My Visitors and My Kids...My Inspirations

I seldom have comments on my posts...I do receive emails once in a while. Now that the blogworld is saturated with bloggers, it is quite hard to have an audience that sticks with me. What do I get from blogging anyway?...

As I have said before, I started blogging as a way to make use of my time, and to make myself useful to the society, to somehow lift my self-esteem up especially at the time I was unemployed. It has been a fun ride. I have met (and helped?) a lot of people online.

I do get some from ads since I signed up for them. But what I get from these in 10 months I can earn in one day work as an RN.

So what motivates me? An occasional note of thanks and praise via comment or email does tons. When I do not have any, I have found a way to keep me motivated.

I signed up for statcounter.com a long time ago, but had not been logging on it

From stats

during my more busy RN days so I had forgotten my PW. I recently signed up for a new one and started the # with what I had on my blogs. Interesting to see people getting to my blogs either directly (as in they bookmarked me already) or via google/yahoo search using keywords such as "kusina", "kusina ni manang" or "pandesal", ensaymada, chicken afritada, beef pares, beef asado, siopao, pichi-pichi, etc. Interesting to see "first time visitors" turn to "returning visitors" in the following days. Photos here are snapshots of my visitors both at my new and old kusinas.

From stats

I find it very amusing that I have seen stat map showing visitors in Alaska, Pakistan, South Africa and other less likely places. Seems like there are a lot of Filipinos/Filipinas searching for some of these Filipino goodies.

I guess these stats are enough to keep me motivated.

From stats

Sometimes I am just not sure whether what I post is still interesting to my readers. And whether how I post is the right way to keep them coming back, whether for old posts or new ones.

Then my ultimate motivator is knowing my kids can refer to these pages in the future when they get to the age (or situation) when they will have to prepare foods by themselves. Sometimes they, especially my older son, would even initiate and actually told me that baking/cooking is quite interesting. I tell my boys, they are good looking not only by Western Standards but also by Filipino standards, and they are quite intelligent (not nerdy types, though); knowing how to cook and bake on top of those will surely make girls ga-ga over them.