After a long article last week, I thought I would finish the year with a short one.
I began the year with a goal to “publish a blog article every two weeks” but I modified it slightly to include “not go two weeks without an update” which meant that I could not publish one article at the beginning of a fortnight and then another at the end of the next fortnight.
Since I like to avoid stress, this had a positive impact on me. I wanted to avoid the stress of knowing that I had to publish “this week” or “in the next day or two”. The result was that I published an article weekly for a few weeks to keep ahead.
Then another factor kicked in – having published for several weeks in a row, I didn’t want to break my record.
That worked pretty well for me. It did lead to quantity over quality though, so I added a new proviso that I would draft and then edit my posts rather than just punching them out. I failed miserably at that one, with only a couple of well edited posts and many rushed “streams of conscious” posts.
So what was the impact?
My readership went up by 0.0%. In fact it is lower than a couple of years ago. But then I used to publish articles for people to reference when I was running training sessions and I think these were the main winners in the readership stats.
Also – I measured this in WordPress, but I don’t think the linked-in reposting was much improved either.
I also got 0 leads and no income, so as a professional author this blog is a bust.
But I did get the pleasure of writing and I did get to think aloud by sorting things through in my blog. This was the main win and I think it justifies continuing on its own.
Finally, some real humans mentioned that they saw my blog and so that gave me an ego boost. It feels good to connect to people and I think a blog is a good extension of doing that.
So what next? I am not sure if I will publish weekly but I will keep up a rhythm. I think my next goal will be to create some longer story arcs, so there are some topics that cover multiple blog articles. I think this will stretch my strategic thinking and help me work ever closer to capturing my thinking in a book or journal, eventually.
Meanwhile – this is a first for me. Published an article every week for a year. I am pretty happy about that.
James King 