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You may have heard about the Ultimate Blog Challenge. A new round takes place in April, with challenges running every three months of a year. This is one of those 30-day blogging challenges, which sees bloggers post new content every day of the whole month.
It can be a daunting task. I’ve done a few of these challenges in the past, and the first time I stared at the computer in shock. Would it be possible to write something new every day of a month? April is a shorter month with just 30 days, but January, July, and October have 31 days. That extra post can be a little too much.
Sure, I share blog post ideas for every day of a month. That doesn’t mean I expect people to need something for every single day of the month. The ideas are there to work with and have fun.
Are 30-day blogging challenges worth doing? Here are my thoughts on the matter.
They’re great for giving a new blog a boost
If you’re just starting a new blog, doing 30-day blogging challenges can be good to get started. You’ll get a lot of content in a short space of time. This is great for ranking on Google and for building an audience.
The blogging challenges can also be great if you’re revamping a blog or if you’re bringing an old blog back to life. The aim is to get the fresh content on the site, making it clear what the new focus is or making it clear that you’re coming back with more content.
You’ll want to be careful with this. Once you start posting daily, people will expect that to continue. Once you stop, it can be very hard to get the following back. This is where the 30-day blogging challenges can work against you. Initially, you look like you’ll offer daily content and then you go to whatever the original plan was after that.
I’ll get to that shortly. You need a plan for after the blogging challenge.
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Blogging challenges can be a good way to set a discipline
The blogging challenges are often a great way for building a discipline in writing. You get used to creating daily content, helping to bring people to your site. You can use a challenge as a way to get started with daily writing.
There’s not always a need to post the content daily. The aim is to write daily. You can create your blog posts offline, and then you post them on your blog on your own schedule. It’s not quite doing the blogging challenge as expected, but it is a great way to get your routine.
As you get better doing this, you may find that posting daily will help. You can always build your way up to this if you’re not too sure at first.
It’s important to ensure quality and not just quantity
One of the issues I’ve seen with daily blogging challenges is that the quality of the writing drops. People are so focused on getting the content out on a daily basis that they don’t put the focus on quality content. You need to make sure that while bringing quantity, you’re also bringing quality.
Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to Google. Thin content or content that is riddled with errors doesn’t make you look great. Google will push your content down in favor of content that is written much better and is more valuable to readers.
So, if you can’t create quality content, the 30-day challenges are great. If that means you need to write every other day, go for that instead. You can always create content daily, but you’ll want to make sure it’s ready to post before you actually publish it. If that means taking a couple of extra days, go for it.
What’s the plan after the blogging challenge is complete?
Once you have completed the 30-day blogging challenge, what’s your plan? You need a plan for your blog afterward.
Will you keep going with daily posts? If this was always the plan and you can create great daily content, go for it! I’ve got a lot of websites where I write daily, and it has helped boost the views to the millions.
But what if you’re going to drop to just writing one post per week or even one post per month? This is going to be a problem when people have been used to you writing daily. If people see that you’re not posting as often, especially without any warning, they’ll wonder if your blog is still running. People don’t stick around on blogs if they don’t really know you, and unless you’ve already built up the audience before the challenge, people don’t know you.
So, before you even think about doing a daily challenge, look at the plan for afterward. What are you going to do?
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Are you taking part in a blogging challenge? What are you doing to boost the views to your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.