Blogging Every Day
If you’ve been around Violet Roots for a bit you may remember my Blogiversary blogging marathon. I made a commitment to start blogging every day for the week of my blog’s anniversary and I had a lot of fun waxing poetic, dishing about life and talking about strategy as a blogger.
I mostly thought it would be a fun challenge to see how far I could push myself. Some people say that blogging every day or even blogging multiple times a day is the key to increasing your traffic but let’s be real here – VR is a one woman machine. I occasionally have help from my #InstagramHusband, A, with photos and overall advice but for the most part, everything you see is done by me and me alone.
It would be cool if I could take The Blonde Salad or Cupcakes and Cashmere route and have a team of contributors but that’s not in the cards at the moment. It would be amazing if that happened some day but until then if you want to add your two cents of brilliance to Violet Roots feel free to apply to guest post here!
Blogging every day was a challenge and it led me to break some barriers that I had unintentionally set for myself. Straying from my routine of 3x a week allowed me to evaluate my blogging schedule, figure out what I wanted and most importantly what I didn’t want my blogging life to be like.
I discovered how I wanted to write, what types of posts impacted my audience, how to stay creative in a busier blogging schedule and more! Today let’s rehash my experience blogging daily. Maybe you’ll try it for yourself or maybe you’ll see that it just isn’t for you.
Creativity
Having to come up with topics for every single day wasn’t the hard part. I was lucky enough to pretty much have the ideas for the whole week taken care of weeks in advance. Being prepared with the topics ahead of time allowed me to write without stress and I was able to knock out post after post like never before.
I discovered that it’s easier to create when there is less clutter in your mind and I’m working daily to recreate that mindset. I also had to think up different ways to market each post since I would have to do it every day without any downtime. I had to get creative with my promotion and I also had to stretch myself to make sure I wasn’t repeating myself or being redundant with my content.
Stats
My stats increased for February 2016 in comparison to January 2016 but that’s typically the case. Usually, there is a monthly increase so I don’t know if blogging every day is the cause of that.
I could argue that blogging every day made up for the fact that February is a shorter month and it’s possible that my stats would have dipped had I not blogged as frequently. Still, there is no way of knowing for sure. The next month in March 2016 there was another increase but that was only a slightly larger one than in February or January.
Maybe I would have seen a bigger jump in numbers if I did it for longer than a week but I can only share my own experience. A few of the posts from my blogging marathon are still some of my most popular posts and add to my traffic numbers every week. Feel free to check out my post on essential blogging tools, ways to stay creative while blogging and blogger problems.
Engagement
Older posts on Violet Roots still add to my monthly traffic. Although it’s normal for me to continue to rack up views in this way it’s rare that I’ll get a comment on a post that is older than a week or so. A lot of the posts that I wrote during this timeframe have received comments way past that timeframe.
I think the engagement is higher because the topics I featured are ones that resonate with bloggers. Other bloggers happen to make up a sizeable amount of my readership. If you scroll through the comments that fact will become clear and although you’re not all bloggers it’s important to talk about things that are unique to this community.
Management
Before the blogging marathon, I had gotten pretty far ahead in my editorial calendar. Posts were written out weeks in advance and day to day blog maintenance and tasks were a bit easier to manage. Blogging every day took up so much more of my time that I fell behind and never really got myself back together after that. As of now I usually have maybe one or two posts scheduled out ahead of time and I’m slowly getting myself back into a position to be ahead of my calendar.
It’s not easy but it’s probably the one negative side effect of having put so much time into content creation and daily promotion. Who knew posting took up so much time? Oh right, I should have! Haha. Blogging can be hard however when you have a plan set stress levels can drop down considerably. Posting daily taught me that in order to keep my head above water I either need to have better time management or simply, not post every day.
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Takeaways
These posts were, at the time, longer than the average post on VR. Now, it’s not out of the norm to see a 1,000+ word post on this site. I didn’t set out to write longer posts but once it happened I never really looked back.
There is a lot I want to say and I realize that some people like bite-sized posts that you can absorb in a few seconds but both in life, and in blogging, I realized that I shine when I have ample time to get my point across. I don’t think you can accurately describe the scene at a concert or share blog tips in just 300 words.
You might have to bookmark my posts and it might take you a few minutes to read but by the end of it I hope you’ll know what I wanted to share with you.
I don’t plan to start blogging everyday anytime soon but I think it was a great learning experience. I learned how I do and don’t want my routine to be, that people will respond to well thought out posts, even if they’re longer and that when post topics truly resonate with your audience and yourself blogging becomes easier (Click to Tweet).
What do you think about blogging every day? Have you ever done it?
NOTE: Check out my latest guest post about the life of a blogger on Gunhild Kristiansen’s blog here!