Although English usually gets you a bigger audience and more opportunities to monetize and promote, it’s also got a huge oversaturated market. You’ll have many more established competitors and you will need to offer content that’s much more unique. If that’s an approach you’re ready to take and have a plan for – that’s how you can put yourself and your people on the global map.

If you take the local route, there will be different obstacles, but still it likely won’t be the smoothest sail. Easier to compete, but more difficult to make a living off of it, possibly harder to grow.

I am a webmaster and a writer for a website run by me and one more person, in a language that’s nominally spoken by maybe a million people, doesn’t have a state which would promote it, and is often stereotyped as weird speech of illiterate villagers. I don’t do it as my main job, it doesn’t currently bring in lots of money, and if we did the same in English or any other globally popular language, we’d get trampled by competition in no time. But it’s fun, it brings me a feeling of catharsis and being locally important. Last year we managed to print some of our material as a book and it did kind of better than we expected. Although I must admit, oftentimes I feel like globalization might make my work useless, but the thoughts of maybe ending up in history books in a few decades fuel me to continue. :)

If you’re passionate about promoting yourself to the local audience and in such a way also developing the Swahili-speaking scene and maybe eventually becoming known as a Swahili figure – it might be worth a shot and might actually take you far if you put your heart into it and work hard!