.

I’ve also decided to start some regular features on my blog each week.  For instance, I’ll be posting a “Question of the Week” on Mondays, a parenting blog review on Wednesdays, and Funny quotes on Fridays.  I’m not sure how this will turn out but I’ll try it out for a couple of months to see how it goes before deciding whether to continue it or dump it.

Before I wrap up, let’s take a look at my blog stats for December:

Despite being gone for half of December, I’ve noticed that my income stayed steady.  Since the payment for work is usually received after the work is done, I suspect that I’ll only see the effects of my two week break in January’s income report.

My readership has also stayed steady, although I did notice a bit of a drop towards the end of December.  Looks like my attempt to keep my blog running by writing post-dated blog posts before going on holiday didn’t really work out as well as I hoped.  Since my readers are used to me blogging on a daily basis, I felt I needed to keep up the blog post frequency even though I wouldn’t be around to blog.  I ended up writing several posts in advance and releasing one each day.  I think the problem lies in the fact that I was churning content out for the sake of having something to publish rather than writing a post of value which was probably felt by my readers.  Since returning back and blogging again, my readership has returned to pre-holiday levels.

So lesson learned – don’t blog for the sake of having something to publish.  If you really don’t have the time, it might be a good idea not to blog rather than to write a half-hearted blog post.