I became very busy in November-December (kids activities, weddings, trips, holiday stuff), and one of the casualties of the time crunch was my blog.

Not this blog on writing tips and travails, which has never been very active. Instead, it was my key blog on Corporate Politics, the one that reinforces my expertise on all things Corporate, and helps to legitimize my expertise in the "Corporate Thriller" genre.

I started this blog more than three years ago under the assumption that I could draw potential audiences to my website with interesting advice and observations about corporate life. It was my hope that a fraction of those readers would be interested in purchasing my books. I'd never bothered to test this theory, and since I enjoyed putting the blog posts together, I just kept at it.

Now, years later, with a couple hundred posts out there in cyberspace, you'd think I'd have enough content to sustain pretty steady traffic on the site. That was my plan when I decided I would weather a couple of months of inactivity.

That's not how it worked out.

As the blog posts started to slow down, I noticed substantial peaks in site activity coming immediately after a new post went live, and then a rapid falloff to an alarmingly low level in a couple of days. As the gaps lengthened, the number of hits per week on the site dropped first in half, and then to a quarter of where it had been trending.

The same thing almost immediately happened to book sales. While I can't attributed all of the decline in sales to reduced site traffic -- I also reduced the amount of other promotion I was doing, and I haven't released a new title since March of 2013 -- the correlation certainly isn't coincidence.

So starting with the new year, I've re-committed to writing the blog, my goal being to get two posts out a week until my backlog of ideas is exhausted.

That should take the entire year, and then some.

After just two posts, I'm already seeing both trends reversing. I just hope the momentum continues!