Finally Made It To The 21st Day
Today is the 21st post of my getting back into the habit of blogging thing. I started this whole odyssey back on the 22nd of September in the blog post Let’s Break Some Rules… The rules were pretty simple:
So, I’ve decided to get the momentum back, and I have a plan. I’ve read many times that you can make or break a habit in 21 days. It’s pretty simple to explain, and tougher to follow through till the end.
Here it is in a nutshell: Any good habit you want to start, you just do it for 21 straight days. At the end of those 21 days you will have added that new habit to your life. Likewise for a bad habit. Just cut it out for 21 days & will be gone from your life.
So, I’m going to blog for 21 days & get back into the habit of writing. Not going to make this overly complicated with a bunch of rules. Just going to write a post & publish it… simple.
It took a little longer than 21 days because I skipped a day early in the challenge. So, I decided to start again from day one, and commit to finishing. It would have been easier to catch-up by writing a couple posts & publishing them one day. But, I wanted to create a habit of blogging daily.
I did learn a few things the past 21 days…
1. Setting a goal to blog for 21 days in it’s self is not a very good idea - I jumped into this with only the plan of writing daily. There was no purpose other than to write, and that made it difficult to get this done on several days. There was no master plan, or direction to the blogging. As I look back over the posts… they were all over the place.
2. Traffic increased by posting content - Once I did start posting on a regular basis the traffic started to return. I watched the Alexa score drop from just under 200,000 to 132,000. Even with the lack of focus there was a return of traffic. I wonder what the traffic stats would have looked like if I had narrowed the subject matter.
3. Less participation in the comments - Except for a few posts. the comments & emails have been less frequent per post. Once again I can attribute the lowering of participation to the subject matter of the posts being scattered.
What am I going to do with this information?
This is something I’ve been thinking about over the past few days a lot. And I’ve decided to spend a few days to put together a plan for this blog. It will be related to online marketing… I just haven’t decided the exact direction. But, it definitely be more focused than the past few weeks.
Feel free to leave your thoughts, or comments below.
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Congrats on the completion and I look forward to you re-focus plan.
I too have been wondering if I should post more often and am going to construct a question post to my readers regarding it.
Right now I’m at about two to three per week, with excellent participation from readers.
I’m afraid of losing this as well. Not due to scattered focus in writing, but sheer overwhelming’ness of more posts.
Dennis Edell
5:00 am
Sure I’ll leave a comment. I have two blogs – I am pretty new to this stuff – but I sure love writing them. I was writing one of them everyday and lately I have eased off a bit to put my time into other things – like writing articles, concentrating on things that need to be done on my main website, and oh, taking care of clients both on and off the web! I really don’t know how many people are reading my blog – I haven’t figured out how to tell on Blogspot. My second blog on a different topic is on Wordpress and it has an easy way for me to check. Being a part of the web is an interesting experience. And what a learning curve – I expect that we shall all live to a great old age because of our continuous learning and keeping our minds fresh (or is that confused?)Thanks for your 21 days….no, I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read a few and I have been enjoying them.
Laurie Mueller
7:13 pm
Hi Keith,
I’ve only just arrived so I have to go back and read all 21 posts still, but I do have a question.
Do you feel you’ve made blogging a habit now with the 21 days of practice? Just curious.
I just finished a 30 day article writing challenge and part of the time I just felt annoyed that I “had” to write an article each day. But now that it’s over I’m so glad I did it.
I’ll be curious to hear your blog plan, and thanks for sharing your insights from this experiment.
Peggy
Peggy Baron
3:39 pm
Peggy,
I believe this has re-established the blogging habit for me. But, I can also say that some days I was annoyed because I had to write a post.
My take away from this challenge has been you need to have a focused plan or goal to make blogging fun & energetic.
Keith Goodrum
5:34 pm