¶ What I’ve Learned Over 30 Days of Blogging
/Today marks 30 continuous days of publishing to this site. It was a challenge to myself at the beginning of the month inspired by Shawn Blanc. I thought it would be good to review a few things I’ve learned along the way.
In no particular order:
Publishing regularly definitely has a dramatic effect on site traffic. Beyond RSS, I notified people of new posts via Twitter and my personal Facebook. According to Squarespace’s analytics, I am currently at 560 unique visitors for the month to date, which is a 273% increase month over month. I am also now sitting at 225 RSS subscribers, which is an 81% increase month over month.
I have read from other writers time and time again the best way to grow an audience is to publish regularly. That seems to hold true. It reminds me of the old saying, “If you build it, they will come.”
If anything, it’s nice to know a few more people than just my wife and parents read this site.
Writing daily seemed pretty easy until I ran out of my little list of ideas for topics. Then it got tough to figure out what to write about. It did not come easy, and honestly, I felt like I phoned it in a couple times. Not that there is anything wrong with phoning it in on occasion, because that is still forward momentum.
I learned the importance of trying to have some semblance of a content calendar and knowing ahead of time some things I would want to write about. And sometimes something newsworthy arises and takes precedence over the plan. But it is good to have some ideas in advance to prevent spinning the tires in frustration.
- I don’t enjoy writing much from my phone. I did a couple times out of necessity, and it is doable, but far from delightful. I wrote most of my posts from my iPad, and thanks to Safari’s much improved desktop-like experience, I published mostly from my iPad, too. I wrote a bit from my Mac, too, but the iPad has come a very long way for blogging.
- I threw away a lot of drafts. I can’t tell you how many times I wrote something, read it over, and decided it either was poorly written or just plain not interesting. Often, the second draft is much improved, or even a different topic entirely. Don’t try to force the first draft into being the final publication.
- Read other writers. I found a few more to read at the beginning of this journey a few weeks ago, and their words were very helpful. A lot can be gleaned from seeing what others go through.
Those are a few of the things I took away from my 30 day challenge. Now that I’m in a groove for doing this on the regular, I don’t see why I’d stop. I hope you’ll keep following along, dear reader.