BETTER VERSIONS ARE BUILT ON PREVIOUS BETTER VERSIONS
Nah! This has nothing to do with versioning in Cloud/DevOps
People,my friends, tend to ask how I got to know the rudiments of story telling and how I manage to make my readers stay glued to the end. I tell myself that it's something I was born with - sometimes - but Facebook memories has a way of reminding me my journey of self development. One of such journeys is my first job as a content writer as shown in the figure above, or below, depending on where I will put this first paragraph; I will definitely forget to edit this.
I spent a year at home after my WASSCE exams before gaining admission to study in University of Benin, Nigeria. During this one year, I worked for top security doors outlets in Lagos, connecting buyers and sellers. It wasn’t an interesting job to me; I was selling bullet proof Turkish and German doors and I never got to test if they were indeed resistant to bullets. But then it afforded me a lot of lone time in warehouses and sites, alone with my Blackberry Torch 2.
Thus, I started 'typing away.'
I started by writing stories on Nigeria's number 1 online forum, Nairaland. One of such stories had more than 10,000 views and positive reviews. It also got pirated by a lot of users, some even went to the extent of putting it in PDFs and sold it. Anyways, I met a few of my audiences when I resumed university, and till now, some of them still think the story wasn't fictional as I suggested. But then, among my readers and fans was Godwin Togan, the owner of the then first student blogsite for the university. With a vision to grow the blog to rank number one on Google search, he asked that I partnered with him by writing for the blog. Thus, my first official writing gig.
I went on to write two customized stories for the blog with an average of 15,000 words each. Aside the stories, I learnt the art of SEO writing and created articles that would later get the blog to the top search rank with good earning in Good Ads, having a Facebook of over 15,000 followers - while I was an Engineering student! Talking about Google Ads, we had hoped that the success story of Linda Ikeji, Nigeria's most famous blogger, would inspire us to work harder to build the blog. But it wasn't to be.
I remember vividly the day we went to collect the login details of Google AdSense of the blog. We/I were/was so full of hope, thinking it was a new beginning. But we soon found out that the worth of ads clicks in Nigeria is different from the worth of clicks in US. We became discouraged, but there was hope. We had at least 1,000 daily visitors, 15,000 Facebook followers and loyal fans. Yeah! I became somewhat popular in school, I even had people approach me to ask me if I was Momodu Afegbua 😁. Anyways, we settled for direct adverts
After two years of working for the blog, it had grown a team of content writers, but academic activities had become too stressful. So I called it quit with the team. While I didn't earn much writing for the blog, I learnt to write better and I also got better in working with a team that has a common vision. A year later, the blog closed up, an event I'll liken to not moving with trends in blogging.
There you have it, I didn't just pick my Qwerty keypad to find out I am good at writing. If I visit the stories that I used to write then, I'd laugh at myself for my poor use of punctuation and story build up. But I can't deny the fact that I am better today because I kept on learning and writing. Hell, if I read this piece after posting this, I'll have some corrections to make, but that doesn't mean I wasn't at my best when I wrote it. What matters now is that I am the current best version of myself, and every second is a new version — continuous improvement.
