Here are some tips I've learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site's traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I'm a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.

Yowie, it's been a busy couple of months. Since I went on vacation in early June my life has been very full. I've had a lot of video editing to do, and I've been taking work home to do it on my laptop — since it seems so hard to get anything accomplished at the office. (Is it ironic when your boss agrees that the worst place to do work is at the office?)

Meanwhile, I've been wringing my hands over my blog. I've been too … absorbed in everything else to dredge up the energy to post anything substantive, but over the past couple weeks I've at least made sure to moderate comments and track stats. So, BlogRodent hasn't really fallen off my radar. It's just that I've fallen off the face of the Earth. In fact, I'm waiting for video to finish rendering right now … so with a few minutes on my hands, I thought I'd post a retrospective.

I think milestones are important. I'd been waiting for the one-year anniversary of BlogRodent so I could celebrate it with an anniversary post. Naturally, because I am time-insensitive — my employers would say I'm time-comatose — June 20 passed without comment. I'm about to rectify that.

What happened on this blog on that day one year ago? My first "Hello World" post, nervously titled, "This is easy," and a throw-away mention of the adult Christian education class I was teaching at the time, "Do Heaven and Hell exist?" Frankly, there's nothing to recommend either post for your reading pleasure. But lot has happened since then and I hope I've made some improvement.

Let's talk about what's been good, bad, and what I've learned as a newbie Pentecostal blogger.

I thought I’d take a look back on the last six months, since I began blogging here, and see which of my posts received the most attention from you, my patient readers. The results are in, and I am dutifully sharing them, despite the fact that this post will only serve to draw more attention away from my other, equally deserving but under-noticed, blogerature. (Yes, I know. It's not a word.)