“Could I blog every day for a year?” Looking around for a challenge which would make me pay attention to my own blog, I decided to attempt posting daily this year. I write all the time so adding my own blog into the mix wouldn’t be too difficult, surely.
I started the challenge on January 4 and it’s the end of month one. I blogged about how I got on in the first week so it seems appropriate to do a round up now.
What have I learned? Quite a lot! I learned that I wouldn’t always manage it but should keep going; that blogging really does make a difference to traffic to your website; and that blogging is a good way to test ideas and find out what your audience is interested in.
What happened to my website traffic when I blogged almost every day?
There’s nothing more motivating than seeing the upward climb of my website visitors every day. Monthly, weekly and daily visitors to my website have all increased.
I was delighted to see today that the bounce rate on my site has declined over the past 7 days so my articles are starting to keep people’s attention a little longer.
But as you will have gathered from the title of this article, there were days I didn’t blog and my traffic nose-dived every time. It was a real eye-opener for me about just how important my blog is for bringing people to my website. Any thought of giving up after a missed day was banished by seeing the benefit of keeping going.
It's vital to recycle your blog posts
On the days I didn’t blog, I didn’t have any links from my website going out on social media either. When I looked back at the numbers, I realised how important it is to recycle the content on your website. I try to publish a reasonable number of evergreen blog posts – ones which will be relevant months or possibly years from now.
I know there are many ways to make use of blog content but I hadn’t made the time to do them. Once I clocked the difference it made to my website I started putting my previous posts into a scheduling tool. I currently tweet one existing post a day as well as going onto the platform to post that day’s blog and tweet with others.
The Facebook algorithm changes haven't hit my page - yet
Almost 60% of my social media referrals are coming from Facebook. The changes to business pages came in a few days after I started daily blogging. I post once a day on my Facebook business page and it’s a link to my website every time. But the reach is still there and some posts have been seen by hundreds of people despite the page only having 80 likes.
I’ll be interested to see what happens on Facebook over the next month!
People like to hear your experiences and get value
I’m often asked: “What should I blog about?” I’ve been very conscious during this experiment that I don’t want it to descend into navel-gazing. I won’t blog just because I have said I will and therefore I’m going to ramble on about next door’s cats. While the subject matter has zipped about from one day to the next, I have tried to stick to writing about my experiences of being in business and producing helpful articles about social media, blogging and content marketing.
My top five blog posts this month are:
- What I learned during my first year in business
- Facebook is not dead for businesses: here are three things you need to know
- I will be saying I don?t know more often in 2018: here’s why
- What I learned from blogging every day for a week
- Five reasons why you should collaborate with other businesses
While I don’t always have time to blog every day (I’m writing this at 11pm!) I do now know that it’s possible for me to post at least five or six times a week. It’s also been great to have feedback from people about what they have read and what they enjoyed.
If you are thinking about blogging, I would urge you to give it a go. If you’re wondering where to start then take a look at my post on business storytelling.
