Rule #1 to Blogging Success: Never stop blogging.
Whoops.
To the fans I earned off the strength of this site, I'm sorry. It's been way too long since I've updated. While I know it's too late to win you back, and I'm not sure I'm in a place where I want to put as much effort into this site as I used to, I still wanted to at least explain where I've been since I supposedly fell off the face of the Earth.
I've been concentrating on work
This site was meant to act as a quasi-portfolio for me. As a student coming out of school, I felt like I needed something to demonstrate my understanding of the business and my ability to succeed. Ultimately, it worked. When interview time came at 58Ninety, this was one of the resources they used to judge me and it worked in my favour. I've been with 58Ninety since April 2010.
In the last year-and-a-half, I've grown tremendously as an interactive advertising industry professional. I was promoted to Client Engagement Manager a few months ago, and along the way I've had a chance to refine my skills in account management, project management, new business development, content entry, information architecture and most recently, strategic planning. I've also been fortunate enough to work with an amazing team that have helped me grow and made the experience enjoyable. I hope that I'm leaving as positive an impact on the rest of the team as they have on me. I'm forever thankful to 58Ninety for the opportunity they've given me and I'll continue to do my best to get better to the benefit of everyone around.
With that said, maintaining this blog fell on the priority list. I'm proving my worth every day with the work I contribute to 58Ninety and the experience I gain during that process. Those will hold more weight to my overall worth than my writings about "ad campaign X" ever could.
I've been concentrating on In Third Person
What was once a passion project has grown much bigger than I could have ever imagined. Ever since In Third Person was featured on the Wordpress.com home page, the trajectory of that site changed dramatically. That event affected In Third Person in two ways:
Short-Term Win: It brought thousands of new readers to my site for a few days
Long-Term Win: It significantly improved my placement in the Google search rankings
Recognizing the opportunity at hand, I put in the extra effort to building on that success, which has paid off so far. What was once a pet project that got 100 visits a month if I was lucky has grown to a site that serves thousands of monthly visitors. Though it may not tie into interactive advertising in terms of subject matter, you could make a strong case for In Third Person being a stronger 'portfolio piece' than this site ever was. It's still hard for me to believe that the site gets that many eyes on it and that I've gained loyal fans around the world who care about my perspective on video games.
The best part of this experience is that In Third Person has never felt like work. I was doing this for for fun a year before this success, and I would have continued writing for it regardless of the outcome. As long as it's still fun, I'll keep regularly updating it.
I've been concentrating on life
Much of my adult life to-date has been spent working assorted part-time jobs to pay the bills. I've worked a ton of nights and weekends making close to minimum wage, and because of that, I had to make sacrifices to other parts of my life. I understood that these were the steps I needed to take to get to the next level, but they're tough steps to take.
Now that I'm working a mostly 9-5 gig, that opens up things that many people take for granted, such as evenings, weekends and holidays. There's a life outside of work, too, and now I have more opportunities to enjoy that. The most exciting thing lined up for is a trip to England with my girlfriend Steff. I've never really had the opportunity in my life to travel for the sake of traveling up until now, so this trip is going to be special for all sorts of reasons.
That's where I'm at. Life is good, and I'm hoping life is going well for you, too. Thank you for still checking this page out after all of this time. I'm still not sure where to take this site from here, but I'll at least check in more than once a year. If you'd like to follow my more frequent works, check out In Third Person.
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