What I Learned From Blogging Every Day For A Month

So…you might have noticed, especially you poor subscribers, that I published something to the blog every day during the month of January.

First, here are some stats I recorded as a result of the practice:

[please note these numbers are for January 2012, as compared to December 2011]

1. Comments to the blog increased over 6X. This was a big victory! Blogs are meant to encourage engagement. And publishing more often certainly achieved this. But the engagement came not necessarily from the act of publishing every day, but more as a result of publishing more thought-provoking material and concepts.

2. The amount of books purchased through my Amazon affiliates program held steady, but I did promote far less books over January than I did in December 2011. It was noted, however, that there were a heck of lot more click-thrus to check out the books I did promote.

3. It was my third best month ever in terms of sign-ups to my intrepid email mailing list.

4. My Alexa ranking did drop by over 200,000.

5. The amount of podcast downloads almost doubled. As a podcaster, this was a very exciting result.

6. Unique vistors to the site, as measured by Google Analytics, more than doubled.

So, a few thoughts:

Sure, these improved statistics are good results, but of course, the real desired result is moving the needle for the business and driving more business revenue. Being that I do NOT sell product online, but rather consulting services, I cannot really measure the impacts of this experiment on February 1st from a January experiment. It will be interesting to see if a new subscriber (to RSS, iTunes, email list) found in January might become a customer over the next several months. We’ll see. [note: I did sign a new client as a result of publishing a certain blog post in the first week of the month...]

Also hard to say that if I was to blog every day in February that several of these trends would “double” again. I don’t think I will continue publishing every day, but I will certainly publish much more often than I had been doing over the last quarter of 2011.

Oh, one other thing. Yes, I did worry whether or not I would be able to have enough material to publish every day. Turns out that getting into the habit and routine of posting every day made that process easier.

Turns out, if you have to publish every day, you just get down to it and create.

If you open your eyes and think just a wee bit, generating content should never a problem…and certainly wasn’t for me. In fact, I have material left over to run in February.

Blogging isn’t rocket science, but it is a lot of work. Writing every day does make blogging easier, and as shown above, does move the numbers.

[helpful tip: running experiments gives you something to write about, as evidenced above, you know, just in case you are struggling with ideas on what to blog about...]

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