Right now, every blogger out there should be calling this woman Aunty Linda. Just saying.
Why?
Well, first of all, because she’s not your mate. Levels have changed. Big time. She now hangs in the same neighbournood with the likes of big bros Mike Adenuga.
The news hit social media last week about her latest (and most expensive) acquisition to date – a multi million naira mansion in Banana Island. As is now sort of par for the course, the interwebs got the cost of the house wrong, pegging it at NGN450 million. But Aunty Linda quickly corrected that with a tweet.
Lol. My house is not N450m…where did y'all get that from? It's over N500m. And thanks for all the kind words. Love to u all. #utoocandoit
— Linda Ikeji Blog (@lindaikeji) October 16, 2015
Secondly, and of more interest to us is how she got here.
There’s the emotional, poetic, semi-autobiographical version which she shared some time ago on her blog. But here’s a more scientific, statistical explanation of her rise to internet success, courtesy of our one and only Lordbanks. This one’s from the archives, so take it away sir:
Bankole Oluwafemi: Want to be the next Linda Ikeji? Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you. It took six years, six whole years for Linda’s blog to tip. And I’ve got a graph to prove it.
The graph shows Google web search interest in Linda Ikeji from 2004 to the present. While Web search interest is not representative of actual traffic (since that comes from other sources too), it does constitute a huge chunk of the picture, and gives you a fairly good idea of what’s going on.
Here’s Linda’s graph –
Interest over time. Web Search. Worldwide, 2004 – present
Linda started blogging in 2006, but things only began to pick up in ’07. She mostly drudged it up till 2010/2011 when we start seeing the beginnings of an upward slope. Then kablam! In late 2011, Linda’s graph takes off at a near 90 degree angle.
Most people are familiar with the latter part that story — what appears to be Linda’s sudden and meteoric rise to Naija internet fame. But when confronted with the pre-2011 side of the graph, there’s obviously nothing sudden or meteoric about it anymore.
So if you wanna be like Linda, it’s useful to consider what it takes to do it. The moral of the story borrows from the comments of one of my people on Twitter — blogging requires consistency. Read that again, but with consistency in capital letters.
Linda’s tipping point came six years after she started her blog. For the serious ones, it certainly won’t take six years anymore. But it’s not likely to happen in six months either.
And finally, what will happen anytime soon is our kids will be taught this nursery rhyme.
There 1ce was a queen of the web
Who blogged on all matters celeb
Prodigious ad banner
Led her to Banana
And she's now forever ex – pleb.— Tex (@TexTheLaw) October 17, 2015
