Last month, on May 15th, I stared a 230 days writing challenge. The goal was to write every day until the end of 2020. So far, so good, I’m on track with more than 30 posts already (32, to be precise, if we include this one too). Since this is quite a big task, I decided to write – as part of the challenge itself – some recaps at various milestones. This is one of these recaps.
Most of the time, I tend to write in the morning, before the “regular” day kicks in. I feel better when I know I crossed this off and then I can safely focus at the other tasks. Sometimes, though, I may go well beyond afternoon without a blog post written, and that puts a bit of pressure. But, overall, I can see a “morning writing” habit starting to form. I would be pretty happy if I could end the challenge with this habit on my toolbox.
In terms of topics, I am on a very free-form, no-topic-whatsoever approach and I feel ok. Most of the time, I just fire up my WordPress blog, hit the plus sign, and start writing. From there, it’s just whatever crosses my mind. I observed that I tend to edit more when writing like this. Sometimes I rewrite entire paragraphs, change order or delete consistently. Whatever I have in mind when I start is not always what I end up with. Don’t know what to say about this, other than enjoying the process so far.
In terms of length, I tend to be consistently around 800-1,000 words, which is my standard blog post length. Some days I write smaller posts, and, even if they may be just as “round” and balanced as the longer ones, I am left with a feeling of “not enough”. After almost 1,000 articles of 1,000 words or more, writing less than this seems to make me unconsciously anxious. I plan to work on this a bit more.
As for promotion, I post links to my Facebook page, with a short excerpt, and then share them on my profile. I also share them on Twitter. Both social media presences are more or less frozen, though, I didn’t make any effort to increase my audience on any platform. I also send every two weeks an email to my list, which, again, is very small now. Didn’t notice any visible change in traffic for the blog, as a result of posting more often. If anything, I noticed the same trend I spotted before: whenever you change the frequency of your posting, Google seem to back off a little – probably thinking you’re spamming – so the initial reaction is that the traffic goes slightly lower. I am not particularly interested in increasing the traffic right now, but this might be something I want to focus on in the near future. After all, I still have almost 200 days left from this challenge.
So, if I had to sum up this recap, this is it: keep it consistent.
Image by Sachu Sanjayan from Pixabay
