A million and counting …

ABOUT BECOMING A BLOG MILLIONAIRE

(Posted 14th August 2015)

ATC News by Wolfgang H. Thome

AVIATION, TOURISM & CONSERVATION NEWS FROM EASTERN AFRICA & THE Indian Ocean ISLANDS

Five years and a bit down the road, since I started this blog – choosing WordPress over its various rivals for its range of user friendly features and their support staff’s excellent feedback and interaction – and a figure beyond my wildest dreams, a special milestone, a moment to both reflect and celebrate is reached.

Today I counted my one millionth visitor to ATC News as it is now called, a million captured IP addresses from around the world of people who are keen to get the latest news, re-blogs, features and opinion pieces from Africa, covering a vast area from the two Sudans and the Horn of Africa all the way down south to Zambia and Zimbabwe, the countries in between and of course the Indian Ocean islands.

The start was slow. Initially, and for too long in retrospect, I only posted a summary of my daily articles on a weekly basis. For those of my regular readers who were following me from the start, this was not good enough and they minced no words when breaking news came their way days after the event. As a result did the format change to daily summaries, later to be changed again to individual posts as and when events happened and my articles were ready to be shared.

As I write this my blog stats show that I have over the years filed over 7.140 articles and posts which, almost predictably, attracted nearly 1.3 million spam responses kept away from sight by WordPress’ Akismet spam watch dog. It seems the more successful one gets the more attempts are recorded to hack and spam the account, especially when ‘hot stuff’ has been published.

The advance in leaps and bounds of social media and new features and tools available allowed my blog posts on WordPress to be cross loaded to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, widening their reach and bringing ever more readers on board.

Two years ago my reader count stood at just around 370.000 and from that point on began to climb steadily. After the half million mark did I eye the 750.000th reader and from then onwards it was just turning into a race towards the full million.

In addition do over 7.700 aviation and travel trade journalists and professionals subscribe directly to the blog, getting the latest posts delivered to their email inbox the moment an article is posted. This has led to syndicated publishing of many of my articles in other media, to a point where Google regularly picks my material for their Google News. Sadly do not all provide author’s credit including some pseudo scribes masquerading as journalists who think that copy and paste does the job, some only learning lessons of journalistic integrity the hard way when their publishers came down hard on them.

I am not sure yet what format my celebration will take, if my feet will do the happy dance under my desk, perhaps a special brew of Theodore tea but one thing I do know is that my thanks go to all my subscribers and all my readers for making this happen.

If my blog helped to put Africa, and Eastern Africa in particular, on the global map, then much good has come out of my daily, or rather nightly effort to share the news I get from many sources across the region. To them goes a very special thank you today. Many make the effort sharing breaking news and in fact often ‘hot stuff’ at some personal risk of being found out, with poaching and environmental issues from Tanzania perhaps ranking highest on that scale. Protecting their identity is paramount for their safety and important to make sure that these individuals continue to share their news and views which I can then reflect in my articles. I do what has to be done to conceal their identity and play my part to ensure they are not outed, at times even leaving out details which might lead the snoopy dogs right to them.

Promising young travel bloggers I happily offer the opportunity to write and get published to give them a head start and that will continue of course while the bulk of the material continues to come directly out of my own keyboard which substituted the old days’ pen. That will continue as long as I can, even after one regular reader (and dedicated fan) raised the pertinent question what would happen to the blog should I be knocked over by a bus, or something of the sort. Well, we shall cross that bridge when we reach it, to a large part due to my sources across the region and beyond sharing their tip offs and hints with me and me alone, making a succession of sorts difficult at best and impossible at worst.

Those valued if not outright prized sources and my readers are the two groups without which my blog would not exist and I pay tribute to every individual who has helped me to accomplish reaching the million reader mark.

Many of my sources as well as readers, often out of the blue really, give me words of encouragement and I thank those most sincerely. To them I say: ‘You have no idea how often your kind words have come in the nick of time, when, tired to the bone after being mobbed once again I looked in the mirror and wondered why I bothered. That we reached the million mark today I credit to you who never stopped your support and moral boosts’.

What I do, day in and night out, is a constant struggle to find the time to process all the information I get because, after all, this is a free service, enjoyed by my readers free of cost to them. There is no paid for advertising on the blog (yet) apart from two special arrangements, one with my ISP Smile Uganda which has provided me with the fastest and most reliable internet connection available in our land and the other one with Brussels Airlines. Hotel and other tourism businesses and airlines getting good reviews do not pay for what I write, ensuring that, while I do not hide my sympathies for some over others, I can write the way I see things and not what their PR and Corp Comms departments would like me to write.

Some might do well to remember that this therefore is a volunteered service to, by and large anyway, promote East Africa and the continent and its islands in the Indian Ocean. I seek no nominations for prizes or awards – in fact I have turned down a few nominations and repeatedly refused to nominate myself when prodded to do so – nor do I seek the public limelight. It is perhaps that integrity which has in the past ensured that I often get information ahead even of the mainstream media when it comes to aviation events or conservation issues. My sources after all know, that while the story goes out there is no self-aggrandizement involved as the focus is on the story, not the writer.

Asante Sana, Webare Nyo, Merci, Thank you and Danke Schoen to my readers and my sources! Time for that cup of tea now and then back to bring you the real news of today.