Happy 1,100 posts!

I like counting things and celebrating milestones.  For instance, in March I celebrated my eighth freelancing anniversary.  Not full-time or even all that seriously -- but my first-ever freelance article (an article for a content site, not something I'm necessarily proud of, but it's what got me started) was sold in March 2005.  (I freelanced full-time for six years, from October 2005 to November 2011.)

This post represents another milestone: It's my 1,100th post on this blog.

I started this blog in December 2005.  One of my first freelancing jobs once I started doing it full-time was writing posts for a blog network.  That was my first experience with blogging, and I found I liked it, so I started my own.

It was an awkward thing at first, with long posts that weren't always about freelancing.  I talked a lot about my home life too, which I guess is somewhat related, since a freelancer works from home, but it wasn't the professional image I should have been presenting.  I knew nothing about that at the time.  Eventually, my blog was joined by a handful of others on various topics.  Some of them I still maintain today: PonyTalesBlog.com, My1920sWedding.com, and Livre-du-Jour.com.  I also have a site for an instruction ebook on doll stringing that I sell, DollStringing.com, and -- most recently -- my book series website, RubyRansome.com.

I've grown a lot as a blogger since 2005, and learned a lot about marketing, professionalism, and most importantly, what I want out of my blogs.  I post ads on them for some side income, but since I wasn't updating my blogs as often for a while, I don't make as much from the ads as I used to.  Mostly, though, my blogs are about different facets of my life.  This one, being about my writer self -- and considering it also bears my name -- is the one that I've kept running the longest.

Happy 1,100 posts, Swan's Blog!