Step One Towards Covering the World

Blogging, lessons learned, Teaching and Education 3 Minutes

Three weeks ago I wrote about my goal of trying to get at least one view from every country in the world.

At that point, I was down to six countries:

  • Central African Republic
  • Congo
  • Guinea Bissau
  • North Korea
  • Svalbard
  • Western Sahara

Today, I thought I’d try to add Congo, also known as the Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo Brazzaville to my list of countries with at least one visitor. This is a different country than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo Kinshasa, from where I somehow have 38 views over the past seven years.

My first thought was to try and find a sports team or a regular Joe’s Twitter account of someone in Congo, and tag them on my tweet for this post, but that was a little challenging to try and meet those criteria I did find a couple of government officials on Twitter, so I will mention them, but that seems like a long shot.

Another challenge is that French is the official language of Congo, so it made it difficult to understand what various sites were about.

I then thought I’d try and connect with Marien Ngouabi University, the only state-funded university in the Republic of Congo. It is located in the capital of Brazzaville. But it does not seem like the school maintains much of a digital presence, at least one that is kept up to date. But they do offer Accounting!

I then found an employment site, Emploi.cg, which listed many job opportunities in Congo. I then scrolled through several companies and decided to focus on Blue Collar, a firm that promotes temporary work and personnel management in order to support companies in their quest for performance.

So my plan is to mention Blue Collar in a Facebook post related to this blog post. Hopefully, someone from the firm will notice it, and click on the link to my blog.

I also came across a top tourist attraction, Basilique St. Anne, a Catholic church built in 1943 in Brazzaville. It looks beautiful.

I also came across what appears to be a couple of the news sources in Brazzaville, Journal de Brazza and ICiBrazza, each of which seems to have an active Twitter account. I also found a network company with a Twitter account, MTN Congo.

So hopefully, one of these Congo sites will do the trick.

And then, there will be five…

Some background on the Republic of the Congo, from Wikipedia

The Republic of the Congo also known as Congo-Brazzaville, the Congo Republic, or simply either Congo or the Congo, is a country located in the western coast of Central Africa. The country is bordered to the west by Gabon, to its northwest by Cameroon and its northeast by the Central African Republic, to the southeast by the DR Congo, to its south by the Angolan exclave of Cabinda and to its southwest by the Atlantic Ocean. French is the official language of the Republic of the Congo.The region was dominated by Bantu-speaking tribes at least 3,000 years ago, who built trade links leading into the Congo River basin. Congo was formerly part of the French colony of Equatorial Africa.[8

The Republic of the Congo was established on 28 November 1958 and gained independence from France in 1960. It was a Marxist–Leninist state from 1969 to 1992, under the name People’s Republic of the Congo. The sovereign state has had multi-party elections since 1992, although a democratically elected government was ousted in the 1997 Republic of the Congo Civil War, and President Denis Sassou Nguesso, who first came to power in 1979, has now ruled for over 4 decades.

The Republic of the Congo is a member of the African Union, the United Nations, La Francophonie, the Economic Community of Central African States, and the Non-Aligned Movement. It has become the fourth-largest oil producer in the Gulf of Guinea, providing the country with a degree of prosperity despite political and economic instability in some areas and unequal distribution of oil revenue nationwide. Congo’s economy is heavily dependent on the oil sector, and economic growth has slowed considerably since the post-2015 drop in oil prices. With a population of 5.2 million, 88.5% of the country practices Christianity.

*images from Tripadvisor

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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68 thoughts on “Step One Towards Covering the World”

      1. I don’t have any of the countries you listed, but Wow, I have a lot of countries that I never heard of and can’t pronounce. LOL!
        I have 501 views from Italy. I think I need to see if someone could send me a free airline ticket to come there! Same with Ireland, I have 255 there.
        I did enjoy looking at all the different flags. 🙂

        Liked by 1 person

      2. it is fun to look at all the countries and to think someone from there read your blog. and I don’t recognize many of countries either. and let me know how that airline ticket thing works out; I’ve got a few visits from Australia I wouldn’t mind trying that on 🙂

        Liked by 1 person

  4. My suggestion is to find a VPN service that lets you emerge in Congo and then visit your own blog from there. I wouldn’t try this for North Korea and I don’t expect you want a visitor from North Korea as it would likely be the government.

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  8. This is a well thought out approach, Jim. The only suggestion I would have is to use Google translator to have your blog title in the native tongue. It will be interesting to see what works. Best of luck, my friend!

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    1. Actually, you made me think about my stats and visitors from countries. I haven’t had as many as you. I think there’s still 10-15 left for me. I’ll let them visit naturally. What you’re doing sounds too difficult for me.

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  11. Why not write a post saying that you don’t think they are really a democracy, and then tweet the link to those officials you’ve found? That should get a few views for your blog. And maybe a home visit from a hit squad…

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  13. Wow, that’s a lot of effort. When I chase countries, I simply search tags for that country (usually Greenland), and if I find a post that looks like it was originated from there, I’ll “Like” it (assuming it’s likable) and then wait for a reciprocal read. Do you have a list of countries from WordPress? They include some countries that actually aren’t countries like Puerto Rico and the U.S. Outlying Islands. This will result in more than the 195 countries I would be looking for. That’s a really pretty church. I’d like to see what it looks like on the inside. I suppose I could google that.

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    1. well it was a way of killing two birds with one stone. It gave me a blog post, and a shot of picking up a reader from the Conog. I agree, that church looks beautiful…

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  14. You’re so funny. But I have to hand it to you, very clever idea of getting all the international bloggers around. Good detective work. And I agree with a reply I saw here, perhaps a VPN would be helpful. I wouldn’t be without one. 🙂

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  17. You only have six countries left? Amazing. I haven’t checked mine but I suspect I have way more nationalities that haven’t visited my blog.

    But your outreach methods are amazing though. This is the exact hustle that many PR teams (or even ‘growth hackers’) actually employ, so I’m actually impressed by the effort you’re taking to reach this goal. Here’s to getting that click from Congo!

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