2010 July

Month Long Blogging Challenge – Who’s up for it?

Next month is August – 31 days. What a great choice of month to ramp up your blogging efforts by going through the Build a Better Blog in 31 Days by Darren Rowse ebook! If you have not picked it up yet, you should. It’s one of the few ebooks I ever purchased that I actually printed out and scribbled in the margins, put into a folder and actually hang on to.

So here’s what we’ll do – I will post a recap of the blogging tips each day either here or on Examiner where I am the National Blogging Examiner. We’ll leave links in the comment to our daily postings and can visit eachother’s blogs. Plus, of course, at the end of the month we’ll have explored 31 great ways to build up our blogs and websites.

Want in? All you need is a copy of Build a Better Blog in 31 Days if you don’t have one yet (affiliate link) and leave a comment to let me know you’re in. Subscribe to my posts at Blogging Examiner and we’ll go through one lesson every day.

The Pregnant Pause – the calm before the storm.

This is just as true with blogging as with pregnancy – the vast amount of growth takes place largely unseen and unnoticed. In the early stages of developing a blog you may not even have announced your new project yet, but it’s mentally all-consuming. Each post, page and article you put up grows your blog exponentially, even though it’s still a small blog and very new.

I remember celebrating when angengland.com hit 20 posts. I had grown the blog by 400% in month four compared to the first month! The amount of work it would take to grow my blog by that huge percentage NOW would take much, much longer to accomplish. And understandably so. I’m up against larger numbers now – my baby blog has grown up and is reaching a point where it’s more self-sustaining.

At the very beginning a blog is much more work than the amount of monetary reward it brings in. Just like no one has a baby and expects it to support itself that first month, so it is with a new blog. You will invest a large amount of time and energy into nurturing and growing your blog before those efforts are noticed. But hang in there – soon your blog will be up and running and you’ll wonder what happened to the little baby that required so much attention and coddling at the beginning.

What stage is your blog in? Have you found that a lot of the growth in the early stages went unnoticed at first?