100 blogs in 100 days Challenge | Done | #100blogs

It has been 100 days since I started out on the journey to writing 100 blogs in 100 days, so this is it. The 100th blog. I did it! #100blogs done!

What have I learned from writing these 100 blogs?

Primarily, I have learned that I don’t ever want to be a full blogger. Creating 100 plus different bits of blog content in as many days was a bit of a millstone round my neck at times, but nevertheless, I am pleased to be able to say that I set out to do it, and I managed to conquer it.

I am quite a fan of instant gratification and there has been nothing instant about this process. At the beginning, 100 blogs seemed almost unthinkable, but here at the end, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.

Finding things to write about wasn’t really the problem, though inspiration was a little elusive at times.

The blog posts that had the most ‘success’ were the longer blogs I created. So this at least shows me that going forward, it is not enough to microblog ‘pointless’ pieces; the things that get the most traction either have more effort put into them or are especially current, topic wise. Perhaps that should go without saying, but as this is just me downloading my thoughts about this process, I feel it is worthy of note.

Traffic growth was most evident in the first half of the challenge, but overall the 100 blogs challenge upped my monthly traffic by 100%.  I think the growth can be explained by the increased promotion that went hand-in-hand with the blog creation.

Should You Write 100 Blogs In 100 days?

If you want to, I think it is an interesting experiment to carry out. As a writery sort, this was always going to be beneficial to me, because the more you write, the more you write – if that makes sense! I have found creative inspiration for quite a few different projects over the time I have been working on this blog and I am sure it is because I upped my productivity overall.

When you work in a digital space, you are only ever one click away from distraction and so being strict with oneself about having to produce and publish content every 24 hours sharpens the direction and stops the urge to ‘just check facebook/twitter/whatever’.
This ebbed off towards the end of the challenge and I found that I was interacting more again, but by that stage I was only producing very short blogs, poems or quotes. This didn’t take a great deal of effort and I was less inclined to promote them as wildly as I was in the early days of the 100 blogs challenge.

Promoting Your Blog Content

Writing the blogs and creating the content is not enough. There are small wins to be gained from a search perspective but the main boost will come from the promotion you do and the willingness of your audience to pass your content on.

I’m not a great fan of promoting my stuff, but I accept that it is a necessary evil – after all, if you’re not prepared to talk about what you do, why should anyone else be bothered? That said, it is a fine line. If you don’t talk about it, no-one will know you exist. If you talk about it too much, people either switch off or disconnect completely.

It is a fast-paced world we live in and you have to tailor your ‘promotion’ to each platform. Someone said that the half life of a tweet is about 18 mins, but I actually think it is probably a lot less than that in reality. When you realise how few people are exposed to your tweets and how only a very small percentage of those few are interested enough to read your tweet, let alone act and click through, it can feel like you need to be a relentless marketer to get anywhere BUT actually a handful of engaged people is better than a mass of unaffected folk. You only need one person (‘the right person’) to be paying attention to garner potentially surprising results!

 

Top 10 Tips For Conquering The 100 Blogs In 100 Days Challenge

1. Set aside a specific time every day to write your blogs.
2. Be religious about publishing and posting within a certain time-frame. I set out to post every 24 hours and only once during the whole 100 days did that not happen!
3. Be prepared to fight the urge to give up! It comes and goes.
4. Write about what interests you.
5. Get into a rhythm with your blog promotion. Better scheduling can greatly affect the figures. Know when your audience are around and get in front of their eyes!
6. Blog with a friend. It was great fun blogging alongside other people doing the #100blogs challenge and inspired me to keep going in the early days.
7. Don’t expect too much. A disheartened state is not conducive to feeling like you want to carry on – each day is a new chance to make a bigger impact! But if you want a certain outcome, don’t forget to build calls to action into your posts.
8. Make your blogs a good blend of text, image and video content for most appeal.
9. Consider your blog never done. You can always tweak graphics, colours, even blog posts after the event. Nothing is fixed in stone and can always be revised.
10. Just jolly well do it! 🙂

What Was The Best Thing About The #100blogs Challenge

For me, the best thing about this whole project was learning that if I set my mind to something I can be a starter-finisher! I was totally determined to complete this challenge from the very 1st day and so I am going to allow myself a little pride in the victory of not breaking the chain! The second best thing was diversification. Having to write so much stuff meant that I naturally outgrew my ‘usual’ topics and blogged about things that I wouldn’t have ordinarily thought about. I also changed up/unified the format of posts a little compared to how I blogged in the past. I will be able to use all the things I learned here and apply them when I am blogging for my bespoke poetry service. The 3rd best thing is that I have grown my website by 100 + posts, and now have a batch of poems and blogs that I can continue to promote and use going forward as most of it is ‘evergreen’ content.

What are you going to do now the 100 blogs challenge is over?

As I am writing this post, I do feel a little sad that the challenge is over. I liked having to put something up daily, despite the fact it was a bit of a pain. But I will be glad to have a break. I will still continue to blog but probably not daily. Maybe weekly. Maybe more. (See, gone wishy washy already without the 100 blogs focus) It feels like I have spent a lot of time on output mode and I am realising that I can choose to dedicate that time to things that really matter to me and actually get stuff done. I am currently working on some rather fabulous books and so I intend to use the time I used to blog daily, to help push those projects on a little further. The cumulative effect of doing something on a day to day basis cannot be ignored.  It’s one of those lovely situations where more effort really does get bigger results!

So that’s it. 100 blogs – done! *waves pompoms

Thanks to all who have read, shared and interacted with any or all of my 100 blog posts! You can find a full list of my #100blogs posts here.

This is post 100 of 100 blogs in 100 days.