Review Of A Blog A Day For January Challenge

Dance Of The Flowers Hammer Smash

A blog a day for January challenge? At various points I thought I must have been nuts to have even thought of doing it. But I did it! And it is a great accomplishment. Other bloggers may be interested in my review of the process.

Review Of A Blog A Day For January Challenge

Spiritual Brainwaves

Why I Set The Challenge

I actually set this challenge for myself. I wanted to focus an entire month on producing content for, and marketing, my blog. Normally, my blog sits alongside my artwork in terms of marketing and promotion. But just for a month I wanted to give my blog center stage. In case I changed my mind, I wrote a post on my Facebook Art Page committing myself to the challenge. No going back now!

Establishing A Baseline

I spent a bit of time establishing a baseline of statistics looking at my blog for the preceding couple of months. Visitor numbers were noted, actual reads of the blog, comments etc. I also paid attention to where the referrals were coming from and what people clicked on within the blogs.

Planning The Marketing

I knew that my Facebook Art Page was not going to be the best place to promote the blog as posting similar things on consecutive days is often buried in the algorithm and doesn’t get seen by many people. So, I spent a bit of time looking at blogger groups and how the reciprocal sharing and commenting worked. I decided to focus most of my marketing on here. I developed a daily plan for how I was going to promote my latest posts.

Getting Together A List Of Potential Topics

Dance Of The Flowers Hammer Smash

A blog a day for January challenge meant a lot of work. I didn’t want the posts to be short and skimpy. I like to write lengthy posts, exploring the subject and I try to illustrate them with my own artwork. The search engines like the longer posts. It was important to ensure that the majority were evergreen content. I have some blogs from a few years ago that still get read every day because of the ongoing relevance of the subject matter. I came up with an initial list of topics to get me started. These included:

  • Special Or National Days. I had a list of these but in the end I wrote four blogs about subjects that I really related to.
  • My latest artwork that was ready to be explored and promoted.
  • Topics I had been meaning to write about for a while and just hadn’t got around to doing.
More Examples of Dipped CDs

This was a very rough, handwritten list that I crossed through when I had finished a topic and added to if I had a brilliant idea. I knew, for example, I wanted to write about my hammer smash paintings, my re-use of CDs for home decor, some unashamed promotions of some of my artwork under specific topics. I knew I was likely to do a review of the meditation and relaxation app Insight Timer that I had just started using. Other than that, things were quite open and flexible.

Writing The Blogs

I had every intention of having a few blogs in hand. That worked beautifully for the first few days but then I got sick and lost two days of writing. It was lucky I had the drafted blogs available or I would have failed at the first hurdle. Actually, having been ill led to two posts that I had not planned to write – always a rainbow right?

Most days I sat down each morning after breakfast and wrote the blog for the day and started to map out the bones of another. Then I published and promoted the finished blog. That took about two hours every day, sometimes longer.

Sources Of Inspiration

Some days I was completely stuck for a topic and had to dig deep to come up with something. Sometimes I was inspired by something had happened to me, like needing a new septic tank and the chaos that ensued with that. Of when I made a mess with my colors in the studio. That inspired a whole short story called The Day The Colors Fought Back.

Get My Best Profile Please – Ms Stevie Mouse

My animals are always an inspiration but for January there were only two animal-related posts. The first was when I brought in Ms Stevie Mouse as a guest blogger and ‘we’ wrote Ten Cat Laws To Live For Written By The Cat. That went down particularly well with readers! Another cat post focused on our cat Treacle who grew a horn on his head – one for my cat medical reference section that!

I was inspired by a discussion with a client to wrote a post about How To Support An Artist Without Spending Money. Another conversation with friends led to Life Is What You Make It. The sad death of a revered Buddhist Teacher led to a post in tribute.

The Results

About five days in I wondered what I had let myself in for. I had a dip in motivation but got round that by writing about something that inspired me. After that I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to follow the routine and produce something every day. I was also extremely pleased with the results.

A review of my blog stats shows that views on my blog more than doubled, as did most of the other stats. There was a significant increase in search engine referrals for my blog. Also an increase in the clicks from my blog to my main art website. Not to mention an increase in comments, followers and shares across social media.

Along the way I have met some lovely new people, including some very supportive fellow bloggers. I have learned such a lot, including from the blogs I read while supporting other bloggers. Some great new recipes, books to read, dreams of travel destinations and some thought provoking posts that really made me stop and think.

I will be honest and say it was a relief on day 32 to get up and relax rather than produce another blog. But I really enjoyed the process. I am now committing to producing a blog when I want to, which is still several times per week as it turns out. And even every day sometimes if I get inspired!

So that concludes my review of my blog a day for January challenge. Have you ever set yourself a similar challenge? How did it go for you?

Before you go

Mid-week Reflections
Dorothy and Barnet Boy

My name is Dorothy Berry-Lound an artist and writer. You can find out more about my art and writing at https://dorothyberryloundart.com.

You can follow me on Facebook.

Thank you for reading!

About Dorothy Berry-Lound 448 Articles
I am having fun living half way up a mountain in Central Italy with my husband Barnet Boy, Stevie Mouse and the rest of my fur family. I am enjoying creating art that people will love having on their walls. I also love storytelling through my blog and short stories.

6 Comments

  1. Wow, Dorothy, I am so glad to see you made it. Your commitment and ideas helped me along in the same quest – and I, too, was successful. I also saw results that have exceeded my expectations.

    One hook that really drew me in was your guest post by Stevie Mouse. That, literally, made me laugh out loud. My wife, too. And some other’s with whom I shared it.

    I saw similar growth almost exactly as you described (my “doubling” was 194% across the board). Most importantly, however, is the increase that you (and I) saw in the organic search results. When the search engines send us visitors we do not have to rely as heavily on social media to promotion.

    I look forward to seeing what happens throughout the rest of 2022. For both of us. Best wishes for moving forward.

  2. Great job Dorothy 👍
    It is amazing what you did and I think it put you in the right mood for writing. I think I need such a challenge for myself also. I usually spend lots of time doing the rest of things around related to my blogging and end up writing 1or 2 post per week. Thank you for the inspiration!

  3. Hi Eri, yes I think it really did get me into the groove for writing. I needed a kick start as I used to write something three times a week for years and then got a bit lazy with it. I am now fired up to keep going! Thanks for commenting!

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