Well, this is officially the last post of our 30-day blog challenge. I have enjoyed having to bang out a post every day. There were a few days when I could have easily not posted anything for all of the usual reasons: no time, too busy, nothing to say, etc., but I persevered and managed to make it through the 30 days.
Personal blogging is tough. You’re essentially writing about your life and you have to make it interesting enough for people to be ok giving up their time to read your posts. That’s asking a lot considering all of the media available for people to consume on the Internet. There are only so many blog posts you can ready in day. Likewise with videos and podcasts. And then there’s social media – your TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit and more.
Personal blogging differs from niche blogging or commercial blogging where your subject is narrow and usually centred on information outside of the individual’s personal life. Having a personal blog versus say a blog about the Rock band Kiss is harder because your asking people to be interested in you. Whereas, if this was blog all about Kiss, then you would be here to read about the band and not me. Granted, I might write from a first person perspective, but it would all be about Kiss.
Because social media is quick and dirty, you can consume a tweet in seconds and then move on to the next one. You can cover a lot of ground on Instagram scrolling through endless pictures or watch funny Reels.
Which is why, up until this challenge, I had resigned myself to just microblogging on Twitter and Instagram. Like the readers, I don’t have to invest a lot of time writing a tweet. I can fire and forget. Whereas coming up with ideas to write about for a blog post and then writing it takes a lot more time and mental energy. And if you get very little engagement, then the ROI on personal blogging doesn’t seem to be worth the investment of time.
But, if you do out the time in and you’re consistent, then growth and engagement happens, albeit slowly. You can see the difference in my stats. When I don’t post or post sporadically, traffic to site is nonexistent.
Unless you’re famous or known for something else, people aren’t likely to just randomly find your blog. So, like @MrFresh said in his post, you have to put in the work and push i out to social media outlets. In my case, Twitter is my biggest supplier of readers followed the WordPress.com social network of other WordPress bloggers.
My readership
The big question
Will I continue to post daily? Well, truthfully, probably not. But this past 30 days has taught me that I am capable of blogging daily. It comes back to purpose. What’s my purpose for blogging? To grow an audience? To have a place to document my life journey? Self-expression? Or something else. I need to definitively answer the purpose question. That will determine how I proceed.
One last thing. I think the turmoil over at Twitter has re-opened my eyes to why the importance of posting from your own space and syndicating out to social media platforms. I think it’s a good idea for me to rejoin the IndieWeb movement and blog and microblog from my own platform. That does require dropping the marketer mindset of blogging and returning to blogging for blogging’s sake. Dave Winer is great example of what this looks like. Dave has been blogging daily for 28 years, 2 months, 4 days, 21 hours, 27 minutes, 53 seconds. Dave is a blogger’s blogger.
I do wish WordPress worked more like micro.blog With that platform, you can just write. If it’s a short, i.e. falls in the 280 character limits, then it gets posted as a mircoblog post and crossposted to Twitter and Mastodon (and even to WordPress if you want). If what you’re writing starts to get long, the platform automatically turns it into a blog post and you proceed like you would with a regular blogpost. It also automatically gets posted to Twitter and Mastodon (if you chose). And with micro.blog you can post text, pictures, very short videos, and short audio.
While I am singing micro.blog’s praises, I no longer have a blog there. Mainly because it lacks the more powerful features of full WordPress site.
Anyway it’s been fun doing this challenge with my blog brothers, @MrFresh and @SMWGeek. Until next year, this officially ends the 30 Day Blog Challenge for me.
Here are all of my November posts. And here are my December posts.