The #blog100 challenge

on
The #blog100 challenge was initiated by the Swedish blogger Fredrik Wass. The challenge consists of writing 100 articles on your blog and you have to write at least one article each day. You can follow the hashtag #blog100 on Twitter to find like-minded bloggers who have also accepted the challenge.

But why do you have to blog so much - isn't blogging what we used to do several years ago before we used Twitter? But that's also part of the problem - we have begun to focus on shorter updates and forgotten about the articles we may actually learn something from. People are still using Google to find solutions to their problems - they are not searching for the solutions on Twitter. As we saw in an earlier article, How to market your company by sharing your knowledge, we learned that one way to market your company is to share your knowledge with your current and future customers. We should out-teach our competitors - not out-spend them. I believe it's much harder to teach on Twitter or Facebook compared with wring an article on your blog.

But coming up with good articles to write about is difficult. The solution to that problem is #blog100 because the theory is that you will come up with more ideas for articles if you force yourself to blog more. It will be difficult in the beginning, but much easier in the end. 

These are the original rules:
  • Write at least one article each day
  • The articles can be short and consist of only an embedded video from YouTube. But you should add some text to the video so your users can find the article through Google 

I believe you can also include major updates of old blog articles in the 100 articles. If you go through your blog, you may realize your language has improved or you have just embedded a video from YouTube without any text. Modify these articles to make them better. You should also take a piece of paper and mark 100 squares so you can easier track your progress - it will also make you more motivated since you really want to fill in those empty squares. 

I began this challenge in October and have now written 100 articles if you include this article. I don't know if it's important to blog during 100 days or write 100 articles? Anyway, here's what I've learned:
  • It's true that it was difficult in the beginning, but after about 50 articles, I realized it became easier and easier to find new ideas. You have to "transform" your mind to always hunt for new ideas to write articles about. After writing 100 articles, I still have a long list of ideas to articles I would like to write in the future. 
  • I realized my English language has improved since I wrote some old articles, so I've included major rewrites of old articles in my #blog100.
  • I've also seen that the number of retweets and favorite markings on Twitter has increased. After I wrote each article, I tweeted about it.
  • It takes some time before Google includes all articles in their search engine so I will update this article in a few weeks to see the final results. What can be seen today can be measured through Google Webmasters where you can measure how many people saw your blog in Google an how many clicked on it. The number of impressions per day has increased with 145 percent and the number of clicks per day has increased with 90 percent.

Update! Google has now indexed all pages, so now can we measure the final results by taking the average of the latest week and the average of the week before #blog100 began:
  • The number of clicks have increased by 123 percent
  • The number of impressions have increased by 107 percent

Comments

Post a Comment