What Publishing 30 Posts in 30 Days Taught Me About Blogging
One day I decided I wanted to blog more.
But more isn’t an effective goal.
A result and a deadline is required for great goal-setting, so I figured I might as well challenge myself. I decided to publish 30 articles in 30 days. I called it my Awesome Blog Challenge.
And now I present to you — in no particular order — many of the lessons I learned during the process:
- Creating content that is useful isn’t necessarily hard. It’s a matter of getting a commonly asked question, and answering it as best I can.
- Building a blogging habit creates more ideas for content. New thoughts would come and I’d think “that’d make a good blog post”.
- Writing isn’t 100% of the process. Promotion needs to be a bigger part of the picture! It’s one thing to have great posts, but if no one reads them then they’re not as effective as they could be.
- The WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin is amazing.
- Having focused writing time by setting a Pomodoro timer really helps the writing process.
- Writing a blog post from scratch is hard. It’s super helpful to write notes in a draft, and come back to it every now and then to add more. Then when it’s time to write a full draft from those notes, there’s not as much thinking to do… just connecting the dots between ideas.
- Reading a post out loud helps to spot errors.
- I can easily write and publish a post from anywhere on my iPhone with the WordPress app.
- Flickr is awesome for finding photos for just about anything. If you’re going to use photos from Flickr for your site, make sure to choose photos that have a creative commons license.
- Constantly coming up with new content teaches me how to consistently think “how can I provide value for others?”
- There isn’t a perfect length for a post. Sometimes what I wanted to communicate took 1,000 words, sometimes it was 300. Even when I thought about splitting up the longer posts, I realized that what I wanted to say needed that many. And the shorter ones felt like they weren’t long enough, but they contained everything I wanted to communicate.
- Blogging while tired doesn’t produce good content.
- Writing many posts on one day and scheduling them to be published later makes life easier.
- Consistently promoting my knowledge on a topic (and providing value for others) is by far the most effective marketing tactic I’ve come across. I got lots of new leads.
- Once I’ve posted an article, I never have to explain it to someone again… I can just send them a link to the article. So even though writing took lots of time, I’ll probably save time in the long run.
If you’re wondering how often you should post to your blog, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing it every day… but if you’d like to create a lot of content quickly and take your marketing to the next level, you can try your own Awesome Blog Challenge for a month.
It was a great experience… I may do it again at some point. Until then, I’ll continue publishing consistently. Just not every single day.
What lessons have you learned from blogging? Do you want to try doing an Awesome Blog Challenge too? let me know in the comments below!