What I learned from an excessive amount of blogging

Today I have a guest post over on My Name is not Bob with Robert Lee Brewer. I hope you'll go check it out.


If you follow this blog or my twitter account then you already know that I spent the month of July writing a ridiculous number of blogs. One every day actually. I'm kinda tired.

Coffee, stat! Credit

I was hoping that all that writing would help me to learn a thing or two about blogging and I wasn't disappointed. So here's what I learned!

1. There are a lot more blogging topics than I realized.
 My past schedule (pre month long madness) was M-W-F. Plenty of times I struggled to come up with a subject for each post. Forcing myself to blog so much made me write posts on topics I had previously dismissed. Some of them were not great, but I wrote them. This is also a lesson I'm applying to my drafting skills.

2. I need to establish some kind of schedule.
I'm not great at coming up with random topics. My life is just not that interesting. I think I can help myself and provide a better blog for writers like me, by putting a little more structure to my posts. I've already started this with the idea to post my goals and updates on Fridays. I also want to pick a day to share the interesting articles and posts that I read each week. 

3. I do better when I can write several posts at a time.
Like many of you, life has a funny way of sneaking up on me. Too many times, I was up later than I wanted to be so I could fit in a blog post in time. I did my best writing this month when I set aside a chunk of time to write several posts. Knowing that I had a few posts "in the bank" helped ease up the pressure to write and fit my schedule much better.

4. You guys like getting personal.
I get good page views for the informative posts that I write, but my biggest page hits come when I share my personal writing life. At first, I was shocked by this because, as previously stated, my life is not that interested. But I think I get it now. There are so many of us floating out here in the internet working hard and looking forward to the day when our work is read by the masses. Until then, we're desperate to know if what we're doing is going to get us there. Hearing each others stories is like a warm hand to hold.

5.  More posts do drive more traffic.
I'm not sure why this works. There were plenty of days when I didn't 'advertise' my post at all. No Twitter, Google+ or website promotion. And yet, my page views this month hit an all time high. While that's nice information to have, I don't plan to do anything with it. July was a fun challenge and I'm glad I did it, but this blog is still fun for me. I want it to stay that way, so I plan to go back to my old 3x per week schedule. My traffic may take a dip, but I think I'll live through it.