And so we arrive at the finish line and it feels soooo good. 30 days, 30 blog posts, 9 happy bloggers, and 5 big wins. This calls for a happy dance!
30 days ago, we took Hubspot’s 30-Day Challenge because of three reasons:
We needed to challenge ourselves. Check.
I lost track of the number of times we told ourselves that we’re going to start blogging regularly but kept setting it aside in favor of other more important tasks. We knew well that we have to stop making excuses and start getting to work. And so, by committing ourselves to a public challenge like this one, we felt the pressure to deliver, and used that pressure to motivate ourselves and start making things happen around here.
We have to be our best case study. Check.
Paul Rosenberg hit the nail hard in the head when he said this:
So let me get this straight, you tell your clients to blog every day but you don’t?
Being in this business, we study and implement the best practices in Online and Content Marketing, and we know that consistency is a major factor if we want to succeed. But we haven’t been practicing what we preach, and it was about time to test our strategies on our own blog.
We wanted to create a habit. Check.
Blogging everyday is not a walk in the park. But with a little force, some consistency, and loads of determination, it becomes natural to meet deadlines and to follow an editorial calendar. That’s not to say we would continue to post daily moving forward, but we will definitely stick to a more manageable blogging schedule and deliver even better content.
These changes in attitude and habits are significant wins already, and I could stop right here. But there’s more to share, and here’s a rundown of the big wins we gained from doing this 30-day blog challenge:
5. We earned non-family / non-friend blog subscribers
I’m first to admit that we have not exerted any effort whatsoever to grow our mailing list until this month. On the first month of this blog’s existence, only a few friends and my mother (hello Mom!) subscribed. But as we publish articles that are relevant to people in the industry, and promote our content out there, we start seeing unfamiliar names and email addresses added to our mailing list. Thank you guys, for subscribing. We promise to treat you well.
4. We added new bloggers to our content team
And we didn’t even have to hire! Our new bloggers are the same people I work with and exchange emails with everyday. Like a broken record I couldn’t stop gushing about how proud I am of our team for pushing their limits and officially becoming bloggers this month.
The Spiralytics team is made up of professionals who have years of experience doing PPC, SEO, Web Development, Graphic Design, and Analytics, but none of them (except from our writers, of course) has experienced blogging before this month. We can therefore attest that you don’t need years of formal education or professional experience to actually publish content. You only have to share what you already know.
3. Our posts got a significant amount of social activity
Because we’re blogging daily, we have something to share on our social networks daily too. Little by little, people in our spheres of influence begin to know Spiralytics and why we exist. We’ve allowed ourselves to be in other people’s radar, beginning with our own personal networks, and then our networks’ networks. Soon enough, industry influencers and people we don’t know have started sharing our content too.
2. We increased our traffic by 638%
This blog is fairly new. We launched this site in November, and built our content slowly in November and December last year. Aggressively posting content this January increased our visits from 400+ in November to almost 4,000 this month. I know that’s nothing compared to the traffic other blogs normally get, but we’re proud to achieve this at this early stage in our blog’s existence.
1. We experienced growth as a team
Call me sentimental, but I have to make this our biggest win. I’ve discussed in this post how content creation has become like a team building activity for us here, and how it can be for you too. Corporate blogging can be lonely without a team of supporters and doers backing you up, but it can be really fun and more efficient when the whole company understands the purpose of publishing content, and everyone works together to achieve those goals.
So there you go folks. We’re ending a blog series today, but this is definitely the start of something even greater.
Spiralytics’ 30-Day Blog Challenge, over and out!
