Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time
Today is day 30 of Sarah Arrow’s 30-Day Blogging Challenge and I survived. When one area of your life is not working as well as it should, the effects tend to seep over into other areas of your life. Last year I was sick a lot, which impacted every aspect of my life, including my business. I doubt that I wrote 10 original posts on The Invisible Mentor blog in 2018.
I have taken this blogging challenge four or five times before, so I knew that it was what I needed to get my blogging groove back. I need the structure of the 30-day challenge, which include daily emails. Each email is a prompt and you are reminded to read the email, write your blog post and post the link in the Facebook group. I have fresh content on my blog, where I fell short is not posting in the related Facebook group.
There is a lot going on in my life, and although I did a post every day, I was on the go practically every day and didn’t have the time to post in the challenge Facebook group. For personal reasons, I removed the Facebook app from my mobile phone, which made it impossible to post on Facebook while on the go. I still feel successful because my objective was to post 30 consecutive days and the 30-day blogging challenge allowed me to do that.
What I Thought About the 30-Day Blogging Challenge
Sarah Arrow’s 30-Day Blogging Challenge worked for me because its structure is what I needed to start blogging again consistently. It met my blogging objective. Additionally, over the past 18 months, I have been working toward targeting my blog. For the most part, my focus is on the Strategic Reading Challenge and helping professionals to develop in their career. With this focus, I still do book reviews and write a lot about reading and learning. I haven’t done the invisible mentor interviews in a long time, but I am tweaking the questions to align with my focus.
Have you read?
During the 30-day blogging challenge, there were three or four times when I clicked on a link that I got a 404 message. For those who may not be aware of the 404 error, it means that the link is not where it is supposed to be. What Sarah Arrow has done with her blogging challenge is to guest post on several blogs to introduce blogging challenge participants to blogs they may not be familiar with. That’s a good idea, but the downside is that if the owner of the blog changes their website without notifying Sarah, the link to her blog post will likely lead to a dead link.
The 404 errors weren’t a big thing for me because my goal for taking the 30-day blogging challenge was to develop a habit of blogging again and I did that and my traffic is slowly rising again. For new 30-day blogging challengers that could be a problem.
For one of the days of the challenge, you are asked to create a video using Lumen 5, and another day, you are asked to create an infographic. I have a pillar post, “How to Interview: What I Learned after 20 Years of Interviewing People,” that I used Lumen 5 to create a video, but I never created a new post to include the video in or even added it to the pillar post. During the blogging challenge I added the video to the pillar post, created an infographic and added it as well. I have a newly enhanced blog post. Thanks to Sarah Arrow.
Sarah Arrow recommends that you focus your blog, which is something that I struggled with for a long time. It’s now a lot better than it was two years ago, but I need to narrow my niche more. Because of the reminder from Sarah, I went to some old posts that are almost 10 years old and gave them a major overhaul, adding images and so on. I reposted them for a new audience to enjoy.
Final Thoughts Sarah Arrow’s 30-Day Blogging Challenge – I Survived
If you have an important goal that you’re trying to accomplish, to succeed you may need a little help from a friend, like the Beatles say. For blogging help, consider joining the 30-Day Blogging Challenge. If you want to read more books join the Strategic Reading Challenge.
This article contains Amazon affiliate links, which means if you click on a link and buy any of the books or other products from Amazon, the company will pay me a small commission.
