Last month I set a challenge to blog for 30 days, to establish a habit of blogging, increase my knowledge base and followers.

While I missed a couple of days here and there, and was grateful for some awesome guest bloggers to give me a break, I feel pretty satisfied with the content I created. I aimed for a range of topics, from general business/entrepreneurship, to website design and development, to social media and marketing.

Here are the top things I learned and results from my 30 Day Blogging Challenge:

Tools are a Key

CoSchedule was a key to my process. I signed up and paid for a year, so I was invested in using this tool to schedule my blog posts, create drafts, and seamlessly integrate my content into my social media feeds. I loved the ability to drag and drop blog topics on a calendar, which works with my preference for a calendar/visual view of a schedule. CoShcedule lets you draft posts in your WordPress site directly from the CoSchedule Dashboard and store them in a “Drafts” folder, whereyouI can drag them onto the calendar when you want to use them. It also integrates Evernote, which I don’t use but I do have an account so could connect it to make this a useful connection.

Social Media was easy to incorporate into my challenge with CoSchedule. Without social media, my blogs would have gone into a black hole! I generally posted my blog on Twitter, Linkedin and my business Facebook page.

Photography for my blog mostly came from Pixabay.

Screenshot and Screencasting: I used the Awesome Screenshot Chrome Extension for screenshots. I had never done screencasting before, but tried it out a couple of options. I used Cattura Capture Cast Google Chrome Extension because it was very easy, but the visual quality was not very good. If I continue to do screenscasting, I will look at other options.

Results – Numbers

Mailing List: If I had been looking to increase my mailing list subscribers, this effort was a total fail. I only gained 2 subscribers to my Mail Chimp list in the 30 days of blogging! Yikes! I guess I need to research ways to add subscribers. I don’t have a pop up on my site at the moment, as gaining subscribers was never a goal since I have never focused on blogging. I plan to add a pop up within the next couple of weeks and will see if it makes a difference.

Social Media Followers: I have never really analyzed data from Twitter, which was my main focus during this campaign. According to Twitter, my average number of impressions in March was 813 per day. I did more than double my followers on Twitter during the month, although my number is still pretty small.

Going Forward

I am planning to use CoSchedule to retweet some of my blog posts and hopefully that will increase the exposure of my content.

If nothing else, the challenge did instill in me a habit of blogging that I plan to continue at least twice a month. It helped me learn, as I researched topics of interest in greater depth. For example, I tried using 3 different plugins “from scratch” on my local server for the blog post I wrote about Membership Plugins.

I love that my blogs may be resources for other now and over time, in the spirit of WordPress and blogging in general as a way to provide information on the internet.

I am happy to have started a blogging habit, which had increased my confidence as a WordPress “developer” and sparked a desire to expand my knowledge and participation in the WordPress/entrepreneur space.

Are you a blogger? What tips can you share?