The past year 2011 has been good to me in general. There are a lot of good things to remember from last year.

I experimented with few things on this blog – I outsourced the blog to guest writers. With that, the blog’s Alexa Ranking and number of RSS subscribers have increased dramatically.

But I am not happy with that improvement. Here’s why:

1. Losing my personal voice

My main goal when I started this blog was to be able to voice out my take on productivity topics that I am interested in. My own voice quickly faded away once the guest posts started to come in.

2. Losing blog’s focus

This is an obvious consequence of outsourcing this blog. Different authors tend to have different views of common topics. Not only different authors have different ways of thinking but they also have different motives in writing.

3. Losing quality readership

I may have increased my blog exposure by frequent publication of blog posts but I have lost quality readership in return. Outsourcing your blog also means that the articles that you published are just spun posts from other blogs, which leads to:

4. Losing blog identity

Once your blog started to sound like other blogs on your topic domain, you are losing your blog identity. And readers don’t like that.

So, is outsourcing blog a good or bad thing? Blogging, or just plainly web presence in general, is not about search ranking and improving numbers.

What you’d expect from productivitybits.com this 2012?

1. Less frequent posting
2. More quality articles (I hope)
3. No guest authors allowed (except on special case. e.g., book authors)
4. Zero outsourced article
5. Simple blog outline (subject to my taste)
6. Eliminate advertisement (the only one to retain would be the ad in my header because of the 1 year contract, which might get extended if needed)
7. Although I will be eliminating ads going forward, old ones will remain due to the overhead it requires to remove them.
8. More changes as I see fit.

What do you think of these changes?