When No One Reads Your Blog – Confessions of a Stubborn Word-Lover

Or how to spend hours writing something that three people might read. Two of whom could be bots.

There is a particular kind of optimism involved in writing a blog.

You sit down with a cup of coffee, an idea in your head and the firm belief that the world has been patiently waiting for your next literary masterpiece.

You write. You delete. You rewrite. You spend twenty minutes deciding whether a sentence sounds better with a comma or a full stop. You search for the perfect photograph, adjust the headline for the fifth time and finally press Publish.

And then you wait.

Perhaps someone will leave a comment. Perhaps an old friend will share your story. Perhaps a complete stranger somewhere in Scotland will read it over breakfast and think, “Well, that was rather good.”

You check the statistics.

Three visitors.

One of them was probably you.

Welcome to the glamorous world of blogging.

The World Has Better Things to Do. Apparently.

I have nothing against modern technology. Quite the opposite. Without it, Lizz and I wouldn’t be able to share our little adventures between Germany, the Philippines and wherever else life takes us.

But I do sometimes wonder what happened to people’s attention spans.

We live in a world where a dancing cat can attract a million viewers, someone peeling a banana in an unusual way becomes an internet sensation, and a video of a man falling off a chair gets shared halfway around the planet.

Meanwhile, you spend an entire afternoon writing about something that actually matters to you.

And the internet responds with a deafening silence.

Perhaps I should try falling off a chair while reading one of my articles. That might improve the statistics.

The problem is that I love words.

Not just the quick ones that fit beneath a photograph or those carefully selected hashtags that are supposed to make everything suddenly popular.

I love proper stories. Stories that take their time. Stories that wander off the main road occasionally, discover something unexpected and return with a completely different point of view.

Rather like our travels, come to think of it.

Unfortunately, stories like that don’t always fit comfortably into a fifteen-second video.

A Little Herzblut Goes a Long Way

In German, we have a wonderful word: Herzblut.

Literally translated, it means heart’s blood. Rather dramatic, I admit, but the Germans do have a talent for making perfectly ordinary emotions sound like something from a medical emergency.

What it really means is putting your heart and soul into something.

And that’s precisely what I do when I write.

Whether I’m remembering a journey, describing the peculiarities of life in the Philippines, or explaining why a decent German sausage is surprisingly difficult to replace, there’s always a bit of myself between the lines.

Sometimes more than I intended.

Writing isn’t simply putting words on a screen. It’s remembering things, sorting through thoughts, occasionally laughing at yourself and sometimes discovering what you actually feel about something.

And yes, it’s also correcting the same spelling mistake three times because your fingers apparently refuse to cooperate with your brain.

All that takes time.

Which makes it slightly disappointing when the result receives less attention than a photograph of somebody’s lunch.

Although, to be fair, some lunches do look rather impressive.

The Dangerous Temptation of the Statistics Page

You promise yourself you won’t check the visitor statistics again. Then you do.

Just once.

Well, perhaps twice.

Or every time you happen to pass the computer.

You tell yourself that you’re only interested in understanding your audience. A perfectly respectable explanation.

In reality, you’re hoping that somewhere, somehow, the numbers have suddenly exploded.

They haven’t.

And that’s when the questions begin.

Is my writing simply not good enough?

Are the stories too long?

Should I write shorter articles? Add more pictures? Make everything sound more exciting?

Should I start every headline with “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”?

Actually, that last one might work.

But it wouldn’t really be me.

And that’s the difficulty. Of course I want people to read what I write. Otherwise, I could simply keep a diary, lock it in a drawer and save myself the trouble of maintaining a website.

But I don’t want to turn every story into a desperate attempt to please an algorithm.

Somewhere along the way, the pleasure of writing would disappear.

And that would be a rather high price to pay for a few extra clicks.

So Why Bother Writing at All?

It’s a fair question.

After all, nobody is forcing me to sit in front of a computer and wrestle with sentences when I could be doing something considerably more productive.

Like taking a nap.

Or making another cup of coffee.

Or finally sorting out those photographs that have been sitting on my hard drive for years.

But the answer is actually quite simple.

I write because I enjoy writing.

And perhaps, years from now, Lizz and I will look back through these articles and remember places, people and moments that would otherwise have faded into the background.

Our blog is, after all, a collection of our lives. Not every story needs to attract thousands of visitors to deserve a place in it.

Perhaps Somewhere, Someone Is Reading

There’s another thought that keeps me going.

Maybe somebody really is reading.

Not necessarily today. Perhaps not even this month.

But somewhere, at some ridiculous hour of the night, a stranger might stumble across one of our articles.

Perhaps they’re planning a journey to the Philippines. Perhaps they miss Germany. Perhaps they’re wondering what life between two cultures actually feels like.

Or perhaps they simply have five minutes to spare and are tired of watching dancing cats.

They read a story. They smile. Maybe they recognise something from their own life.

And then they move on without leaving a comment or pressing a like button. Their visit may show up in the statistics, but the numbers cannot tell me what the story meant to them.

Unless they tell me, I may never know whether it made them laugh, helped with a journey or brought back a memory.

The Stubborn Blogger Carries On

So, am I going to stop writing because the internet isn’t exactly queuing up to read my latest thoughts?

Probably not.

I’m far too stubborn for that.

Besides, I’ve still got stories to tell. Places to remember. Recipes to argue about. Cultural misunderstandings to laugh at. And quite possibly a few opinions that nobody asked for.

Especially those.

More readers and conversations would be lovely, of course.

I’ll make another coffee, open another blank page and start wondering how to turn the next little adventure into something worth reading.

And if the audience consists of three people, well, that’s three more than none.

Assuming they’re all real people.

And if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this article, thank you.

You’ve already done something increasingly rare in our scrolling world.

You’ve actually read something.

Now, if you could just leave a little comment, I might finally be able to prove that my audience isn’t entirely made up of robots.

Cheers,

Andi