What I’ve learnt from writing 100 blog posts

This is my 100th blog post on The Bowditch Group’s blog.

(OK, actually it’s my 104th – I forgot about the milestone coming up and kinda missed it. But let’s just pretend it’s my 100th blog post.)

I have taken the opportunity this morning to look back through some of the old stuff and plan for the future as well. It’s really hard to objectively look at your own work and appraise it but even I can honestly say that some of the stuff I wrote early on is just crap.

Also, it’s interesting that a few opinion I fervently gave in the early days are no longer my opinions – due in large part to the other bloggers I have networked and interacted with since kicking all of this off. I have learnt so much from other people and I’m sure I will continue to as well. The blogging community is generally a very generous one and I am grateful for all of the help, advice and criticism I have received along the way.

Here is some of what I learnt when I reviewed the blog over its 6 month life thus far:

I have had 48,267 unique visitors, 194,411 page visits and 672,749 hits in that 6 months. StumbleUpon has been responsible for 16,565 visitors and from other external referrers, Twitter has been the biggest contributor (44%) followed closely by Facebook (31%).

My most-read blog post was 15 things you should be doing on Linkedin but probably aren’t which has to date had more than 10,176 views, followed closely by The top 9 ways to annoy the crap out of Twitter people which has had 10,062 views.

The thing I have been most proud of on the blog is our effort to raise awareness – and funds – for the charity, Backpacks 4 Aussie Kids. At the start of this month, I posted a story about them and declared that I wanted to raise enough pledges for 20 backpacks (at just $25 each) to be made up which are given to kids when they are taken into foster care because that’s usually done in a hurry and if they get anything at all, in a lot of cases, it’s a few things chucked in a garbage bag.

After posting the story, and within two hours of talking about it on my social media channels, we had those 20 backpacks pledged. I revised my target up to 100 backpacks by the end of August and I am proud to say right at this moment we have gotten over 30 donated. There is still time if you want to be involved or if you just want to read the story, click here.

The thing that I was sure was a winner and can’t believe it hasn’t done better? The Small Business Forum I set up also this month. It’s only early days with it of course, but it was definitely one of the times where I have thought I had a brilliant concept that everyone would love and it’s fizzled a bit.

My most valuable lesson? Including weekly recap posts. By posting each week the top 5 most-read blog posts of that week, it had a two-fold effect: it gave people a chance to only read the good parts of the blog if they wanted to, and it was great for traffic as those posts were among the most-viewed on the whole site.

Did you know … that there are more than 120 million blogs circulating the internet now? Can you imagine how many of them are rubbish but also how many of them might be directly competing with you for readers’ attention? If you would like to find out how I might be able to help you with making your blog better, more relevant, and found more by Google, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594 or email me nick@thebowditchgroup.com.

I have learnt so much and gotten so much return on the effort of producing 100 blog posts in 6 months – despite a bit of my writing being pretty ordinary along the way. It does take discipline, creativity and a lot of time but the return on that investment has been massive for me and I would highly recommend it.

What have you learnt from reviewing your own blogging? Or have you read something of mine that you thought was pretty good or pretty awful? I have thick skin …

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

Tagged as: Blogging