I was curious about what makes a great blog, and I learned that good blogs with ardent followers have a niche. And so I thought “What is my niche?”. Is it being a postdoc? Being a foreigner in the US? Being in the privileged Stanford campus? Should I write about my family?
My Swedish blog has been alive and well for more than 10 years and I´ve gained a lot of readers there, but my English blog isn´t getting as much traction. It could be due to the sheer number of English-language blogs out there – the search engines just don´t rank me very high. When I started looking back at my Swedish blog and which posts are the most popular ones, it turns out my Swedish readers are mostly in the late stages of their pregnancies, or at least they are very interested in reading about MY final weeks of pregnancies. These posts are in my top-10 list of posts throughout the year. So, there is an option to simply translate those posts to English and perhaps gain a similar following here. But. It´s been years since I was pregnant. I have three kids now. The oldest is in school. The other two are toddlers. A pregnancy blog isn´t where I am in my life anymore. Instead, I would like this English-language blog to be about my journey, both in the world and through life, starting in the final months of my PhD and moving forwards. It´s about the opportunities and life as a PostDoc with a family at Stanford University, and it´s about traveling to, or living in, foreign countries, and seeing them from an outsider´s perspective. Because I think that it´s possible that a single blog can be about more than one thing. It can be about a person´s life and the journey she is going through. And who knows? It might even become interesting or inspiring enough for people to want to read it one day…