What happened when I blogged every day for a month
As you may already know, I celebrated my five-year anniversary of being a published author on September 6 2023. I remember my very first publication day so well - and now I look back and think how sweet and wide-eyed I was about the whole process.
I also had a Bookbub on the day, and I woke up to an email from my lovely editor telling me that I had a bestseller flag on Amazon (in some obscure category, natch, but still, it was very exciting!)
Anyway, I’ve learnt a lot since then, and yes, it’s fair to say the experience of being published has been a massive rollercoaster. Which is why I thought to celebrate my anniversary I’d set myself a blogging challenge!
My blogging history
I have been an inconsistent blogger for years and years. When I was pregnant, I had a pregnancy blog. Before that I had a lifestyle blog. After I had my daughter, I carried on blogging for a while and even launched a kids’ interiors blog (called Go To Your Room - I was very proud of that name at the time! 😆). But then I got a book deal and stopped blogging completely.
However, when I first launched my web design business (four years ago now - what!! 😲), I was very committed and blogged every week. I know how powerful content marketing can be (I used to run a content marketing agency), especially when you are starting out in a new industry.
So I really focused on providing useful, informative and helpful content to authors who were looking for help with their websites, and I made sure that I shared that content in as many places as possible.
I also offered lots of free resources to encourage people to sign up for my monthly newsletter, and this helped me to grow my audience quite quickly.
Now, the good thing about blogging is it has both long and short-term benefits. In the short-term, it gives you content to share on social media and if you have a decent following, this can really quickly get traffic to your website up and running.
But it also has a long-term benefit. Provided you’re consistently publishing relevant, useful content and optimising it for SEO then after a few months, Google will start showing your content in search results, and this is a great way of getting new visitors to your website.
As I said, I blogged consistently for the first two years of my business, and it really helped my traffic grow. I was ranking really highly on Google for ‘squarespace author website’ and ‘author website designer’ (and I am currently no 2 on Google in the UK for that search term, which might be my proudest achievement ever?!) which helped me get enquiries from people who didn’t know me in real life.
But then, as you’ll know if you’ve followed me for a while, I got a second book deal and suddenly I had to write two books in one year, and I started to get booked up really far in advance with my web design (a high-class problem I know, but an issue nonetheless).
So I decided to pull back on the blogging. I literally didn’t have time.
I didn’t blog for about a year. But it bugged me. I knew I had SO much useful information to share, and I really wanted to keep this blog going and create something with real value.
Almost a gold-mine of information for authors on all things tech.
But I also realised that there were other things I wanted to talk about, that weren’t just related to Squarespace or author websites.
I had shared a few more personal posts on life as a writer before, and these always proved really popular. Which gave me an idea…
The blog challenge
I decided to set myself a goal to get back into the blogging grove: to blog once a day throughout September on all the things I’ve learnt since my first novel was published.
I thought it would be a fun and satisfying way of getting back into blogging game after my hiatus. And I’ll admit that writing blog posts on Squarespace or author websites isn’t a task that fills me with huge joy, even though I know the content is helpful.
Whereas sharing my thoughts on publishing is rather more satisfying and, well, cathartic!
And I did it! I successfully published one post every day throughout September.
If you haven’t already, you can catch up on the blogging series here →
So, here’s what I learnt from the experience:
1) Batch-working saved me
If you’re not familiar with the term, then batch-working is basically a way of organising your work so that you concentrate on doing one thing at a time until it’s done, rather than lots of different tasks in one day.
It allows you to focus exclusively on that task, rather than doing a little bit of it then getting pulled into something else, then trying to go back to the initial task and pick up where you left off.
I find this way of working makes me so much more productive. It’s the reason I do a custom website project in two weeks - I literally do nothing else for those two weeks, which makes me quick and efficient.
Same with writing the first draft of a novel - I try to get these written within eight weeks and minimise any other work while I’m doing them.
So I knew that if I tried to write one blog post each day and publish it immediately then I’d get nothing else done on those days.
I wrote all 30 posts in August, over the course of about a week. It was a lot of work - nearly 30,000 words in total. But batch-writing them also meant I could get ‘into the zone’ and write them quite quickly.
Now, there’s no way I could have written 30 blog posts on Squarespace or anything technical in a week because those kind of posts require a lot more research, but as this was essentially a recollection of my own personal experiences, it was much easier.
If you’ve read the posts, you’ll see that they are quite stream-of-consciousness in tone!
(I was very wary when I shared them of making sure people realised that they are JUST MY THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS and not some kind of official dissertation of the publishing industry.)
2) Uploading the posts was the most laborious bit
I’m a website designer and generally love working in Squarespace but I have to say the bit I hated the most about the challenge BY FAR was actually uploading the posts!
Squarespace’s blogging platform is fiddly and a little bit annoying (having played around on Substack recently, I can confirm that it is MUCH more efficient - sort it out Squarespace!) and I found uploading the posts very tedious. I usually did it the night before in a panic (while wishing I had a VA!).
