Confessions of a blogger

I have never considered myself a writer. On the other hand, I am an avid reader and I can just be as happy if I am only surrounded by the most intriguing books. Having been introduced into the blogging world, and the success of bloggers like Linda, Bella Naija and Co, it seemed so easy to establish a blog and make money from it. I always said to myself that  'ah this is so easy if Linda can do it and make millions from it, I can also do it and earn a lot'.

So one day, about 2 years ago I went to Google and registered my blog. I never got myself to actually start blogging because I just didn't know what to blog about and the interest wasn't that high. So after I moved here, I found myself being overwhelmed by all these experiences that comes with living in a foreign land, and with virtually no one to share it with, I got up one night, logged into my blog and began to type away my experiences. I then changed the original name of the blog to what we have now.

When I started, apart from wanting to share my experiences with other people who could relate with me, I was also motivated by one other thing: Money!. I couldn't wait to start making money from blogging and I immediately registered for adsense. After my account was approved, every other minute, I would check my adsense account to see how much I was making.

"This is going too slow, I thought.... When would I start making the millions I see other bloggers earning?"

Then after a week of concentrating so much on how much I could make, and not seeing any positive results, I realized how tiring it was chasing after the money. It didn't make me enjoy blogging as much as I did when I started. Instead of focusing on the wonderful comments and the encouraging mails I was receiving from readers, I was getting disappointed in my inability to earn much. Also the blogging became more like a job, where you are working with the expectation to get paid but at the end of the month there was no salary

Then it hit me: that I appreciate the priceless benefits I get from blogging.  The fact that I actually have a platform to share my thoughts with the word, the feeling of knowing there are people who can relate with me one way or the other, knowing that I get to immortilise my views and experiences somehow, or the fact that there are people who take time out of their schedules just to visit my blog and read what I have to offer and even knowing that I get to make people smile sometimes. After realizing all these I stopped being stressed out about the money aspects and I actually was beginning to enjoy what I was doing again. I stopped feeling disappointed about my low earnings and rather, I was content even if only one person read my posts.

I haven't even logged into Adsense in a long while, not to say the money is not important but its actually not my focus right now. Maybe I might earn millions, maybe not, but that really is not important. What matters to me right now is allowing readers into my mind and building a close knit readership base.