If you’ve been following me lately, you’ll know I was planning to blog every day for a month. I love creating ridiculous challenges for myself and I’ve always admired those bloggers who somehow manage to push out quality content every single day – so I thought… why shouldn’t I try the same thing?
I was initially going to attempt this challenge for a fortnight, but I was really worried about the ‘side effects’ so thought I’d keep it to a week – and then I thought, ah what the heck! Why not blog every day for a month, because you know, it will easy.
It was not easy guys, and as you can see, I only managed 6 days before I threw in the towel.
Firstly, blogging on a weekend is weird. Also… who the hell has time to write 30 articles in advance? Secondly… I felt so disconnected from the community I’ve come to love so much (are you guys still there!?) that I simply didn’t have enough time or energy to engage like I usually do. And lastly, I did not have time to work on my novels. Considering I usually write every night, this was not good, not good at all.
The worst part about this whole thing
The one thing I love the most about blogging is engaging with other bloggers. I had an inkling that this favourite part of my routine would suffer badly during my challenge. How would I manage to reply to every single comment? How would I even begin to return the favour and visit other people’s blogs too!? Do I even have enough time in the day to keep up?
In a nutshell: no, no I don’t.
My reply rate to comments has been abysmally low. Last year, when I was getting 25+ subscribers a day, my trick wasn’t that I was blogging every day or even every second day, my trick was making time for those who visited my blog. I would always reply to as many comments as possible and visit other blogs in return.
No surprise, once my engagement floundered, the stats also decreased significantly. Engagement is the name of the game guys, and I was silly to think it could be otherwise. Actually, I didn’t think it would be otherwise, but it’s good to have this confirmed.
What I learned
By day three of this insane monthly blogging challenge, I lost my blogging joy. You could almost say blogging every day was pure torture for me. I blog for fun, not to make money (one look at the regularity of my posts and you’ll know this to be true).
It’s stressful pushing out content every day, even if planned in advance. There’s selecting images, proofreading, tagging, coming up with new ideas for future blogs, writing those future blogs to keep ahead and… trying to press the publish button while you’re suffering from massive stage fright.
I had a few completed blogs up my sleeve, but it came to a point where I was up at 12am composing a philosophical rant about how life has a meandering way of delivering you to the exact spot you need to be (if you don’t understand, then that makes two of us). Safe to say, I think returning to blogging a few times a month might be a good idea.
Here’s what you’ve been waiting for, the stats
During this week-long experience, my best-performing post was my relationship-themed blog about How To Cope Being Single.
Can you believe?? To say I am surprised is a complete underfuckingstatement. Perhaps I missed my true calling? Should I have been blogging about my single life all this time? And my transition into a not-so-single-life? Could I have been the Australian Carrie Bradshaw who finally found her Mr. Big?
Yeah, nah. I’m not that cool, but it’s a nice idea.
My least successful post was my first one, Blogging Every Day for A Month, which is not surprising as I hadn’t blogged for a while, so you know, no returning readers. But what I did find interesting was that daily blogs did not have a cumulative effect on my stats like I expected. Perhaps this would change over a month of daily blogging, but I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to keep going.
Here’s that WordPress bar graph I promised:
I averaged about 180 views a day, with a total of 1,086 views for the six days. I think these numbers were lower than they could have been due to my non-existent engagement. Usually when I post a blog, my views sit at about 500 a day. Also, over the week, my subscriber count went up by 20, averaging three a day. Nowhere near the 25+ a day I was getting last year!
If I continued to blog daily, I could possibly get 4,000-5,000 views a month, which wouldn’t even qualify my blog for the WordAds program. Just so you all know, I’m on the premium plan so I’m already in the WordAds program, so no matter how dismal my stats are I still make all the money in the world. Although… I did write my first sponsored blog post for PDFelement this year, of which I made the princely sum of $120 AUD (paid for my blog this year, so I’m very happy with that).
If you’d like to know the reason why I upgraded, it’s because I wanted access to all of the premium templates WordPress has on offer. As much as I loved the Canard theme, I wanted a more black/white magazine feel to my blog.
So there we have it, my ‘blogging every day’ for a month and the resulting failure in full, honest review. One day I’d love to blog more often, but for the moment I’m happy to concentrate on immersing myself in the WordPress community and – the most important thing of all – writing.
Thanks for putting up with me the other week and all my spam. Back to normal in November folks 🙂 Though I do hope to blog more often than once or twice a month. It’s entirely possible this experiment has cured me… Never say never!
Now I will go and catch up on all those wonderful comments you guys have been dropping. Thank you a million times over!
The Cat's Write 
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