My 200th Post

My 200th Post

For my 200^th post I think it worthwhile to reflect on what sort of blogging I have been doing so far since July 2006. As regards the content, all my 199 posts up to this point have largely been tracing my attempts at creativity. Poems, short stories, book reviews, reflective snippets, translation--these are a few genres I  have touched as I was building up archives for the blog. Genre-wise, there has been no conscious effort to regulate it though; nonetheless its predominant theme during early days has been literary. So, in brief, everything that has found its expression here through all its posts has been only muse-related. Well, it is not to say that I have not digressed at all. In fact I’ve posted a few pictures here and there just to infuse some colour into the mass of drab text archived month after month. It is a well-known fact that sometimes pictures are good substitutes for words, nay a million words. I have even tried to post jokes, all of them being my own creation, for whatever worth they have been.

I started my blog “The Unadorned” in English medium but then as I subsequently published my books in Hindi, I thought I could post some Hindi topics, too, just to afford some variety to the contents. It has no doubt diluted the focus yet I could not have done anything better. When the author of the blog himself turned bilingual how could he remain stuck to English in his blog?

Not that I have been able to maintain regularity all through. There were at least 11 such months during which I could not post any content. The dry months were April, May and June, October 2007, February, March, August and December 2010, January, June 2011, March 2012. The reason could be anything, but the fact remains that the declining seriousness has definitely bothered me as it does to all other bloggers. I have endured the vacuum, a kind of writer's block during those months of neglect.

There have been moments of happiness when some recognition came for this blog. Recognition is, after all, recognition and in my opinion there is no small or big types of it. As early as November 2006, fellow websites started noticing this blog. There was a thanksgiving post from my side at this link  . Now when I try to dig the trace of that in that blog’s archive, I do not succeed. However I can recall the feeling of happiness it could bring in its wake to this new blogger. Then another recognition came along the way as the blog got listed in the Directory of Top Blogs in India and Most widely Read Indian Bloggers maintained by http://indianbloggers.org/ . The web page exists to this day. In fact when one searches in Google with the search criterion "Best Indian Blogger", one can get the link to the above list of blogs. Getting something like this, I think, is an achievement...and a heartening one at that!

Should I say that I have been successful in my blogging pursuit? Going by the statistics of sitemeter as on 26th November 2012 there have been 13873 visitors so far viewing 19419 pages during their visits. According to clustermap a total of 13801 visitors have visited the site since 2006. As per Blogger’s overview which only keeps count of pageviews, there have been 32,446 all-time page views so far. Going by the comments count, only 414 comments accrued to the posts and that too only when I include my own replies to those comments. Of course, I do not approve of such comments that land in my spam folder. For a six-year old blog, this is so meager a figure. And I should have long reflected on the lower visitors’ turnout.

Come to think of it, there is one weakness in my blogging that I should have remedied from the beginning. And that is the lack of any serious attempt at blog promotion. Of course, there are occasions I have visited other blogs of matching topics and left some topic-related comments there. That is what I have resorted to with the hope that those blog-owners would return their visits and leave their comments about my blogging quality and so on. But the painstaking formula of genuine reciprocity has never worked, at least not to an extent as I would have liked. I have resisted the desire to accept the offers of link exchange for the simple reason that such offers have not come from blogs that are similar in contents. Besides,there has been little or no attempt to churn out those words and sentences that would endorse a product or subscribe to a trend that has a big following. I have consciously avoided clever methods of packaging my contents with advertorial objectives or subscribing to the reigning controversies and hullabaloo just to improve the prospect of appearing high on results of search engines. Even successful bloggers have taken advantage of microblogging and social network to promote their blogs and divert visitors. I have not done any of that fearing that I might have to dilute the ethos of my blog in the process.

And what about my content? Are my posts really reader-friendly? They are only long ones, barring of course those crisp humorous posts. There are far too many long stories whereas the average visitors like shorter pieces, say 500-word length articles at the max. Secondly, there are posts that make it a public diary, cramming quite a lot of personal brags into it. A serious blogger interested in pleasing [wooing] visitors should rather talk about mission to mars than cover his own book review function. Talking about others, especially in their own language reflecting their own likes and dislikes, would have brought more visitors—I can hardly overemphasise it.

I have, however, no pressure on me to be so much popularity conscious…and then to leverage that popularity for some ad income. What I'm interested in is expressing what goads me from within. I have so far kept my blog advertisement-free. When I come to read about blogs earning enough through advertisement, I've difficulty in getting convinced about it. It is just not credible. Why should people come to read a blog just to click an ad appearing in it and then buy the product? There are websites providing for online sale and they specialize in that. Anyway, as I checked one site that evaluates blogs [http://www.statscrop.com/www/ramblingnanda.blogspot.nl], there is some information about that. Its Alexa rank is #1306 in the world. As per its calculation, my blog has a daily revenue of $2101 USD and the website is worth: $771,659 USD!! Quite funny as a piece of information I must say. Shouldn't I treat it an internet hoax?
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By
A N Nanda
Bhubaneswar
25-11-2012
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