If you've managed to somehow stumble across this blog, the first thing your likely to ask yourself is what it's all about. So let me explain...
My name is Ashraf Stakala and I am a 23 year old 'Electrical Engineer' and football fanatic from Cape Town, South Africa. Exactly a year ago I started a football(soccer) blog called SA Football Fans.co.za The blog became quite popular after about 8 months of blogging. I was getting good traffic, Google loved me(ranked #1 for the keyword 'football' on Google SA), my Alexa Rank was 83k and I was earning some decent money from Google Adsense and other affiliate networks. I was even receiving invitations to attend exclusive media launches directly from FIFA, while also having the pleasure of doing some work with Coca-Cola and Nike. Everything was going great. Or was it?
I found myself being consumed by the blog and the 'blogger lifestyle'.I would spend hours online, searching for interesting new stories, learning SEO techniques, updating the blog(I posted at least 3 times a day, 5-6 times on weekends) and spending time on various social networking sites like twitter. My friends and family were taking a back seat in my life while I was busy building the next big blog. My career and studies were also taking strain as a result of me getting about 4-5 hours of sleep a night! I started to get frustrated with running the blog. The constant updates, the late nights, it was all getting too much for me and this is when I knew I had to stop. I had to get away from the hustle and bustle of running a successful blog. So yesterday I decided to stop running www.safootballfans.co.za
I have decided to take a different route, focusing on sharpening my writing skills as I try to become a freelance writer while I complete my Degree in Engineering. This will be my testing ground. The platform where I will work on improving my writing skills until I'm good enough to write for successful websites like goal.com or soccerlens, because for me it was never really about the money. I just love football and enjoy writing about it.
That is my story in a nutshell. Thank you for taking the time to read my new blog, I hope you'll join me on this journey....
Dude, all the best for the direction you taking, I'm sure it's for the best, you know you always welcome you always welcome at footballfevr
ReplyDeleteThanks Calvin. I know most people think I'm crazy but I have to do this.
ReplyDeleteHopefully once my articles are good enough I can submit them on FootballFevr.
Hmm, am not sure I understand the logic behind the change. If the original blog has been consuming lots of your time, then you should reduce the amount of hours you spend on it and not launch another blog on the same principles. You've already invited time on it, rather find a balance, say only contribute one story per day/week. Starting all over again, I see as a waste of time and all the resources you had already invested on the original blog.
ReplyDeleteDon't give up broe, just reduce the number of hours you spend on it.
I'm not a joomla fan, thus I would strongly suggest you switch to wordpress to easily grow the blog.
Thanks for the advice Muzi. I will be returning to the main blog in future but for now I just needed to "get away from it all".
ReplyDeleteI really didn't like what the blog had become and the effect it had on my life. It's a bit like what Adii did when he changed the design of www.adii.co.za
He didn't just change the theme, he stripped it apart and started over from scratch. I plan on doing something similar.
And I'm planning on converting the site to wordpress ;)
The blogging sphere needs your input, so don't be too comfortable with this blogspot...am glad you plan on switching to wordpress...
ReplyDelete