This funny story is a little bit of background how I blogged for nearly 3 years and got thousands of people reading my blog. Oh, and you’ll find out some crazy things how blogging grows.
Let’s be honest. My blog is about nothing. I mean if you’re here you must be really bored 😉 But seriously I do not have any agenda, I nicely described it as brain vomit and I stick to it. But the beginnings of my blogging are completely different than now. So let’s move back to the year 2010 when I wrote my first blog post.
When I moved to New Zealand, for a little while I would send my friends and family a message saying “hey, I just visited a museum and it was awesome”. In a nutshell. Obviously the message was much longer. And very quickly I realised that it was repetitive. Annoyingly repetitive. Sometimes 3 times in one day I would have to describe what I saw in that museum to the degree that sometimes I’d say “oh nothing important happened” just to avoid repeating myself.
That’s how it all started. I decided to write my letters to my friends and family online. I mean it’s just the internet, it’s not like anyone’s going to find me?! And I wrote a lot. In total just over 200 blog posts in 3 years. By the way, such a stupid idea to try to compete with that ay? 365 blog posts? What am I a Shakespeare? Anywho, back to the point. Back then I would write silly things about my regular life and I guess a lot of details on how an outsider sees New Zealand. This lasted for nearly 3 years until I became more New Zealander than Polish and I not only I stopped seeing New Zealand as a novelty but also I lost the skill of writing grammatically in Polish. Way to go, Ralf, now you can’t write in any language 🙂
What’s interesting though is back then I didn’t really realise the power of Google and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, don’t even ask). I just sent my blog post to a few friends and family. Some friends would possibly share with their friends and that would be it. Oh, and I wrote one article for some portal and signed it with my blog post. That’s when it started. From 2-5 visits a day my humble statistics rose to sometimes a few hundred a day. I had people emailing me and trying to meet me in New Zealand (or in Poland when I was visiting). It went so crazy that even Polish radio and TV got in touch about a few things (this is another story – how to fail on live radio audition). It was then when I realised that if you searched in Polish Google anything about Polish in New Zealand, my blog was almost always in top 10 search results.
In a way, I was proud of my stupid writing and on the top of that, I have learned a little bit about search and how it works. When you search “how to create a business in New Zealand” in Polish, you’ll probably still find my blog somewhere there although Google doesn’t like much-outdated content. But SEO is a double-edged sword and I’ve learned it with this blog.
You see now that I know a little bit about statistics and this is a blog post number 21, I kind of wanted to see how many people read it (no spoilers, nothing to be proud of). But by checking that I also checked how Google sees my blog and today there was only one keyword that Google recognises my blog with… drumrolls
Yup, after writing a blog post about royalty and naming it Casino Royale Google has decided that I am going to be blogging about casinos. So now I’m going to grow more content about casinos, bringing people searching for a casino (casino, casino more keywords for you Google). You see if AI supposed to be so smart that they’re going to kill us in the future, Google’s AI reading my blog is so wrong that I feel safe for now and for the foreseeable future.
P.S. Casino, Casino, more casino, dear uncle Google send me the traffic of people with the money they want to throw away.