The Dodge Retort (TDR), my eclectic blog, celebrated its third anniversary on Tuesday. That’s third as in three weeks.  You know, Internet time.

This isn’t my first blog. I have done several others working for an employer and learned about a tenth as much in a year as I have in three weeks. That being on your own heightens your creativity and motivation is an understatement.

It’s noteworthy that on Tuesday, TDR enjoyed its best day in page views – 535. That might not sound like much, but starting 21 days ago at zero puts it is perspective. One colleague remarked that page views just satisfies my “vanity.” Perhaps. Page views by themselves aren’t the point, but building an audience and following is.

With this good start, I am confident I can build a substantial following. What’s satisfying are my efforts being rewarded with traffic growth. Best of all, I learn something new every day, sometimes every hour.

Am I making money? Of course not: this is a blog (I do make money from freelance writing, however). But sooner rather than later, someone will write the playbook on blogs making money.  I suspect joining an ad or affiliate marketing network (there’s about 60 of them)  is a bit like putting solar panels on your house and selling electricity back to the power company. On the sunniest day, you might make three bucks. And at my nascent traffic levels, I might make a penny or two. As Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons points out, he made a whopping hundred dollars on the day his Fake Steve Jobs blog hit 500,000 page views.

Former Ziff Davis colleague Joe Panettieri at Ninelinesmediainc.com which launched in January, 2008 may have it right. He and his partner are making money with three focused-technology blogs which they sell themselves. In others words, they’ve created a their own self-funded media company complete with blogs, events and newsletters.  That is the path Joe recommends and he seems to be making a go of it even though Nine Lives launched into the teeth of a recession. After all, publishing empires Ziff Davis, CMP and CNet were started in recessions, he points out.

BTW, it was  Nine Lives’ Workswithu.com blog about Ubuntu Linux web site that drove all that traffic Tuesday to a TDR netbook post.

What’s next for my blog?

I have bought 300Gb of hosting space and will move to WordPress.org which allows plug-ins (WordPress.com which I currently use does not). In other words, my blog, er web site actually, will become more robust. I will be able to add  scripts and choose among the 4,200 and counting applications for WordPress.

I’ll report back again after my sixth anniversary – sixth week, that is.