I’m winding down on my 30 Days of Blogging challenge. I wasn’t tagged or forced to do it, I just really wanted to inspire myself to blog more regularly and consistently in 2024 and I felt like this would give me a boost of motivation. In this post, I’m going to share the tips and tricks that I learned from my 30 Days of Blogging and how you can use them to set yourself up for success if you choose to do a similar challenge.
Why Blog for 30 Days in a Row?
I already said that I just wanted to do my blog, but there were also some unexpected benefits to blogging regularly. For instance, I noticed a huge spike in visitors to my blog. This includes both organic searches and referrals from more social media posts that link to my blog. As an author, I also noted that my free book promotion giveaways were more successful during this time – likely due to the increase in traffic on the blog, so more people found out that my free promotion was happening.
I also found that I did feel more inspired to write posts for my blog and even more inspired to keep reading. I typically go a few months at a time without even picking up a book, but because I knew I wanted to post more reviews, it helped motivate me to pick up a book at night rather than turn on the TV. I did start playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with my husband during the lead-up to this, so that definitely still cut into my reading time but I still read more than I would have otherwise.
I think that blogging daily for a stretch of time to help boost a new blog or to reinvigorate one that has been a little dormant for a few months is a great idea. If you are just starting out or you want to boost visitors to your website before you launch a new book or product, you should definitely challenge yourself to blogging daily.
Planning Out the Blog Posts
One of the first things that I did when I decided to take on this challenge was to brainstorm a bunch of blog post ideas. I started by breaking up my blog into some main sections or topics that I typically write about already. These were:
- Book Reviews
- Author Interviews
- Booklists
- Book Promotions (Free books, Book boosts, etc)
- Helpful Tips for Authors
Once I had my list down, I started writing down ideas for each of the sections. For instance, I knew that I wanted to write about monetizing your newsletter, so I put that under the category of Helpful Tips for Authors. Because I was blogging in April, I decided to include some spring themes which is where I came up with the idea for the floral designs and my booklist for 15 Novels with Floral Covers.
I wanted there to be a good mix of posts that include a lot more work and research, like Author Interviews and Book Reviews, and posts that are generally easy to put together like Book Boosts and product reviews.
Blog Post Batching
Once I had a good idea of what the blog titles would be, I put them into my Blog Post Batching Checklist from my Content Planner and started checking off the boxes as I wrote, edited, and created images for each of the posts.
Finding Collaborators
I also made a Twitter post asking for authors and book bloggers to reach out to me if they wanted to collaborate or be featured on the blog during the 30 Days of Blogging. I also reached out to my Discord group that I run for the Sci-Fi Fantasy Collaborative and my newsletter since I know a lot of the folks on both of those are also writers. I was looking for guest posts, and authors that would be open to an interview, and generally just hoped to get a little bit of help with writing all these posts.
One thing that I always do when I am doing a collab like this is write backup blog posts. I didn’t end up needing backups during this challenge, but I know that sometimes life changes and things get in the way and suddenly you get a panicked email the day before from your collab partner and they are like “I FORGOT.” So, instead of having to panic write one to replace the one they didn’t send you, I suggest having enough backup posts so that even if no one gets back to you with a collab you will still have enough posts to fill out your challenge. The bonus with this is that if you happen to write six or seven extra blog posts, you can just schedule those to go up during the months after your challenge is done and keep up with the consistency of posting.
I would definitely suggest setting up a spreadsheet to keep track of all the guest posts that you are asking for from other people and any other collabs. It can get pretty confusing if you have 6 or 7 email chains with other bloggers! If you don’t want to make a spreadsheet, you can download this one (and some other helpful PDFs) for free using the newsletter signup below.
Schedule Your Posts
Once you have written up the posts and created images for them, you can start scheduling them. I checked them off my Blog Post Batching Checklist as I went to make sure I didn’t forget to create an image for any of them or forget to fill out my tags. I started by scheduling posts for the first of April because I knew it might take me some time to write all of the posts. I tried to spread it out so that I didn’t have all of the author interviews posted in the same week, for instance, and instead, I made sure they posted once a week.
For instance, this post is going up on Day 27 of the 30-Day Blogging Challenge because I knew I would want to save it for the very last few days so that I could see how the challenge affected my blog. Early on, however, I created the graphics for it and started taking pictures of the process so that I could make sure that when the “analyzing the results” part of the month came, most of the work was already done. It wouldn’t work to write this post before I wrote the previous ones, so I saved it. Some of the first posts that I wrote were the lists (2024 Writing Competitions You Can Still Submit To) because they weren’t dependent on the content before them (or reliant on an author sending me back their answers.)
Thankfully, all of the authors that I interviewed got back to me within about a week so I didn’t have to wonder whether they were going to ghost me or not. (It happens to the best of us!)
The Benefit of Posting Every Day
I’ve had a few people ask whether it’s worth it to post on your blog every single day. While I think doing this for a full year would be unsustainable (and probably would be an overwhelming amount of content), I have noticed a fairly significant increase in both book sales and blog readers. The month isn’t quite over yet and I’ve seen a 32% increase in page views for my blog. And after my recent giveaways, The Disappearance of Susannah Dane has stuck in the top 100 throughout the month, in a few categories on Kindle. I’ve also seen a small bump in readers on Kindle Vella.
Curiously, my most popular posts for the month of April include a lot of older reviews and posts from a few years ago. Using Google Insights, I can tell that readers are finding these posts via Google searches. So, I think that posting every day has helped make my blog posts easier to find. Maybe it’s helped with Search Engine Optimization. My top posts include: Free Character Building Worksheets (from 2022) and my review of Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson (a great book – must read.)
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