I don’t like to do this, but I have to wave the white flag on my participation in Scott Bishop’s 28-day blogging challenge. Starting the challenge, I knew it would be, well, a challenge to make it the full month. Regardless, I’m pretty disappointed in myself for only making it one week. Lamesauce on me.
In the grand scheme of things, I learned a lot about blogging and blog strategy, specifically for personal blogs, in the past week. Here are some key takeaways for me-
I felt like I was being a little bit annoying. Seriously. You people must have been thinking, “Again? Again? Didn’t he just post something, like, yesterday? What the hell is this?” I was confident in the content I was putting out there, but by the end, it just felt weird to be peddling my content every day – and that was just five posts. My question for others who are participating, or blog at this frequency regularly, is how do you do it? How do you put your content out there without feeling like you might be annoying?
Being a college student sucks. You know what I’m talking about. Everyday, a college student’s schedule ranges somewhere between hectic and ‘what the fµ¢√!’. One post would come at 11 p.m., then the next day’s post would be at 9 a.m. I haven’t asked it, but I bet that first blog post feels jilted. It only got about 10 hours of primo air time. When your day-to-day schedule is constantly changing, it’s hard to publish consistently. Yes, I suppose I could have written them ahead of time, but that brings me to my next point…
Write. Read. Publish. That was my basic strategy. Write the post. Read it over to make sure there are not any horrendous grammatical errors (and probably miss half of them). Hit ‘Publish’. Part of me likes that strategy – thoughts to paper, err, keyboard and put them out there. The Strunk and White part of me would read a post after it’s been published and think, “doh!”
I ended on a hot streak. My last two posts of the week, “You Don’t Need A Community Manager” and “Five Reasons Students Should Use Social Media“, were the most popular – and it wasn’t close. The former was a bit overblown because, although I believe some brands can benefit from a CM, not everyone needs one or, more specifically, the one they have right now. The last paragraph of this comment is my mea culpa of sorts. I’m just extremely happy with the conversation that it started, and very proud of my readers for never personally attacking anyone (specifically me. I don’t like rocks or tomatoes).
What’s next? Well, set benchmarks and stick to ‘em. I entered this challenge to improve the consistency in my post frequency. It worked… for five days. For now, I’m setting the bar at three posts a week. Hold me to it. Also, I’m going to integrate the write-read-publish in me with the Strunk and White in me by writing, letting it sit for awhile, editing and then publishing. That one’s fudgeable though, as current events mandate swift posts. At least I have a go-to strategy now, whereas I didn’t before.
That’s about it. White flag in the air, but some lessons learned. For those still participating in the challenge, have you faced any of these challenges or other challenges? How did you overcome them? Other bloggers and generally smart people – have any advice for the above? Any personal experiences? More cowbell?
Shameless plug: at the end of every post this month, I’m putting a call to action to vote for Pepsi Refresh projects. Specifically mine, obviously. You can vote for an idea once every day and have 10 votes each day. That means you can vote for my idea, or others, but preferably mine, up to 28 times.
photo credit Flickr user peasap
Posted by Colbywg
