Today is the half-year anniversary of BPMS Watch, time to reflect on how it’s gone, and where to go next.

Ismael invited me to guest blog on IT|Redux at the beginning of the year, and after doing that for a couple months I had the urge to try it on my own.  Unlike Ismael, Sandy, or other better-known BPM bloggers, I cover BPM only.  That limits the audience, but I guess it’s the piece I know.  Bloggers are always checking their stats, and I’m no exception.  Here are my results after 6 months.

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Feedburner reports subscribers to the feed are around 240, and still growing linearly at around 40 per month. That’s pretty good (I think).  Blogger lore says that it’s better to cultivate a regular readership via the feed than to try to maximize one-off hits on Google.  That’s good, since I have no idea how to do the latter.

AWStats tells me I have around 3000 unique visitors a month, 6000 visits a month, and 24,000 page views a month.  Ismael tells me that’s pretty good as well, especially the daily page views.  Technorati, where the A-list bloggers like to play… not so much.  That site ranks blogs by the number of unique other blogs that link or track back to yours.  I have 149 links from 42 blogs, rank around 66,000.  Unless I expand my coverage into SOA or something, I don’t think I’ll go a lot higher on Technorati.

There are 117 registered users on the site.  I expected more.  You only need to register to comment or download one of my reports.  I don’t get as many comments as I hoped.  I still want to work on that.

The site is now syndicated on FindTechBlogs, part of KnowledgeStorm, an information aggregator.  A number of other media companies have approached me about a similar thing, but so far only this one has pulled the trigger.  I think I will have to broaden the message a bit to appeal to the wider market, and I’m thinking about how to do that.

So far I’ve aimed at thought leadership, mostly among readers who are pretty deep into BPM already — a lot of vendors, consultants, and IT people who “get” BPM.  I think BPMS Watch has done a good job of surfacing issues around “BPM 2.0”, BPMN, what business analysts can or cannot do, the relationship of BPM and business rules, BPM and SOA, and other things that don’t get a lot of serious coverage elsewhere.  I had expected to write a lot more about specific BPMS offerings, and I’m going to do that more in the next 6 months.

As I get into the BPMN training business, I am going to be dealing a lot more with BPM newbies and less technical types, and I need to create more reference material for them on the site as well.  It might have to be another site, but the best thing about WordPress (and I assume other blogging software) is how easy it is to maintain the site, so I’d like to find a way to reformat BPMS Watch to look a bit more like a website that includes a blog, rather than just a blog.  Any WordPress mavens out there who can point me in the right direction, please drop me a line.

The bottom line, though, is that blogging has been absolutely great as a marketing vehicle.  It provides reach, visibility, direct engagement with the BPM community… and it’s free for both the blogger and the audience.  I am totally swamped with paying work, much of that generated from blogging.  (Yes, blogging is in a way self-limiting.)  So I am in total agreement with Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady and other so-called “open source” industry analysts… the traditional Gartner/Forrester subscription model is getting harder to sustain every year.  If I am ever able to get a vendor to pay me $50K to put a dot in a box, I’ll know the tide has finally turned.