About a year ago, I started this blog as a means of penning down my ideas and to share interesting stories that I find around me or on the Internet. My primary focus was on articles bordering on innovations and evolution of technology and how it affects, especially, Nigerians. Quite a noble idea, if I may say so, but how well have we fared after one year?

With a monthly average of about 2,500 visits and a viewership of almost 4,000 (Source : Google Analytics), one can not say the blog has fared badly, not at all. But how well has it fared viz-a-viz other Nigerian Blogs? Not very well, I daresay.

You see, as noble as the intentions of this blog are, the dream of every blogger is to have his blog listed among Technorati’s Top 100 blogs in the world, putting one’s blog in the same league as “The Huffington Post”, “Mashable” and “Techcrunch”. And if the last ranking of Nigerian blogs is anything to go by, being ranked with “Ogbonge Blog”, “Bella” would definitely not be a bad idea.

I read up articles on how to improve the visibility of blogs and carried out the following recommendations;
– Search Engine Optimisation (Check)
– Quality Content (Check)
– Frequency of posts (Ehm, well, check. Hey, I need to earn a living!)
– Blog Networking (check)

After this, there was a slight improvement in the rankings but it was barely noticeable.

So, in the quest to make things better, I decided to take a stroll around the Internet, to see what makes these other blogs tick, and to find out exactly what it is they talk about that viewers find interesting. My findings were eye opening. People find blogs dealing in certain contents more attractive than others. Oh well, I should have known this, my wife never visits my blog, shouldn’t that have told me something? She always complain about me talking about nothing else but Linux, Computer, iPad! Well …

From my findings, blogs that have the following contents seem to excel more than others (not in any order);

– Social news and gossips
– Mobile News
– Free Browsing, mobile hacks, etc
– Online Business : How to make money online without lifting a finger!
– Free this, free that!
– Guys, what else?

This really did set me thinking, do I join the bandwagon? I am damn sure I would excel talking about hacks and the likes, it has always been a major attraction to me. However, one may have to consider the ethical aspect of this, the reason why the blog has only dealt sparingly on this topic. I recently penned a write-up on how to unlock your Etisalat dual SIM phone, you can only guess the number of viewership the topic had!

Thinking seriously, I felt the reason for this blog is to share ideas and not necessarily for commercial gains (Not that I would mind though) and obviously, the articles on the blog seem to fill the needs of a few people, and most importantly, I am happy doing what I do. So why change?

You see, I am a Geek, a Geek by birth and inclination (Borrowing from Wole Soyinka’s words) and anything short of the blog content would amount to not being true to oneself. I only hope and pray that “Insha Allah, By God’s Grace” (Borrowing, again, from the words of my high school teacher), this blog would get to the top of all rankings, someday.

PS: This article was meant to coincide with the birthday of my darling wife, I actually penned it about 2 weeks ago, but couldn’t find the time to type it out! So much for frequency of posts!!

Happy Birthday, Dear. Happy Birthday, “Diary of a Geek”