3) Sharing the posts first thing in the morning worked well
I decided to share the posts first thing in the morning so that I wouldn’t have it hanging over me all day to remember to do it.
I first shared them on Instagram, then a little bit later on Twitter.
This really worked and half way through the month I had people messaging me to say that they were reading them first thing, and coming to my social media each morning to check that a new post had been published.
This reminded me of something that I already knew: that being consistent with blogging is really important - and respectful to your audience.
4) A few of the posts went viral
A handful of my posts went semi-viral, which caused huge spikes in traffic to my website. And a ton of messages and comments on social media.
Interested in which ones were the most popular?
Your wish is my command! In order of popularity:
The size of your advance matters (this was the second post I published and the most popular by a huge margin)
I was fascinated that the genre post proved so popular.
5) My traffic went up a whopping 91%
I was hoping my traffic would go up throughout September - understandably - but I was pretty astonished by just how much it went up.
I had a 91% increase in page views from the previous month, and I reached 13,000 page views, with more than 4,000 unique visitors.
Obviously, all that traffic was social-media driven (and I’m lucky to have a pretty big Twitter following), as Google won’t have had time to rank the pages yet, but I’m hoping I’ll start getting some traffic from search over the coming months too.
Here’s a little graph from my analytics to show you how my traffic was affected.
Between January and July of this year I didn’t publish ANY new content at all.
You’ll see that August also had high traffic - this was because I’d shared a post ‘How not to be a dick when you get a book deal’ which went a bit viral and gave me the idea to do the blogging challenge in the first place.
6) I had a LOT to say 😆
One of the things that surprised me the most was that I had SO much to say. I said to myself that I’d only do the challenge if I could easily think of 30 things to write about, and when I sat down to brainstorm, I had 30 ideas within minutes.
I even had a ‘b-list’ of ideas which didn’t make the cut. I’ve saved these for the future, and by the end of the month I had already decided that I would keep sharing posts on being a writer alongside my Squarespace and website design posts.
7) I had tons of DMs from authors and still continue to get feedback!
This was so lovely! I had so many messages, DMs, emails and comments from authors thanking me for writing the posts, and saying it felt as though I was talking directly to them about something they were worrying about. It actually made me feel really emotional.
I think we are all so wary of talking honestly about the things that concern us as authors, and I hope that by being a bit more frank and open I can help relieve some of the anxiety that goes with this unstable career.
8) My traffic dropped off massively after
Not a huge surprise as so much of my traffic was driven by social media shares, but afterwards, my traffic took a huge nosedive.
However, you can see from the graph above that my October traffic is still way higher than my July traffic, and I’m hoping to keep it at this level going forwards.
I’ll be honest, the SEO on this website isn’t great considering I’m a web designer. There’s a lot I need to do to improve it (my alt tags are a mess, y’all!), and given the amount of useful content on here, I think it should be performing better on Google.
It’s something I’m going to work on next year.
I didn’t choose to blog daily for SEO reasons, and the topics covered in the posts are quite niche and definitely not optimised for search, so I’m not sure if any of them will rank well on Google, but time will tell. I’ll keep you posted!
What I learnt from blogging every day
I was really pleased with myself for completing the challenge and I am really glad to have done it.
I would definitely do it again but it was a lot more work than I expected, given that I write all the time anyway, and if I hadn’t batch-written the posts in advance, I think I would have failed.
Blogging daily is hard work! I also found remembering to share the posts on social media tricky, especially at the weekends when there’s all kinds of Life Stuff happening. It felt like a bind to remember to post, and then I felt bad if I didn’t respond immediately to people who were commenting on the posts.
I have huge, huge respect for full-time bloggers. Everyone makes out that it’s an easy job but blogging well to provide high-value content is really skilled and takes an enormous amount of time and research.
If I’m honest, I don’t enjoy blogging as much as I enjoy writing novels. And I much prefer building websites to blogging. Blogging feels a bit like homework to me, or writing an essay, whereas creative writing is much freer.
However, I have really, really loved reading all the responses to the posts I shared, and engaging with my fellow authors. That was by far the best bit about the whole experience.
Which is why at the end of the challenge, I decided to continue blogging about life as a writer once a week.
I have a very ambivalent relationship with social media. Any content you share on there is so short and insignificant, so it’s hard to feel you are making a real impact. Whereas with long-form blogging I really feel as though I can offer something of value to the writing community, which is so rewarding.
I would love to make this blog into a super-useful resource for writers at all stages of their publishing journey - whether they’re just starting out, have just landed their book deal, or they’ve been writing for years.
So a huge thank you, really, to everyone who read or shared my posts throughout September! I’m so glad you enjoyed reading them, and I hope to continue to share plenty more interesting insights going forward ☺️
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