Friday Freebie: The Journey is Long But Can be Fruitful

Grab a seat and enjoy the ride

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Earlier this week I notched up my 800^th blog, quite the milestone on the journey. On average my articles are at least 500 words long and generally a bit longer so that’s around 400,000 words at least have been typed away and read by quite a few.

That’s been my entire blogging journey and in a month or two’s time it will be anniversary time once again. If memory serves me correctly it will year number seven coming up, the beginnings on WordPress that over the pandemic period really fired me to be noticed.

But, if I take you back slightly further than that, it was the three part interview with the then Barnet FC manager Darren Currie that started the growth. The figures were the best I’d ever seen and Daz is one of a few I am forever grateful for to be where I am today, which is nowhere near the end.

Ever since those days my work has been read around the world, in some really obscure countries I had to Google at times to find out where they were! The power of the internet, Trev goes international was my tag line!

The pandemic as tough as it was on a personal basis, my blogging work hit the heights of a captive audience which dovetailed a fair few Zoom interviews with Barnet legends on a Saturday afternoon adding another string to my bow in terms of my output that has continued to this day.

I expected the figures to fall once people went back to work, less time as everything began to open back up. But they plateaued and then began to rise again, never dropping.

That was the theme through the two stop-start seasons, so much still to write about without much happening on the pitch. The momentum didn’t stop at all and having notched over 20,000 visitors over 2020-21 it surpassed itself the following year with over 35,000 visitors, still going worldwide and that was the point things went paid.

I’d already had a couple of sites that did pay me but didn’t last beyond 2021, the lack of football curtailing some and then ending up not carrying on, so it was time for me to take my journey in that direction and also to move platforms.

WordPress had served me well, but I was introduced to Substack, a new upcoming platform and moved all my work over to there. Since going paid in March 2022 subscriptions moved fast and have continued at a steady pace, enough for me to do a four day week to pay the bills and suchlike whilst spending the other day just writing about football.

I have a thriving programme column service in which eight different clubs are given an article for each home game, never the same topic and all individual. That this season will break all records I have for something again I started back in 2020 and has grown year on year.

There is currently one other site I have that I produce pieces for, plus of course my new project, the SNLF.co.uk in Sussex, there isn’t time left in the week to fit any more in!

So, what next? Well the journey keeps going of course, the Sussex site being the next part of the jigsaw. Where it all goes from there, who knows, you keep plugging away and finally the last piece slots into place and all is complete.

If you give up half way through the puzzle nothing is completed and a case of what might have been, if you don’t buy a ticket you can’t win the lottery, fingers crossed…….