My Reflections On 23 Days Of Blogging In August

Today is my last day blogging each weekday for the month of August 2017. I've written twenty-three new blog posts alongside my friend Jim Karwisch. As the challenge came to an end, I felt a sense of Deja-Vu. It then it hit me. I've done this type of writing challenge before. In fact, these previous challenges have equipped me to make it happen this month.

In 2015, I silently participated in the Your Turn Challenge from Winnie J. Kao, Seth Godin's Special Projects Lead. The essence of the challenge comes from a statement Seth told Winnie. Every day you don't post a blog, you fail. So, what if you learn to publish a new blog post every day, no matter what? 

 

I participated in this seven-day blogging challenge and it kicked off my 2015 blog writing. While I wasn't able to publish in seven consequence days, the challenge directly led to me finishing blog posts about purpose, mission, vision, core values, and the Formula for Intentionality.

 

Excluding my question of the day and content roundups, I wrote just over thirty blog articles in 2014. In 2015, I ended up writing just under thirty blog posts.  At the end of 2015, I began writing my first book, Path Of The Freelancer. This extended over the next eighteen months where I was writing what seemed like all the time between my book and blog. In 2016, I wrote almost forty blog posts and this was alongside writing a book. My writing muscles definitely grew during that time.

 

Once I had finished writing the book and transitioned into promotion mode in early 2017, I decided to do another daily writing challenge to help promote the book. It led to me experimenting with Quora, writing answers to questions every day of the week for three months. I wrote a little over sixty answers on Quora during this time. By the end of July 2017 and before starting my August Blogging challenge, I had written eighteen blog articles on my personal blog. 

 

After running across the podcast from Being Freelance with Guest Lauren Hooker on her year of blogging daily, I suggested to my friend Jim that he start blogging daily to help grow his coaching business and that I'd be willing to do it alongside him to help grow my personal platform. He agreed and we've now both completed this blogging challenge. In August, I've written twenty-three, so I've now written a total of forty-one posts for the year.

I've followed the daily bloggers Seth Godin and David Cummings for several years now being taught, encouraged and inspired to follow in their footsteps. Their example of blogging daily speaks louder than the well-crafted words they put together, and now the question is, do I continue this new habit? Inspired by the month of writing, Jim suggested that we continue through September and invite others to join us. I agreed and we have each recruited three friends to join in on the challenge. I suspect I'll sustain this weekday writing habit through November (with some possible art work along the way). Blogging every weekday with a month off in December, I'm on track to publish over one-hundred blogs for the year. This will be more articles than the three prior years combined.

What's also interesting is the momentum that begun before I started this writing challenge. Here is my website traffic since January. I had a huge boost in July allowing me to tap into this momentum as I followed through on the challenge for August. 

 

A good amount of this growth has come as the result of traffic flowing to my site from the search engines. The volume of visitors also picked up this month with me sharing all of my blog posts across social media and email.  

 

In case you missed any, here is the full list of published blog posts I wrote during the month of August.