In the immortal words of Snoop Dogg, “Blogging Ain’t Easy.” So I took the challenge 30 days ago, and I actually completed 30 post in 30 days, but it wasn’t easy. A lot can happen in 30 days, a last minute vacation, family parties, Halloween, a network meltdown, 5-6 major CM’s, work hours that usually last until midnight, and so on…. In the end what I realized was how much of an appreciation I have for those that pump out 100-300 posts a year, most of which capture my interest and quality controlled, not a lot of filler.
So a brief recap of my journey and some internal metrics. I read Greg’s article a day or two late, and said I’m doing it. I registered that day for a domain, and starting playing around with WordPress in the 20 min breaks I had throughout the next day or two while still working too late to have actually started. I quickly came up with 10-15 topics that I knew I could write about, I figured I would fill the rest in as I got closer to it. What I found during the next few weeks was:
- Knowing what to blog about is a job in itself, and after the initial push, it was exponentially harder to come up with ideas
- Don’t expect the shortest of post’s to take less than an hour, by the time you write it out, screen capture, check your facts, it’s an hour
- Writing about scripts just might be my niche area
- It’s hard to tell what people will like and not, do you really want to hear career advice from some guy on the internet? Is scripting something that many are interested in? Especially with no feedback good or bad.
- Not all content was created equal, some post’s are clearly better than others.
- You all stole my ideas!! Seriously, I mentioned in my first post how many times I had ideas for a blog post, but didn’t write it before other’s really hit the nail on the head. If I have a different take on it, that’s fine, but otherwise I had to scrap a bunch of topics since it’s been done.
- You have to stay ahead of your schedule (I didn’t but) that this is the way to survive
- Marketing, you can build it, but no one will show. That’s ok for now, I don’t feel I have my strongest content up yet, I have some ideas for content and once I finish it, I will start trying to market a bit better. I had two influxes of traffic, based on a reddit and a blog comment, but few hits other then that.
- OK, so I cheated… I back dated a lot of my blogs (only so I knew how far behind I was) and I split topics into multiple sections. I wrote scripts on the fly that weren’t of the best quality, just to PoC it. I took content I wrote before in scripts and documentation, and re-purposed it.
- I learned to check the names of the user’s registering, they have been pretty much spam users so far.
By the numbers:
- 10 Posts that were about Scripting
- 10 Post that were technical, but not Scripting
- 8 Post on Career of Soft Skills
- 2 Anecdotal (the last two, including this)
I think it was a great start, and it forced me to keep it going, and just push content out. I’m glad I took the challenge, but I am going to pull back to about once a week for now and then try to ramp up to twice a week once I can get my queue built up a bit.
Anyway, if you have enjoyed, found any of this useful, have any tips, hate it or otherwise, let me know, perhaps it can help me in the future.
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