These are some lessons I have learnt, including some services I have found to recommend bloggers to sign up for their benefits. Actually the title should be "from my first consistent month of blogging", considering that I tried to blog previously but failed to persist after a couple of posts. But anyway, I have persisted. 1. Ego checking with positive results I mean ego checking as in searching for my name on the Internet. If you type "Sunny Wu" on US Google, this site, usually comes up as the second result. The first result, is Sunnywu.com, which is not owned by me. Too bad that this site is currently hosted in US servers, therefore if you use Australian Google, this site is listed lower down the result list. On the other hand, if you search on Yahoo, whether it's US or Australian, this site usually is listed as the first result. With MSN Live search, this site is somewhere down fourth or fifth on the result list. Overall, I have tried to make myself easier to be found on the Internet, for better or worse... 2. Being thick-skin pays off After the release of the new iMac and reading a post on 37Signals, I have made a new post regarding a potential new colour for this new iMac here. After that I have made a comment back on the 37Signals post and also submit my blog entry to TUAW and they post it. In total I have more than 900 views, during those two days as a result. The page view total may sound low, but for me it is pretty big, considering that I usually only get ~10-20 page views a day in average. The lesson here is that, as long as you think you have a blog entry worthwhile to share, be a thick skin and tell them, aka hard-sell it. 3. Search Engine can always take people to your blog ... somehow I signed up Wordpress.com Stats plugin, which shows the queries people redirected to my site through search engine queries. These are some queries which show my blog entries as first-page results:

• "google apps addressbook api"
• "google apps contact manager"
• "google reader external program"

Before blogging, I always thought that this is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or maybe I should have more faith in The Long Tail. :) 4. Lots of ways to earn money - But can you? During this month, I have made myself learn how to earn money on the Internet. I have signed-up in Google Adsense, AuctionAds, Amazon Affiliate,Commission Junction. They are some sites which almost anyone can qualify. There are a lot of ways to make money, but I am still learning how the whole eco-system works. To learn more, I recommend visiting Problogger, John Chow Dot Com, Shoemoney and Dosh Dosh. 5. Statistic is fun It is pretty interesting to see figures on the how/who/where/what/etc of my blog's visitors. I recommend signing up these services for learning more about your blog:

• Google Analytics(lots and lots of info, a must-have!)
• Feedburner (finds out who subscribes your blog's RSS feed)
• Performancing Metrics (good for small blog with few visitors)
• Crazy Egg (good for seeing how people focus/click on your blog's front page)
• Wordpress.com Stats Plugin (for Wordpress only, but the best thing is that its stats excludes the blog administrator visits - more accurate and useful when your visitor count is low)

6. Bandwidth is irrelevant I have used around 350MB of bandwidth, out of the available 100GB of bandwidth... 7. Writing is easy, but the plumbing is not... Writing is fairly easy to me (for things I want to say anyway). The problem is that it's annoying to format your blog entry, like section titles, list, uploading and resizing images, etc. Also, providing references (i.e. add links to sites you mention) is mundane work, too. The default Wordpress editor feature is quite minimal, I can do more with features like more formatting options or more convenient Flash/Javascript embodiment (e.g. for Youtube video). I am still out looking for good Wordpress plugins which can help me to spend less time on "plumbing" but more in writing. 8. My post seems too long If you read this sentence, thanks for staying with me for so long in this post. It is too easy to write and I tend to over-stretch my word limits - after all, I do not tend to read long posts on others' blogs. I need to trim down, or another way is maybe adding page breaks or formatting the blog post entry to increase the readability. This is a great guide that I think I will try. 9. Get A friend to motivate/hassle you to blog It is fairly easy to drop off blogging. it will be great to have some friends to subscribe your blog and ask them nicely to remind you to blog, whenever you have dropped off. I dropped off for 10 days during the past month, but my friend reminded me. Thanks mate! 10. What you said - Please share your advice Maybe you could tell what you think I should improve for my blog, e.g. topics, site design, writing style...etc. Just leave a comment below and it will be greatly appreciated!