Blogging Challenges – The Advantages and Disadvantages

Have you ever done a blogging challenge? How often do your post? Would you like to publish a blog post every single day and see what it does for your traffic and your sales?

Lots of bloggers have signed up for the A to Z Blogging Challenge whereby bloggers will publish posts for every day of April, apart from Sundays. 1st April will see topics starting with the letter A, 2nd April with the letter B and so on until Z on 30th April.

Advantages of Blogging Challenges

The advantage of doing a challenge like this is you will find other blogs to read, there seems to be a community feel about the whole concept, plus other bloggers will find you.  You can categorize your blog and find other blogs within categories you are interested in. They also encourage you to display the widget on your sidebar and connect with other bloggers.  The readership of your blog should increase over the course of the month.

A blogging challenge makes you focus too – and it will get you into the habit of blogging frequently.  You will have to think outside the box particularly when it comes to coming up with topics for the more difficult letters such as J, X, Q and Z.  You will probably step outside your normal blogging topics somewhat too with some of the posts so it will be a learning experience to see the response.

Practising your writing means that it should improve. You’ll be reading more blog posts too – seeing what others are writing for those difficult letters! This means that the quality of your own blog should improve.

Disadvantages of Blogging Challenges

Are there any negatives to blogging challenges?  As someone who blogs twice a week on each of my blogs (and ghost writes), I would view daily blogging as a challenge! Of course, not every post would have to be a long piece of writing – there are ways around it but I think it is the feeling that ‘I have to blog’ that would make me not enjoy it. Blogging is about enjoyment even if it is a business blog. I would refuse to give up but would hate to make a half hearted effort at the latter half of the blog posts.

Will your regular readers (who are accustomed to reading your blog posts twice a week) feel inundated?  Will they groan when they see another blog post in their inbox or their feedly reader?

Will the quality of your posts by compromised by writing so often?  If you usually spend an hour researching, checking links and writing your posts, adding images – not to mention if you have a recipe blog and have to create a new recipe for every day, is the usual high quality of your posts going to disappear?

Tips for Blogging Challenges

1. Plan ahead – create a document or draft posts and brainstorm some ideas. Try to have something planned for each day so you don’t have to waste time staring at a blank screen.

2. Timetable – allow yourself sufficient time to read other blog posts as well as writing your own if you are to benefit fully from the challenge.

3. Have you got products or services that you haven’t blogged about in ages and they might fit into some of the letters? Remember to extol the benefits of the product or service for the customer rather than writing at length about the features. Put your customer as the focus.

4. Have you kept a list of questions that customers ask you?  Are there some you haven’t covered yet? See if they will fit into any of the letters for the month.

5. When you find a blog that is particularly entertaining, informative or enjoyable, analyse what you like about it. Can you use some of those skills in your own blog?

Will I join in the challenge? Well, I think writing this post has convinced me to give it a go. I have lots of Pinterest posts planned though so now to work out how to write them under other letters as I can’t wait for ‘P’. A is for ‘analytics’ after all