Hey readers! It’s been a while (compared to blogging every weekend)! I hope you are doing as well as can be given everything going on. As I’ve mentioned many times (here, here, and here), last month I participated in Mattie James’ Consistency Challenge for blogging. We had to blog every Mon-Fri and I talked about how hard it was on my last post. However, I did say that I learned a lot about blogging on that post as well and I figured I might as well share these things with my readers.

Before I tell you the lessons I learned, I want to l talk a little bit more about the challenge (just a little, I promise). The grand prize was $1,000 and while I didn’t win the money, I did have some other personal wins! My analytics improved across the board and it really helped me re-discover myself as a blogger. Here are some before and after of my analytics.

Isn’t that wild? My monthly views went from 397 to 598. My visitors went from 234 to 397 (also kinda strange that number appears twice). My likes went from 9 all the way to 65 and my comments went from 4 a month to 17! Now, I would like to increase these numbers, but I also know where I fell short as well. I’m going to talk about that on the next part of the blog.

I know many of you are have started your own blogs or are interested in starting one. The rest of this post will have some lessons I learned along the way during my 4-week blogging challenge. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and improve your own blog as well!

Lesson #1: Writing a blog post every day is not sustainable (not for me, at least)

I love writing blogs. I actually enjoy writing blogs more than I enjoy writing most things these days. Even though they’re longer writing blogs is even easier than writing Instagram captions for me. All of that being said, writing a blog every day because I failed to plan a head was draining! This was especially true when I had a particularly busy week at work that was loaded with dense legal research. I definitely do not recommend trying to write a blog every day. I knew this already and even talked about “batch work” in a previous post, but this challenge really hammered in on that point for me. NEVER AGAIN!

Lesson #2: Promoting your blog posts is just as important as writing it!

This sound so obvious but there was a point towards the end of the challenge when I was barely finishing the posts at 11:50pm and promoting my posts on Instagram just fell to the wayside. What was the point? It was already midnight and by the next day I had a different post to write. I honestly slacked on my entire Instagram the entire month of July but that’s a whole different blog post for another day (actually no, but you get my point). I also realized that I should have been promoting on ALL of my social media platforms, not just Instagram. My blog posts actually started to get quite a few RTs on Twitter which really helped me reach a wider audience. I definitely want to start incorporating Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram when I promote my blog posts. More things I have to learn, yay!

Lesson #3: I learned what type of posts I enjoy writing

You probably raised your eyebrow when you read this but surprise surprise, prior to this challenge I had a rough idea about the type of content I thought I should make (it hasn’t really changed) but this challenge helped me realize which content is actually the easiest for me to write/which content I enjoy writing about the most. The content I had the easiest time writing was all related to helping other bloggers, law students, and wellness related topics (most of the time). Now that I know this, I can plan these posts super in advance and get as many of them written as possible when I’m feeling inspired or on a roll. It certainly doesn’t hurt to know what kind of content you enjoy writing for your blog.

Lesson #4: I also learned which content I struggle with writing (even though I enjoy it)

During the challenge, I decided to make each day a different theme and kept those post on those days just so I wouldn’t get too overwhelmed. Mondays were blogging/content creation, Tuesdays were law school posts, Wednesday were wellness posts, Thursday were fitness posts, and Friday were personal development posts. It never failed….every Thursday and Friday I struggled on deciding what freaking fitness and personal development topics I wanted to blog about. It was actually so annoying. However, now that I know that sometimes I struggle with this type of content, I can be sure to brainstorm for those specific posts way in advance so that I’m not stuck when it comes time to write about them. I just have to work harder if I want to keep writing about those topics, which is fine! I actually have some ideas already planned for the next few weeks. Win!

Blogging every week day was a little too much for me but I DO want to start blogging 3x a week. I feel that doing this will help me grow my audience and ultimately help me reach more people and thus help more people! While the challenge did kick my ass, I’m so glad I participated in it! I recommend any aspiring blogger try it and see what you learn about yourself and your blogging style at the end of 4 weeks. Try it!\

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