A month ago, I set myself the challenge to create a blog post every day for the next 30 days. Well, unfortunately, I failed miserably. Here's why I think I was unable to step up to the challenge and how I feel about blogging as frequently as every day.
Creating content for your blog is not as easy as it sounds. Notice how I said 'creating content' and not 'writing posts'. Blogging isn't just about putting words into a post and hitting publish anymore. Creating a piece of content means combining words with images, videos, infographics, screen captures, quotes, podcasts, and more.
30 days ago, I set myself a simple challenge to create a post every day for a month. But I failed miserably to stay consistent, but I started off well. In the first week, I was able to publish a new post every day. After day 9, things started going down the gutter.
I missed a day of publishing here, then another, and before I knew it, I was only publishing a post every few days. The 30-day challenge failed.
That being said, it was an interesting experience. It's definitely not easy to be as consistent as blogging daily. Some bloggers might be used to doing it, but I found it overwhelmingly challenging, a for a number of reasons -
I just don't have enough time in the day to create a blog post daily.
As well as managing this blog, I also run a freelance web design business. That means most of my days are consumed by working on client website projects.
I also have several niche sites and an e-commerce site to maintain. Each of those sites also has blogs that need updating regularly too.
I tried to organize my working day the best I could to create a blog post daily for Magnet4Blogging, but even then I struggled. There just wasn't enough time in the day, at least for my case.
It's all well and good saying 'Make time', easier said than done.
As well as not having enough time to produce a post daily, it actually takes an enormous amount of time and resources to create a quality blog post, let alone create one every single day.
A lot of the articles I create on Magnet4Blogging is well over 1,200 words long. But putting wordcount to one side, I also have to devote time to researching a topic carefully.
Then there's gathering critical data, facts, stats looking for the right stock images to use, and then customizing them. There's adding screenshots, using quotes, video clips, etc.
As I keep saying, there's a lot of critical components that make up a great quality blog post.
Life happens, and when life happens it can get in the way of the things you set out to do. That's just the way it is sometimes.
When I started my 30-day blog challenge, we were in the process of getting ready to go on a two-week holiday and move house. In light of what's happening around the world with Coronavirus Outbreak, none of those things took place.
You may be able to relate to this too. When you have commitments such as a job, college, or family, finding time to blog can be hard.
I don't think it's impossible to produce a blog post daily because a lot of bloggers seem to do this with success. It helps if you have plenty of guest authors at your disposal as well, but if you're doing it on your own then you may struggle.
That being said, if you only manage one blog, of course, you're going to have more time to create a post every day. If you run multiple websites and businesses then blogging daily will be challenging.
Keep in mind that you have to make sure that each post you publish is of high quality. Publishing mediocre content every day is just not acceptable anymore, so that's a whole new challenge on its own.
Sure, I failed this time around, but so what. I've learned some valuable lessons here. One of those lessons being:
Never take on more than you can manage.
That being said, I'm going to give the daily blog challenge another try in the future. Maybe again this time next year in 2021. Next time, though, I'll put in some extra preparation before I kick-off the challenge.
There's always something new and valuable to learn in blogging, and that's why I love it so much. Even after ten years at it, I'm still making mistakes and learning from them.
Here are some posts I recommend reading on the topic of blog writing and posting frequency.
