Here’s a back story of how I started blogging, I was in my final year in high school, I think I was around 16-17 years of age, I found myself writing on paper, this method of writing helps with total concentration and clarity of mind, there would be a lot of mistakes and I would have to cancel, I could also remember I had issues with my spellings so I had to crosscheck every word before I made a final draft, I called it (writeup) then, I hardly showed anyone because I hardly cared if anyone wanted to read it, I wrote my thing and just close my book whenever I was done, this made me more confident since there was no one to critique my writing, my writing was pure as it wasn’t dictated by external factors, it was purely what I thought and what my imagination wanted me to pen down, I think I miss those days of pure writing, not knowing what to expect and not expecting anything from anyone, just penning down what comes to mind regardless of how it looks at the end.
Fast forward 2 years, Linda Ikeji’s blog was the talk of the town and I was fascinated by what she was doing, giving out information to her readers, the interaction on her comment section and the likes, what I love the most was the fact that she makes money while doing what she loved, although her blog was older than when I started hearing about it, to me it was new because I have never seen such level of information in a single place in my country on a digital platform before. It was the first.
I went ahead and googled how to open a blog, I read extensively on how to start a blog and maintain it, some were informative and others just had too much information for a kid my age, I guess my mind wasn’t capable enough to handle such information, so I started blogging using WordPress as my first platform and then later moved to Blogspot after finding WordPress difficult to navigate, mind you, I was using just a 2G enabled mobile device at this time. My journey with BlogSpot was amazing, it had an easy onboarding process and Lite User Interface, I could navigate through stories I wrote in just a click of a button.
The adventure started and I kept on creating contents for my blog which didn’t have any viewers or traction then, but sadly it ended in just a few months after I realised I didn’t have anything to write about, I was low on content and struggled, I really struggled maybe partly because I was almost always occupied with my dad at his shop or probably the adrenaline wore out and I just noticed I couldn’t write down anything anymore, nothing was coming so I eventually put the pen down, I guess I was expecting my blog to blow like that of Linda Ikeji’s and start making huge bulk of cash, well, Maybe.
Successful blogging means different things to a lot of people, to some it is the fact that they meet people’s needs while to another it is the fact that they shower their readers with the necessary information to help them out, while to others it is just to show off their level of understanding on a particular subject matter. I haven’t yet defined what successful blogging is after failing numerous times on the subject of BLOGGING but if I were to put it in context, it is the act of expression, expressing in details the information you wish to share with your readers, putting heart and mind to it and knowing that your information would only add and not subtract, posit and not negate and it should make people more informed rather than dis-informed and they should have more course to be happy after reading your blog. Information is power, and sometimes how we share it matters.