Blogging Every Day For One Year
I started JamieMcSloy.co.uk around fifteen months ago. (September 2015.) For the first couple of months, I thought it’d be a portfolio site with the odd blog article thrown in as a case study.
Views were minimal and I forgot about it for days at a time.
On January 1st, 2016 I decided in a moment of spontaneity to give myself a New Year’s Resolution: To post one article every single day without fail.
I won’t keep you in suspense: I did it. I succeeded with room to spare.
In this article, I will talk you through the method, the madness, the revelations and the results that have come from this experiment.
What I’ve Discovered: Writer’s Block Is A Myth
Sometimes, I really didn’t feel like writing for this site. Whether it was because I’d otherwise have had the day off all the way through to where it was ten at night and I’d been writing since seven in the morning, or the times where other work had given me a really bad day. Sometimes, I couldn’t think of a topic. Sometimes, the topic I’d thought of ended up rubbish and I scrapped it, or it was too complicated and I couldn’t write it in a day.
All those times, I wanted to switch the PC off. However, I had a goal and I stuck with it.
Magically, around the time I needed it, an idea would pop into my head or I’d work out a way to write some material and hit the publish button.
Writers talk about having a muse. If you let your muse control you, then you’re going to get writer’s block or other troubles. Think of your muse as something you have to beat into submission. Better yet, replace your muse with a Robot Muse that does your bidding ala Stepford Wives.
Also… Blogging Is Good For Relationships
I don’t mean romantic relationships here. I can’t imagine your girlfriend/boyfriend is going to be wowed and wooed by the fact that you’ve got a blog.
That said, if you write constantly, you’re sending a beacon out into the online world. “I am here!” and likeminded people will find you.
I’ve been in contact with some great people through this blog, either by my finding them or they’re finding me.
A lot of bloggers bemoan terrible readers, idiots or no content at all. I don’t know whether it’s my writing, my subject matter or some other thing (luck?) but 99% of everyone I’ve talked to on here and on the surrounding properties has been great.
It’s also led to me gaining more; tips and tricks, ideas, improvements, you name it.
Blogging Every Day HELPS With Idea Generation… It Doesn’t Make You “Run Out”
There’s nothing like telling the entire internet, “I’m going to do this” to get you motivated.
Some people would say, “Blog every day? I’d run out of ideas.” At times, I thought that’d happen to me.
It doesn’t. It’s the opposite.
There are things that I’ve tried that I wouldn’t have if I didn’t think, “Hey… people on my blog would read something about that.”
Like niche sites… They were something I did on occasion before this blog. From 2016-2017 I’ll have created about thirty.
Someone contacted me at one point and asked about my prices… they told me they were too low. I raised my prices as a result. (Thanks!)
I launched an online course. I reviewed a ton of helpful books and bits of software. Also, I jumped into paid advertising, threw up this year’s business resolutions and more – just because I had to write something every day.
I’ve also got more interesting things on the horizon. More on some of those later in the month.
Your Writing Voice Will Develop On Its Own With Constant Practice; So Will Your Brain and Your Personality
I wrote an article (somewhere; I can’t find it) about how you can’t force your writing voice. It’ll develop as part of the writing you do.
That’s true, and writing every day is the quickest way to develop your writing voice… and more.
I was reading some of my older posts the other day, and it’s amazing how different they are. The formatting is a lot better nowadays, the way I structure posts and the general style is different, but more importantly I get the points across (as well as my personality – to the extent I have one) that I need to.
What You All Care About… The Traffic
I started posting every day on January 1st, 2016.
January was a big month. In January, the traffic figures for this site equalled what I’d received in the three months previous.
Then, weirdly, the traffic figures dropped in February and March 2016.
In April, they shot up and I had thousands of readers for the first time. I can’t remember exactly, but I suspect this is due to me launching The Niche Site Challenge.
Unsurprisingly then, traffic figures went up again in May and then June. (I had a 50%+ gain from April to May, then a 25% gain from May to June.)
Following that, my traffic doubled from June to July. It increased again from July to August, but only by around 10%.
In September and October, traffic fell slightly. I can’t remember why, but I do know I spent a whole lot less time on the site during the second half of the year.
Traffic rebounded in November and December – December was the third highest month for traffic behind July and August.
What’s interesting about that is that I did pretty much no work on the site outside of the daily topics in November and December. Regular readers will have noticed that I had personal issues keeping me away from doing much work at all over the past couple of months.
Yet traffic increased.
That’s because…
Blogging Every Day Works
If you put in the hour or so it takes to write a post every day, your site will grow continually.
Every single day, people are searching for new material to consume. Every article you write has the chance to snag them.
Every time you add to your site, it gets more valuable. There are more chances that you’ll write something that’ll click with a reader and they’ll share it with their friends. Or, you’ll have an article that’s a hit. Maybe, you’ll write something and it’ll interest a reader just enough that they check out some of your other articles.
It’s funny, because sometimes I’ll have a day where someone finds my site for the first time, decides they like my material and then proceeds to read as many articles as they can. (Because I write every day, there’s very little chance anyone will read the whole lot in one go.)
Having a website is like casting a web. The bigger the web, the more people you’ll catch. Every article you write is like a line.
SEO, social media strategies and the like all follow the same basic rule – the more lines you weave into your web, the more people you catch.
I practically took December off, and I almost got the same amount of traffic as I did in months where I changed the design of the site, added all sorts of functionality and spent hours planning and writing material.
When you have a large body of text for people to read, you have to work less to get the same results… or you can work more and experience exponential results.
(Nowhere Near) Final Thoughts
Blogging is fun and you should do it every day.
The more you do it, the better you’ll be at writing. You’ll also have more ideas, get more readers and make more friends.
I can’t think of a better way to sum up the article than the above.
Thanks for joining me on this journey everyone. Here’s to Year Two!
P.S. In about thirty seconds, I’m going to hit “Publish” on this post. When I do, there’ll be 392 articles published on this site. Check them out on the Archive page, which I’m going to have to change soon, because that’s a long list of links there.