I was looking at my dashboard today and realized I had crossed the 9,000 posts mark, which means that I’ve been average around 3 blog posts daily for the past 8 years or so!! I never thought I’d be blogging for this long and I’m not planning on stopping any time soon since I’m still enjoying it.

I hear a lot of people claiming that blogging is dead, but I disagree. If you’re not reading blogs, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. Nevertheless, things have changed and relying on a simple blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger is no longer enough nowadays, as you need to integrate them with your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages but at the end of the day, it all goes back to the website which, I believe, still gives a certain identity to the author that no instagram or FB page can. It’s definitely challenging and takes a lot of time and dedication, and that’s probably why there aren’t that many bloggers around anymore.

My Google Analytics stats pretty much confirm what I said above. The number of page views has remained steady in the past couple of years but it’s widespread now across several social networks. A lot of people tend to read my captions on FB without clicking on the URL while others go directly to blogbaladi.com without using Facebook. In fact, and during the past 12 months, 57.4% of the blog’s traffic came from organic search, while 23.7% came from direct search and only 16.2% from social channels.

As far as Instagram is concerned, it is a less serious platform for me where I share pictures, funny and personal stories and experiences, and from time to time worthy collaborations or blogposts. Getting proper engagement there is quite challenging (unless you’re hot chick) and I’m still not able to grasp how one can properly grow his instagram page. [If anyone has suggestions on that, they’re more than welcome to share them].

All in all, I’m grateful for all those who have been following the blog for so long and here’s to celebrating 10,000 posts in the coming months!