“Why do people follow our blog?” is a question I’ve been asking myself for some time, but I suppose there’s a parallel question “why do I write a blog?” so let’s answer that first.
Our original blog was to publicise our charity work in Nepal, Nepal Schools Aid, though when we retired from the charity work we began a travel blog that was current with our actual daily travelling, not written several days or weeks later. It’s aim was to keep our family and friends in touch with us and to engage with us when we were thousands of miles away. Then when we weren’t travelling we started to add articles on local stuff such as walks in the countryside, local history especially connected to the many churches we visited, politics mostly related to Brexit, and philosophical stuff about entering old age. Photography and food interested us too ……. and of course our hobby of wine collecting, so we wrote about that too.
What we found over two years was that our number of followers increased to around 350, not a large number compared to some of you, but a satisfying return on our efforts. But numbers of followers doesn’t equate to “engagement” as we are now realising and therefore leads to our initial question, “why do people follow our blog.”
I’ve already mentioned that we have about 350 followers, but …… we rarely get more than 20 hits per day unless we have written something political, then we get up to 100 hits plus loads and loads of spam, mostly from Russian [?] bots, but easy to deal with. We get one or two comments if we’re lucky [thank you Andrew, Darlene and Ron] and that’s it! So, despite analysing for the best days and times to post and sticking to them we only get less than 5% of followers who even read what we write! I even tried separating my political stuff into a different blog but that didn’t work either.

About a year ago we found similar stats from LinkedIn and Instagram with over 1000 followers on each but only 2% or so who engaged; we wiped out 90% from each and chose who we wanted to follow us from that day forward. Much more satisfying as the % of people engaged increased but of course the actual number remained the same.
So why do people follow and not engage in any way? Looking for ideas maybe, plagiarism, stealing your images, or maybe they just followed us as newcomers to WordPress and got bored with it, or maybe they got bored with our article topics or style? Whatever the reason I’M BLOODY FED UP OF IT, but unlike other social media accounts you can’t delete people from following you ….. which I would find immensely satisfying!

Day One Journal

So, from next week when we holiday in Malaga I’m going to START writing MORE in my personal private journal, STOP writing “travel guide stuff” on the blog, and START writing “philosophical stuff” solely for personal gratification. I might do the odd book review too, with “odd” being the operative word as you can see from my Goodreads widget on this page. Might even change the name of the blog too.
And finally……. is there anybody there ……? Do let us know you’re all still alive, or just stop following, we really won’t be offended.

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: bloggers, Blogging, social media, Wordpress