An Appreciation Note To You As My Blog Wins Top Lifestyle Blog of Africa.
June 3rd will forever be embedded in my memory. There I was with my hair royally covered in hibiscus and honey hair mask after some days of neglect. I was working from home with my intern and training her on instagram marketing when I saw a Twitter notification on my iPhone. My heart stopped but miraculously I didn’t drop dead.
Congratulations to @OyooQuartey, winner for top Lifestyle blog in Africa. #ABA2016 https://t.co/aqZrtkhMSg
— AfricanBloggerAwards (@African_Blogger) June 3, 2016
My blog had won Top Lifestyle Blog of Africa for 2016 at the African Bloggers Awards! I jumped up screaming in the most girlish manner possible! Ellie my intern looked up sharply at the unpredictable movement .
I showed her the screen. She started screaming! We screamed together! I could barely stop my fingers from typing a message to my boyfriend on the news. He was dumbfounded.
Then I posted to Facebook in words I could hardly muster or think of. This is all I could come up with.
Other Ghanaian bloggers; Kobby Blay and Circumspecte had also won respective awards in different categories. Congratulations to them both for unwavering passion to create content on public health, entrepreneurship and social issues.
I wasn’t expecting this award and to be honest I had forgotten that I had submitted my blog into the African Bloggers Awards, which had been about a month earlier.
The African Bloggers Awards uses metrics using Webfluential to determine a blog’s specific engagement and readership.
According to the organizers, “The awards aim to recognise and honour the best bloggers on the continent in the fairest way possible by measuring their actual influence and traffic.”
Out of the bottom of my heart, I just wanted to say THANK YOU to you my reader. I cant imagine creating content which no-one reads or shows interest in. Of course there are strategies to get traffic to your blog but without you hanging around to read what I share (whether I post a new blogpost or not), without you who has subscribed to the blog, downloaded the blog app or saved my RSS feed what would this blog be but just another blog in a black hole. Thank you for reading, your comments, resharing and reposting my posts!
When I started blogging five years ago, I put my heart into it. I started writing on things which bothered me and what I was doing to change them. I wrote to share the side of Ghanaian culture, which many do not see on the internet; our food, fashion, events, relationships, etc. I wrote to talk about things that many people were afraid to write on and discovered that delivering value to the lives of people was the key to increasing my readership. That is a TIP you should keep in your ‘ Botom’ if you have a blog or thinking of a business idea. What value are you going to add to someone’s life?
Thank you again! I am encouraged and uplifted! Trust me when I say that it’s not easy creating content in Ghana. There have been times when I don’t feel like lifting a finger to tap on the keys and times when I have questioned myself and what I was doing. During those times, I would get an email from a total stranger who would show appreciation for what I was putting out there. That email alone brings a smile to face and lifts me up from the bed at 5am to get to work.
Thank you again! I can’t say enough thank you’s . Oyuwala donn! I am so looking forward to adding more value to your life through this blog. God is good! Peace!
Here is the full list of the 2016 African Bloggers Awards.
