It’s Christmas morning, and not everyone is up yet. So I think I’ll try to dash off the next in my year in review posts, this time about non-fiction articles.

I started 2011 with a renewed interest in writing articles at Suite101.com. For the first six weeks I added at least one a week, and had a couple of others in the hopper. Then around February 22 a major change in the Google search algorithm went into effect. Called “Panda”, this algorithm change pretty much killed content sites such as Suite101. Page views and ad share income dropped to very low levels over night. A slight recovery occurred in August, but then another Panda update killed it again. As a consequence, I have not written another article for Suite, and don’t intend to for a while.

I was contacted in March or April by a transportation industry newsletter to write an article for them. This was my first time to have an editor solicit me for an article. She wanted an engineer for this article, not a freelancer,  had seen some of my engineering articles at Suite101, and so contacted me. The pay was good, and writing this article required me to do some interviewing. That was good experience.

I wrote about ten (maybe a few more) articles for Buildipedia.com. That started out strong early in the year, but by June it started to fade, as they were assigning only one of every six article ideas I pitched to them. But they had an editorial change in November, I pitched a column on construction administration to the new editor, and it was accepted on a trial basis. At the end of the year I have had two columns published, and contracts for two more columns.

So it was a good year for non-fiction articles. Almost all my writing income came from them. It’s something I plan to keep doing into 2012.