Around the world in 50 blog posts....Wait - make that 100 countries in 65 blog posts!

An Update

When I originally posted this on April 2nd, 2012, I was pretty amazed that in 5 months my blog had reached into 50 countries around the world. Today, just about two additional months later, the blog was read by someone in another country. To the person in Nigeria that read my blog giving me 100 countries, thank you very much. To all of you who have read and (hopefully) will continue to read my future posts, a big thank you. I hope you continue to find it interesting and informative.

When I started writing this blog, I did it mostly for myself. You other blogger understand, right? We all think we have something to say and that people will flock to our sites to hear it (OK, read it), leave glowing comments, and holler (at least figuratively) for more.

However, after I had a few blog posts under my belt, I found out building an audience was a little harder than I had realized. My wife was reading it -- thanks honey. I quickly twisted the arms of few people I work with to read it too. Beyond that, who knew. So I set up a twitter account and started shamelessly plugging my blog. I established a Reluctant Foodie Facebook page and posted a link to every blog entry there. I even started a Pinterest account and posted pictures from the blog hoping people would link back.

Like many bloggers, I became addicted to watching the page hit number roll up daily, weekly and monthly. Getting that first 100 hit day was exciting and reaching 1000 total page hits seemed staggering to me at the time. Now, I average nearly 100 hits per day, but recently I'm more fascinated by the geographical reach this blog seems to be getting.

Like most blogging platforms, Blogger provides an integrated stats tracker. Embedded in the package is a feature that identifies the country that each page hit comes from. I began keeping track of each new country that hit my blog. Yeah, I was that kid in grade school that really, really liked geography. This week, I wrote my 50th blog post. I also received a hit from my 50th different country, Croatia! At some level, I am amazed that people all over the world are reading the words I write here.

I won't bore you by listing all fifty, but I have had people from 6 continents (come on, there must be someone doing research down in Antarctica with an internet connection and some free time on their hands), and two places I had to look up, Montenegro and St. Pierre & Miquelon (I bet you need to look this one up too). I feel so, um, global. There seems to be some controversy about how many countries exist in the world today -- the numbers range from 195-198 depending on who's counting them. In any case, I have quite a few more to go, but knowing I've had readers in more than 25% still seems pretty cool.

Thanks everyone.