Insights on blogging

Live from the farm....

Since I started the 30 Day Blog Post Challenge a week ago, I've realized a few things about blogging and want to share them with you. 

1. Regarding that blogging calendar.... A blogging calendar has turn out to be not very helpful to me during the Challenge. I find that the topics on my calendar are ... meh. They're not very exciting, and so I don't want to write about them. I do look at the calendar, which is on Trello, but more often that not, it's the cards I pulled from my Blog Post Inspiration Deck that inspire me on any given day. Some days though, like today, I'm just way too busy, and so I repurpose content I wrote elsewhere (like this post, which I originally posted in the Challenge as a note to my fellow participants).

My (unused) Trello calendar for the 30 Day Blogging Challenge

2. Goodbye perfectionism! Despite my intention to create a stash of posts for the future, I am posting my blog posts NOW, as I write them. And this is turning out to be a GOOD thing, because otherwise they might sit in the graveyard of unfinished posts on my computer because, well, they're often not "good enough." Like -- I want to do MORE to them. More editing, more images, more elaborating. But if I hold off on publishing, chances are I may never publish at all. So ... THAT is how I'm getting around my perfectionism! Posting no matter what, even if I think I need to do "more" to the piece. So far, I haven't gone back to any of those posts. I just keep moving forward. Bye bye, perfectionism!

Photo by Andy Tootell on Unsplash

3. Content galore! I also find that my blog is filling up with content, fast, and I'm PROUD of it! At this rate, my blog will be jam-packed by the end of this Challenge! And maybe that consistency will bring some new readers and traffic my way. And here's the thing, I can still, over time, trickle these new posts out to my email audience and to my social streams. So I'm filling up my blog with content that I will be able to reuse in other places later. Yippee ki yay!

Photo by Zachary Nelson on Unsplash

4. Hitting the bloggy lottery? Speaking of sharing in other places, I am also planning to share some of my Challenge blog posts in full on LinkedIn and Medium. If you don't have a blogging account on Medium, you might want to get one -- it's free. Medium is the place where blog posts go to be discovered. If a Medium editor likes your piece, it can quickly get out to a huge number of readers. Jackpot!

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

5. It's the images, baby! I also realize that I love finding images that support my posts almost as much as I do writing the posts! I think images add a LOT to the appeal of a post, so I tend to spend a lot of time doing stuff with images:

• First I find them, usually on Unsplash.com
• If an image is the "featured image" for my post, I have to bring it over to Canva to get it into the right size to fit at the top of the blog post
• I download the Canva'ed image to my computer, and then upload it to the blog
• Once uploaded, I set the photo's ALT text, title, and description
• One the image is inside my blog post, I resize if needed and give it a style so it looks a little dimensional

I hope I don't scare you off from using images in your blog! Working with images has become a habit to me by now, but it IS time consuming, especially since the backend of my WordPress site seems as slow as dial-up.

Or a turtle.

Photo by Nick Abrams on Unsplash

There you have it. Five insights from seven days' worth of blogging.

It's work, but I tell ya ... I'm lovin' every minute of it!