Four years ago, on a drab winter day, I was sitting in my room in Southwark, an unremarkable part of London, when I decided to set up this blog. I had already published many articles and several books Until then, I had only written some letters to newspapers, some of them published, some of them not, but I wanted to have my own medium, without an editor that you need to bribe with expensive cigars.
Today, while I was out jogging in Târgu Mureș in Romania, where I now live after having lived in three other countries between London and now, my blog crossed the threshold of one million all-time views.
That means that my blog has about 685 views per day on average. It’s shocking how many people are wasting their time like this, and that doesn’t even take into account my blog in German and the many people who print out articles to show them around at the office.
Looking at the posts which have been the all-time hits, there are some expected ones, like legal advice for free, travel advice and of course anything involving boobs. Many of you are shockingly predictable.
However, I don’t understand the popularity of all of these articles. Seriously, how many people had to look up where Lithuania is? And if 7,693 people have looked at my wishlist of books, why haven’t I received that many book presents? Lastly, if 9,630 people have looked at my CV, why haven’t I received a single job offer?
The sad thing from a blogger’s perspective is that many posts into which I put a lot of effort or for which I risk my life (like my video blogs) are not very popular at all.
I could have guessed that you are weird from looking at the search terms that you use to find my blog:
Twice as many people find my blog by searching for “pussy” than are searching for my name. In my four years of blogging, I haven’t had a harsher reality check than this. And I am not even a girl! – I will also never understand the 824 people who simply enter “no” in a search engine.
More uplifting is the international distribution of my readership. Although it is of course skewed towards countries with a lot of people, a lot of internet and a lot of time on their hands, I am still proud that I have had visitors from 220 countries so far. Have a look at the flag banner on the right hand side for the up-to-date figures.
There are however a few countries which really need to catch up (although it’s nice that the Pope checked my blog 6 times already):
If you are the tourism minister of one of these states, I recommend that you invite me to visit your country. That should increase these numbers and it will give you great publicity in the rest of the world.
The Happy Hermit 
“Twice as many people find my blog by searching for “pussy” than are searching for my name.”
I wonder if that is just because of how popular it is to search for “pussy”. If you compiled a similar list for any other website, “pussy” would probably score pretty high no matter what the website is about.
But you would think that there are enough porn websites that my blog shouldn’t show up among the first search results. Either these porn sites’ SEO is bad, or people are so desperate to continue to page 37 of the Google search results.
Hello Andreas, my compliment for your success and your committment! By the way, I’ve just come back from Southwalk.
The top three visitors are to be expected, but it’s rather surprising to see Malta be #4. You must really strike a chord with the Maltese people, especially when you consider the percentage of people that are giving you views. Congratulations.
That is largely due to me having lived in Malta for 6 months, but I am also surprised that it had such a lasting effect. Either the Maltese miss me dearly or they want to check my blog every day to be warned when I’ll be back.
I forgot about your stint there. Apparently you didn’t leave a good impression in the Baltic nations.
After I explained why Lithuania is part of Eastern Europe, some people there hated me.
Where do Lithuanians think they are located?
They want to be part of Northern Europe or even Scandinavia.
Well a complete lack of Norse heritage kind of puts a damper on that. Estonia does have a lot of ties with Sweden and Finland, but Lithuania’s on its own.
Congratulations!!! What an amazing achievement :) We hope to get there one day!
Dude, your searches are nowhere as weird as mine…relax. (today, for instance, somebody found my blog – don’t ask me how or why!! – by typing “what type of banana makes you fart”. Seriously.)
(oh, and yesterday there was a “tea that makes you fart” – to be fair, I did write a fart post LOL, but I swear I never mentioned any types of tea or bananas that make people fart :P)
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Congrats on crossing million views!
Why don’t you enable advertisements on your blog? You could earn around $100-150 per month.
Don’t people find that annoying?
I do. Or I did, until I installed an AdBlocker. But I don’t know of the AdBlocker works on tablets and phones.
No, because even if you won’t, then WordPress will itself places ads in your blog randomly to support its blog & traffic. If you don’t want ads to appear on your blog then you have to purchase plans for it, check here https://wordpress.com/about-these-ads/
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Are you a billionaire yet Andreas?
Not yet, unfortunately. :-(
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