11 years of blogging

I feel by writing about this topic I am about to commit a cardinal sin of blogging; don’t blog about your own blog. It’s like breaking the fourth wall on a TV show, a risky move that could lose the audience, and one that could have more than just a whiff of narcissism about it. On the other hand I guess I am the central character in this production and it’s my blog so I can do what I want. A little bit of elevated sense of self-importance doesn’t harm, right?

Really I want to write this to be able to have a little look back at the highs and lows of putting pen to paper (finger to keyboard) over the past decade or so. The way we engage with blogging/social media/the internet has changed so much over the past ten years. Perhaps the onset of this has democratised the process but in many ways people writing down their thoughts and feelings is as old as time. So how has my blogging changed over the years and my relationship with it?

Why blog?

To be honest I can’t really recall my motivations for why I decided to start a blog. I remember that my friend, and predecessor at LSE, Jen Lowthrop, set up a blog when she went on her travels. It seemed like a cool thing to do and surely I had many thoughts to share with the world, right?

Judging by my initial blogs, I did not have a huge amount of thoughts. Entitling my first blog, “Hello World!” was probably a touch ambitious. “Hello mum and dad” would probably have been a more accurate title as it has had 14 views since 2012. It reads in the style of a bad dating profile (similar to my actual previous dating profiles), but I had done the hardest thing of all – which is starting.

Looking back at some of the early pieces I wrote it’s clear that I lacked a bit of confidence and was yet to find a voice or style. I also knew that now I had a blog it should actually have some content on it so some of those early posts feel like they were added for the sake of it. But it was also exciting to be able to put stuff out there. Even to this day I get butterflies as I push the publish button and back then it was near full-on panic.

I think I started to find a grove when I realised writing about things I was passionate about would be best. Travel has always been that topic and blogs on exploring the deep south in the states and where people should visit in Ghana were good ones for me. When I arrived in Ghana in 2013 to spend three months there I know that blogging about my experiences would be high on my list of activities and, likewise, on my sabbatical in 2018.

Some stats

I’ll admit that I love diving in to the stats section on WordPress and seeing who is viewing my blogs and where from. Here are a few insights from the past decade.

As you can see from the chart above I had a big spike in 2016 and the numbers have been significantly larger since then. This is when I discovered the concept of ‘clickbait’. 23 photos to show why you should never visit Ghana went further then I could ever imagine. On 13th July 2016 my blog had just over 8,300 views; more the accumulated views in the previous four years since I had started blogging. I’ll admit that it was a mixture of exhilaration and slight terror, especially as some of the people commenting had taken offence at the title of the blog (obviously the point of clickbait). But I had stumbled across a way to share some of my favourite photos of my favourite places and have them reach a lot of people, which was exciting.

Unsurprisingly my blog has most of it views from the UK, other English speaking countries or places that I’ve visited/written a blog about why people shouldn’t go there. Every viewer is equal though and I’d like to thank the individuals from Bhutan, Tajikistan, Burundi and the Aland Islands for taking a read! I sound like a total boomer as I write this but it kind of blows my mind that I can write something and then someone anywhere the world can then read it.

Talking of boomers, the vast majority of referrals to my blog has come from Facebook. Instagram isn’t a hot referrer for me and Snapchat/TikTok don’t even know my blog exists. Perhaps I need to diversify my social media outreach but that sounds a bit too much like work. I also have 194 loyal subscribers too and they get an email in to their inbox or a little notification when I drop a new post. I’m eternally grateful to them all!

As I mentioned above my clickbait style blogs have received the overwhelming majority of the views of my blog. It is always exciting when the numbers rack up but it’s also a touch frustrating that my longer form pieces don’t get a few more views. Below are a few blogs that I’m really proud of that didn’t get the number of hits that I feel they deserve.

• How to volunteer sensitively and be aware of power dynamics
• Volunteerism in Ghana: Alive and well
• Band Aid: Stop the Stereotypes
• Cambodia; Land of a thousand stories
• When football finally came home
• Memories of an AFCON
• Saying goodbye to KickStart Ghana
• Returning to Ghana

Most of these blogs are either a description of somewhere I’ve been or my take on an issue which I care about. I think in many ways these are harder to publish as you could be at risk of someone strongly disagreeing and the internet isn’t always a friendly place (!). But it feels good to get my points out there, even if they don’t ‘break the internet’.

The Future

I’ve always got a backlog of blogs that I’ll ‘finish tomorrow’ so I know I’ll continue to keep blogging, even if it isn’t at the same rate as those early days. I should be more intentional with it as I do feel a real sense of satisfaction when I publish a new one. It feels like I’ve downloaded a part of my thinking and I can put that to rest once I’ve done that. The good thing is that I don’t feel any pressure to blog, I can just pick it up and put it down whenever I find the energy and motivation.

Hopefully this blog hasn’t been too narcissistic for the 8 people that’ll read it. It’s been fun to look back at some of the numbers and some of the 157 pieces that I’ve written over the past 11 years. Here’s to, potentially, more writing in 2024!