My 30 Day Blogging Challenge

I’ve posted recently about the importance of blogging your way through the coronavirus pandemic. It’s important for me to focus my attention on something positive right now, hence I wrote about why I feel this. To support my aim to move in a positive direction, I thought I’d commit to a positive objective: a 30 day blogging challenge!

Why Take a 30 Day Blogging Challenge?

Aside from the overwhelming need to put my energies into something positive right now, there are several other benefits to taking on such a challenge.

Hitting Blog Post Milestones

I want to build up my portfolio of blog posts as fast as I can. Right now I’m sitting on 130 posts (131 including this one). It would be amazing to hit in excess of 150 posts by the end of May 2020… this number is one of the blogging milestones I’ve wanted to reach since I started SideGains.

Building on the above milestone, running a 30 day blogging challenge will help me get closer to another milestone: 200 blog posts. If I could achieve this before the end of June 2020, I will have written and published 200 posts in a year.

The more blog posts you have, the more visitors you’re likley to receive. This isn’t rocket science of course, since the more blog posts you publish the more opportunites your blog has of appearing in search, receiving links shares etc. However, research by the Marketing Insider Group from April 2019 shows a clear relationship between post counts and visitor numbers. In this report, 300 posts appears to show a tipping point where visitor numbers jump. However as the report summary concludes…

Quantity does have the ability to get your site hopping with visitors. However, you shouldn’t publish content just for the sake of saying you have more posts.

Source: The Insider Marketing Group

High-quality content is the ingredient that makes the difference.

Personal Challenge

I want to challenge myself. Some days I struggle with with writing blog posts. At times I feel unfocused and it feels like a battle to get through them. I feel that a 30 day blogging challenge might help me to focus my attention on getting each post written so I can move onto the next. I’m hoping the challenge of 30 posts in 30 days might make me more productive.

I’m under no illusion this will be a difficult challenge because I’ll aim to write authoritatively on a number of different topics that are useful to people who normally visit the SideGains blog. I won’t be writing fluffy articles (well maybe one or two!), I’ll focus on substantial content that offers solutions to problems I know lots of bloggers struggle with.

Usually each post I write requires images and promotion in other areas, so the 30 day blogging challenge will add to my daily workload substantially. I have other things that need to be addressesd at the same time as taking on the challenge… if you’ve read my recent post about Pinterest marketing in a sociable way, you’ll understand what I mean!

Visitor Growth

SideGains has been growing it’s visitor base in recent weeks and I’m interested to run a test. I’d like to understand how the number of visitors to my blog changes by writing and publishing a post every day for 30 days. Of course I’m hoping to be able do demonstrate something exciting.

The 30 day blogging challenge is an ideal test subject for lots of reasons:

• It’s a commonly executed blogging challenge and my test will add to the results other bloggers have reported upon.
• It will run over a substantial enough period of time that should I should be able to see results from which I can demonstrate valid conclusions.
• Bloggers are obsessed with visitor growth and I’d love to be able to show some link worthy results.
• I’m obsessed with growing my blog right now and I’m eager to boost things with a spurt of extra effort. My experience to date with SideGains is that visitors have grown month on month since day 1. Actually that’s not 100% true: there may have been a slight drop in October 2019… but that’s it. So far in April 2020 I have seen a big spike in organic traffic, and my feeling is I’ve turned a bit of a corner. Perhaps I am no longer in the Google Sandbox, if such a thing exists!

Public Comittment

Making my 30 day blogging challenge a public thing forces a commitment. If I put myself out there, I have to deliver. Putting yourself in a position whereby you announce you’re going to do something, kind of forces your hand. If you don’t deliver having crowed about something, people will notice.

It is a little bit of a negative motivation, and I don’t really want to dwell too much on that since it’s not really healthy. However, I want to force my commitment to my 30 day blogging challenge somewhat and I figure this is a good way to do it.

Time will tell!

The 30 Day Blogging Challenge Details

So at this point I’ll outline my 30 day challenge ground rules.

1. Start date: Friday 1st May 2020.
2. End date: Saturday 30th May 2020.
3. 30 blog posts over 30 days.
4. A post must be written and published each day throughout the blogging challenge period.
5. All blog posts to exceed 1,000 words to a total of no less than 30,000 words over the course of the challenge.
6. All posts to be written by me alone.
7. All post images to be produced by me alone.
8. A final post detailing the 30 day blogging challenge experience and results must follow as soon as possible after the challenge ends.

Summary

So there you have it. That’s the public commitment I’m making to a 30 day blogging challenge and I really don’t want to get egg on my face by not hitting my goal!

I’ll write a post about my experiences and the effects of writing and publishing 30 posts in 30 days, but this will likely be in June 2020 when I’ve had time to collect and analyze the results. I might also give myself a couple of days off blogging so I can recover and catch up on anything I’ve had to stop to hit my objective!

Wish me luck!

Paul

I’d be interested to hear if you’ve carried out a 30 day blogging challenge. Drop me a comment below to share your experiences.