31(ish) Days of Daily Blogging - What I Learned

Joe

Apr 1, 2021 — 4 min read

How’d it Go?

Output

Unfortunately, I didn’t publish every day. Out of the 31 days in March, I only published for 28 of them. I missed one weekend, and didn’t post on my birthday (yesterday). That leads to just about a 90% success rate. Hey, I’ll take it.

Almost everyday that I published a post, I copied the excerpt and link, and posted that to Twitter. I did a little extra promotion in terms of sharing my posts with people via comments.

During the first half, I published many of my blogs over on Medium as well.

Stats

To talk about stats, Google Analytics (GA) tells me that 27 people came to my site. Some of those could have possibly been myself, so take it with a grain of salt.

With Twitter, most of my impressions came from engaging with other people’s tweets. Some of these were from just random comments on trending tweets, but a few were from sharing my own blog posts. Twitter Analytics says that 585 people visited my profile, but that seems a bit high.

Regarding Medium, I have zeros across the board, no engagement or views over there.

Based on GA, my top posts were Productivity is Personal with 15 views, and Just in Time Content with 6 views. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these posts are the ones that I shared most with people on Twitter. Most of the rest had between 1 and 2 views.

My Favorite Posts

Today I read through all of the posts that I published this month (tells you a lot about the length of them). From those 28, I ended up liking about 8 of them. Those are ones that I would enjoy sharing with other.

Most of these posts opened up with some sort of anecdote about something that I learned from a book or video, a conversation that I’ve had with someone, or relating to the reader in some way. Examples:

With Productivity is Personal, I really enjoyed the instructional nature of the post. I think it’s a pretty good resource for those looking to get started with the thought process behind building a productivity system.

For some reason, BAD Goals really hooks me in. I ended up reading the whole post word for word when reading through all of my posts. I like the sort of anti-conventional wisdom nature, mixed with some helpful, actionable advice on goal setting.

In terms of actionable advice, I think my favorite post was The #1 Thing Entry Level Marketers Should Do. It’s something very real to my life, and a piece of advice that I wish I would have gotten at the start of my career. It’s not written the best, but I think it’s important and useful.

I also enjoyed writing a couple of controversial posts. In the self-help realm, everyone and their mother has a course, book, or digital product to sell you. One day I was feeling real sick of it, and wrote The Growth of Content Paywalls. As someone who isn’t selling anything right now, I think its a pretty fresh perspective, despite not being very well put together, and probably a bit too whiny. Also, shouting out one of my anti-hustle culture posts, Working Harder Shouldn’t Be the Goal.

Finally, I think Just in Time Content is a really good example of taking a great idea in one industry, and applying that thought process to another. I’d really love to create more posts like this one.

Reflections

I really enjoyed doing this challenge. During the first half of the month, it took a lot of brain power to decide what to post each day. As time went on, however, it ended up taking less of my mental bandwidth and priority, and and I was putting out not-so-great content. Let’s dive into what went well and what didn’t go so great.

What Went Well

I stuck with the commitment for most of the month! I had a 90% success rate with posting everyday, and that’s a lot better than 0%, so I’m proud of myself for that. I enjoyed trying out different types of posts and ideas. Having to clarify my thoughts and take a stance on different topics has been tough, but quite fun! I also really enjoyed interacting with folks over on Twitter.

What Didn’t Go So Well

As I’ve mentioned, I did end up missing a few days. Outside of that, most of the posts I wrote were pretty bad. None of them were longer than a few minute read. I didn’t set aside a whole lot of time for writing, so I ended up publishing very short, poorly researched, unstructured, unedited posts. A few of them were only a couple of sentences long.

Moving Forward

Keep publishing posts, but not as often. Create longer form posts that I put more time into. More research, more outlining, more editing. Maybe a weekly cadence?
Keep tweeting. I really enjoyed interacting with people on Twitter. I’d like to keep posting and keep commenting on other’s posts! I think it’d be great to post daily, either via a comment on someone else’s post, or just tweet about what’s on my mind or something that I’ve learned that day.
Write daily. I’d like to focus more on journaling over this next month, but I’d like to do some sort of writing every day. I want to focus on getting my routines and self-reflection in order, work on my business ideas, then use any other time to write and post online. I want to focus more on sharing what I learn and rather than forcing publication.

Closing

I’m excited to see what path writing will open up for me in the future. It’s been a fun trial month of blogging every day, but I don’t think the daily blog is right for me (sorry Seth). I got 31 (well, 28) days of bad writing out of my system, and now I’m excited to become a better writer moving forward. If you’re interested in following along for the ride, give me a follow over on Twitter!