For some, blogging is just for pleasure. While others do it for the passion of entertainment, a few number of those involved into blogging in Liberia do it as a full time job which they fully depend on to sustain themselves. In Liberia, the mindset to monetize blogging and earn from articles is not familiar amongst most bloggers.
Born on April 25, Kerkula Aketella Blama who is a Liberian blogger, curator, Podcaster, On-Air personality, Vlogger, Web Designer and PR is one of the country’s most reliable bloggers and an Alumnus of the Firestone Liberia Senior High School.
Creating a Facebook page just for fun, Aketella shared short irrelevant posts and photos on the page as he was quite unfamiliar with the social media which he had just signed up for. Later did he know that, it was the first step to becoming one of the well respected bloggers in Liberia. With his educational background being a strong one, Aketella soon realized his full potential as a writer thus making him to gain interest in using his page to write about things he knew and saw online.
Years later, he started blogging on the Same page after changing the name of the page to LIB Geez. Focusing mainly on the entertainment sector, he kept promoting entertainers on a regular as his link to a recording studio on Tubman Boulevard gave him the opportunity to promote musicians releasing new songs out of the studio for a very reasonable amount.
Since then, Aketella realized that he could use his pen to provide for himself, which he has been doing up till now. With just two years into blogging, he was able to create a website and monetize it and has been cashing out some reasonable amounts that has helped him establish sub-branches of his blog in Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Since then he has also been helping and encouraging other bloggers to invest in building their blog as a business around the right audiences inorder to be able to gain from their work. With his influence several bloggers began to have interest in using blogging to make money.
Aketella is currently a student at the African Methodist Episcopal University reading Management and Public Administration.