Over the years, people have come to me occasionally with questions about blogging. ”How do you start a blog?” ”What do I need to do with my blog?” ”How would a blog help me?” I’ve helped where I could. For about a year I kept my own blog about technology, search engines, and general internet news, and I learned a lot during that time about blogging. The main thing that you will read around the internet is that, if you want to have a good blog, you must write something every day.
Lately, I have been failing at that simple rule. Over the past 2 weeks I’ve written twice, including right now. However, if you can’t write every day, there is something to be said for for keeping up with current events in your blog. If you can write something that connects with things that are happening in the real world, people will visit your blog and identify with your writing.
Because I live in Sarajevo, I often include various tidbits about things that are happening here in the city — the film festival, the price of fuel, various happenings at the university, etc. But a recent look at my visitor statistics for this blog revealed something I was never expecting. On July 20-22 — right in the middle of my recent 2 week hiatus from writing — traffic on this blog tripled. I was surprised, until, while thinking of sinking my teeth into a juicy hamburger, I realized what had happened.
On July 20, the first McDonald’s restaurant in Sarajevo opened. It’s been a long time coming. And, on July 4th (about 2 weeks before that), I had written a post on this blog about sitting in a local food court and ordering a hamburger from another establishment, and how the thing tasted nothing like the glorious McDonald’s treat it was meant to emulate. After looking through the statistics I realized that some visitors had come from Google searches. So, I did a quick Google search for [McDonalds in Sarajevo] (minus the brackets, of course). My post was in the top 5! Kind of funny, I though, that a random personal blog post would show up in the top results for such a general query. Go ahead, see for yourself.
So, the moral of the story is, this is just an interesting side plot, at best. I obviously don’t write this blog for the “fame and fortune”, as the title of this post suggests. If I did, I would have picked a less specific theme, probably. But it is interesting.
Take care, readers.
