Today marks the 30th blog post I have written in the last 30 days. One a day for 30 straight days. I did not miss a day. I even managed to write an odd little ditty the one day I did not get to my computer until 11:30 pm and only had 30 minutes to crank something out. It was not spectacular but I wrote it.
To recap:
- I decided on April 22nd to write 30 blog posts in 30 days – just because
- I did not set any particular topics or ideas
- I made it a self rule to not go back and edit or change any of them unless there was a mistake
It was an awesome experience and fantastic, highly recommend exercise. I am not sure if my writing got any better but my ability to write has improved dramatically. I can not fairly easily start typing a title and then find that I have written 800-1000 words on that subject. I have managed to not wander too far off the reservation in each post and sometimes I have managed to actually capture my thoughts into ill-formed, wiggly little words. Many of my marketing friends have expressed admiration and encouragement and several have said that my challenge inspired them to write more themselves. That’s pretty cool.
When I started I did not have any particular goal or objective to accomplish with the writing outside of the writing itself. I wrote to write more and push thoughts from my link-locked head into the digital sphere. I had nothing to sell, nothing in particular to accomplish and no one to impress. I wrote because I like writing and writing makes you write more.
My daily website traffic did triple and has stayed pretty steady over the last thirty days. That’s cool.
The stats for the marketing geeks: (month over month)
- Unique sessions grew 487%
- Unique users grew 386%
- Average session duration increased 79%
But the most intriguing outgrowth of this challenge was to reinforce the idea that if you create content it will drive traffic. Look at the graph below comparing the 30 days before i started writing every day and the 30 days of writing every day. Notice anything about the trend of the blue line that represents the last month of writing? Think that trend will drop down to what it was or retain some of it’s upword mobility?
A funny thing about content marketing: it tends to thrive on content.
Another fun benefit of doing 30 posts was in learning new ways to use graphics. I took full advantage of an awesome design tool Canva to give all of my posts a bit more pop and punch. I had been using the tool already but really stepped it up during this challenge and I have now created over 65 images with the tool.
Overall I am extremely happy with how writing every single day has helped me become a better writer. I am in fact going to continue writing as much as I can. I might skip a day in order to finally kick out these other two big articles I need to get done. But who knows, I might just keep writing till the writing is done.
