200,000 and Counting

 

200,000

Somewhere along the way, without me really paying attention, The Sage Writer Blog passed 200,000 pageviews.

Two hundred thousand.

That number is a little difficult for me to wrap my head around.

When I first started putting my writing online, I never imagined hundreds of thousands of people would eventually stumble across anything I had written. Honestly, I was pretty sure my readership consisted primarily of my mom and my grandma. And maybe a couple of people who accidentally clicked the wrong link.

But apparently, somewhere along the way, people started reading.

The funny thing is, The Sage Writer didn't really begin with some grand plan. There was no business model, marketing strategy, or carefully crafted plan to build an audience. I was simply writing.

In fact, it didn’t start as The Sage Writer at all.

I first created my own domain called The Authors Web. It was not only a place to publish the stuff I wrote, but also a chance to learn about managing a website.

One thing I learned is that posting to a website every time you get the inclination to write is a pain in the butt.

That is when I converted The Authors Web into a blogging format. Much easier to maintain and format.

The first domain was with WordPress. Being the cheapskate I am, I did not want to pay for a domain merely for the sake of blogging. That is when I found Blogger.

A format more conducive to what I needed.

And free!

I changed the name to The Sage Writer...

And here we are.

As I've been digging back through old files recently, trying to find the beginning of this whole adventure, I discovered that my earliest identifiable piece in what I had labeled my Old Blog archive was written in September of 2011.

It was called:

Girls Gone Wild-erness

The title alone probably tells you everything you need to know about where this was headed.

It was the story of an all-girls pack trip into the Frank Church Wilderness. At the time, I was also writing for SBBCH, and I honestly don't remember whether Girls Gone Wild-erness ever made it onto my own website. It may have. It may not have. Digital archaeology is apparently harder than it looks…and I did that very thing for a living for over 20 years.

But that piece was there, sitting in my old files, dated September 14, 2011.

A little over a year later, on January 23, 2013, I published what appears to be the first actual post I can find from my Sagewriter WordPress blog.

It was called:

Let's Ride!

“You know how it is, at the spur of the moment you get a hankering to saddle up your trusty stead and hit the trail. It sure would be nice if you had a little company on that trail...”

It wasn't a dramatic declaration of my arrival as a writer.

It was basically me saying, Hey, I want to go riding. Anybody want to come along?

That seems about right.

Not long after that came one of the stories that changed things a little.

Annie's Story

That story started getting attention.

Annie’s Story was about a barter mule I…well, bartered for. People seemed to gravitate toward it.

For the first time, my little corner of the internet climbed to over 1,000 hits. I remember being amazed. One thousand people? Reading something I wrote?

At that point, I was still probably wondering how many of them were my mom checking in repeatedly to make me feel successful.

But then things settled down again.

And for years, I just kept writing.

Stories about horses. Pack trips. Wilderness adventures. Dogs. Christmas. Things that went right. Things that went spectacularly wrong. A lot of things that went spectacularly wrong, actually.  Stories from the trail and stories from life.

There were no fireworks. No viral explosion. No moment when I suddenly woke up and thought, Well, look at me. I've made it.

I just wrote.

Then I retired.

And I hit the road on my first, and quite spontaneous, adventure to Arizona.

For reasons that made perfect sense to me at the time, I called this adventure:

The Pumpkin Cheesecake Diaries

And something happened.

The blog traffic took off. The hit counter started spinning faster than a Vegas slot machine.

I don't know exactly why that series connected with people the way it did. Maybe it was the adventure. Maybe it was the journey. Maybe people were curious to see what would happen when a recently retired woman packed up, without a clue, a plan or a sense of direction, and headed toward Arizona. I imagine a few of them came for the misadventure. Who doesn’t feel compelled to watch a good train wreck?

Or maybe it was the pumpkin cheesecake.

I remember now how that name came about. Before leaving on that first trip to Arizona, I had made a pumpkin cheesecake and brought it along for the journey. At the end of a day filled with adventure, misadventure, or whatever the day had decided to throw at me, I'd stop somewhere for the night, set up camp, and have myself a slice.

It became a ritual. No matter how crazy the day had been, how many things had gone sideways, or what new adventure I had managed to stumble into, I could sit down at the end of it all with a piece of pumpkin cheesecake.

The weirdest part: I don’t like pumpkin pie. Not even a little. I do, however, LOVE anything cream cheese and apparently, enough cream cheese can make even pumpkin tolerable!

Whatever the reason, people started finding the blog. And then more people found it.

The strange thing about writing online is that you don't always know who is sitting on the other side of the screen. You write something while sitting alone at your computer, hit Publish, and send it out into the great electronic wilderness.

Then life goes on.

You write another story.

And another.

Sometimes you look at the numbers. Mostly you don't.

Until one day you glance up and realize that somehow...

200,000 people have stopped by.

I have no idea who most of them are.

Some may have stayed for a single story. Some may have wandered in looking for information about horses or the wilderness and accidentally ended up reading about my dogs, my adventures, or whatever ridiculous situation I had managed to get myself into that week.

Some may have been bots.

Probably a few. Probably more than a few. Likely a good 199,000 of them are bots. I’m OK with that…bot lives matter too!

But even if half the internet is made up of robots wandering around clicking links, there are still an awful lot of real people behind that number and they couldn't all be my mom and grandma! 

I will take it. Because when I started this journey, I wasn't trying to build an audience of 200,000 pageviews.

I was just writing.

From Girls Gone Wild-erness, written back in 2011...

To Annie's Story, when I first realized that maybe someone besides my mom was actually reading...

To The Pumpkin Cheesecake Diaries, when the little blog suddenly found a life of its own...

And now, somehow, here we are.

200,000 pageviews.

That's a pretty long trail from where I started.

So thank you to everyone who has ever stopped by, read a story, laughed at something ridiculous, followed an adventure, or simply wandered through my little corner of the internet. Even if you are a bot -  I appreciate you, too. 

Apparently, when I said “Let's Ride!” back in 2013...

Some of you actually came along.

And for that, I am incredibly grateful. ❤

Well....I'll be damned