Source: mymym.cpm

I’m still not out of the woods of my studies just yet, but I’ve been dying to write a short post and this morning, an opportunity suddenly presented itself — my blog has finally reached 500,000 hits!  Woo hoo!

When I started blogging in January last year, I was lucky to get 5 hits a day, and it was extremely depressing to think just 5 people (or potentially, one person clicking five times) were reading my blog.  Like many other aspiring bloggers, I began looking for ways to increase my blog’s exposure and getting the hits up.  I joined Technorati.  I joined Stumbleupon.  I signed up at BlogCatalogue, MyBlogLog, Zimbio, Delicious, etc.  I did something (I can’t remember) with Alexa.  And of course, I signed up to all the blog search engines.  I never paid for any of those services (legit or not) that claimed could boost your site stats or rankings.

But really, the most important thing in blogging is not any of that — it’s writing good content that people will want to read.  Whether it’s a movie or book review, funny lists, travel, satirical writing, sports or tips on writing, I’ve found out that if you write what people want to read, they’ll come to your site (provided you tag it and categorise it properly).  It won’t happen overnight, of course (though occasionally there could be a massive spurt if you write something in the news), but over time you’ll find that there are certain posts that will keep generating traffic.  On the other hand, to this day I still have stinker posts that only have ONE hit.  You just never know sometimes, but if you keep blogging, learn how to improve your writing and most of all, love doing it, then eventually it will pay off.  These days I don’t measure how well my blog is doing in terms of hits, but rather, from the opportunities I get out of it.

It’s interesting.  At zero hits I was in another field, wondering whether I could ever get out of it.  At 250,000 hits, I made the decision to make a change into writing.  Now, at 500,000 hits, I’m finally doing what I love.  What will the next milestone bring?  Will I finally finish my novel?