Well, I made it! 31 continual days of blogging. The question is – did I learn anything and in particular will I make any changes to my blogging routine? What will I do more of, less of or not at all?!

Today I’ll cover a little of what I discovered and in my next post I’ll detail what I intend to do about it (more of, less of, stop doing altogether!)

I embarked on the Ultimate Blog Challenge on 1st January 2013 in the hope of kick starting my desire to write after experiencing huge resistance just before Christmas to opening up my blog dashboard. I described the experience here

Here’s what I found…

The first week was hell. I struggled to think of topics I wanted to cover (even with the help of daily emails from UBC which were full of ideas). Some days I only managed to get something written down with the threat of bedtime (and another day) looming. Phew. Just made it.

I persevered.

After around 6-7 days, I sensed a change. I must have primed my mind by then as nuggets of ideas would pop into my head all throughout the day, not just when I sat down and opened up my blog. I felt the first fleeting sense of enjoyment – I began to look forward to creating my next post.

My attitude towards daily blogging early on in the challenge can be described thus:

Resistance … Acceptance … Enjoyment

From week 2 onwards, the process was much easier.

My posts became shorter – not because I struggled to write more but because when I was trying to read posts from others, my task was made much easier if the posts were fairly short. I decided to encourage others to read my posts by posting in brief.

By the third week I was really enjoying posting every day. I had also ‘met’ some lovely friends via the challenge and looked forward to our interactions each day. My only reservations concerned my subscribers – my blog inevitably became less focussed as I expanded the topics I blogged about. Some of these were prompted by UBC’s useful daily suggestions. Would my subscribers still be interested? Would they get fed up of daily posts dropping into their inbox? “Oh no – not her again!” Would they ‘unsubscribe’ en masse? Luckily, subscriber numbers did not drop (actually went up a little) during January so I obviously didn’t drive anyone totally mad!

There are several factors I could have looked at in determining the effect of a month’s daily blogging on my blog stats. Today, I’ve chosen to focus on comments.

I was delighted with all the blog comments (thank you everyone!) and also interested to discover which posts drew the most comments. Overall, I think it is true to say that the more personal my post, the more comments I received. It’s also interesting to note that the only day when I received no comments at all, I was on aeroplanes the entire day and unable to promote my post much or interact on social media. There’s a message there…

Here are my post titles throughout January along with the number of comments received (includes my replies).

On the subject of comments – I’ve talked a lot about my own here, but I think it’s essential to get stuck in and comment on other people’s blogs. Yes – it will direct a few eyeballs towards your own blog but the real key lies in making a point of trying to add value to that person and their post with your comments. Try it. Make it a discipline. It’s impossible to read many on a regular, daily basis of course but aim to add your thoughts to a few a week.  Be sure to interact. Blogging is social.