In August, I joined a group of bloggers who were participating in a project called Blaugust Reborn. Many (but not all of) their blogs were focused on video games.
One purpose of Blaugust Reborn was to encourage people to post a lot of content on their blogs during the month of August. Another purpose was to create a community of bloggers, like we had back in the days when blogging was the new shiny thing for writers to play with.
Blaugust Reborn welcomed blogging “veterans”, people who blogged for a while and then abandoned their blogs, and those who were brand new to blogging. The Blaugust Reborn’s Discord was active and filled with advice, comments, and conversation. I think the social aspect of the project greatly contributed to its success.
My goal was to post something on my personal blog every day for the entire month of August. This was not a requirement. Blaugust Reborn allowed participants to post as little as five blogs in the month of August — and still earn a fancy virtual “trophy”.
As a freelance writer, work that will pay me tends to take priority. I needed to find a balance between my work and my personal blog — and to fit it around my chronic illnesses/chronic pain. Here are some of the things I learned from blogging every day.
I needed to change how I thought about blogging.
Shortly after I became a freelance writer, I’d gotten into the mindset that I shouldn’t write things on my personal blog until I was done with all of my paid work. My personal blog got much less attention.
It definitely felt good to get paid work done and be able to pay some bills. The problem was I started to feel like my personal blog wasn’t important (especially since it did not generate any income).
Blogging every day made me change my outlook. I started to treat my personal blog as though it was a paid “gig”. When I’m healthy enough, I post one piece of writing on each of my client’s blogs every day (or every other day). I learned that it was entirely possible to add my personal blog into that queue — and still get my freelance writing work done on time.
Daily blogging doesn’t work well with long blog posts.
Every so often, I like to create very detailed blogs that require a lot of time to put together. It’s too much work to cram into one twenty-four hour period. Shorter posts are great for people who want to put new content on their blogs every single day.
I learned that I could create several short blog posts rather quickly and schedule them. Doing so put new content on my blog, and gave me some time to work on the longer blog posts. What was impossible to create in a day was entirely feasible if done little bursts.
Daily blogging alleviates a backlog.
I learned from the Blaugust Reborn community that there are many writers who have a bunch of posts that are in draft. They put a sketch of ideas into a post, and then leave it in draft, with every intention to finish it later.
It was a relief to learn that I wasn’t the only blogger who does this. Blogging every day motivated me to finally complete some of my blogs that were still in draft.
It also forced me to start solving another problem. I have a huge backlog of video game screenshots that I took because I wanted to use them in a blog post. Blaugust Reborn gave me a good excuse to go through some of those screenshots, put the best ones into a blog post, and delete the ones I didn’t need.
What’s next?
Blaugust Reborn 2018 is over. My intent is to continue posting something new on my personal blog for as long as possible. Ideally, I’d like to keep going until I have used up, or deleted, the video game screenshots I’ve been hoarding for years.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s Blaugust project.
This blog was originally posted on Medium on September 4, 2019.
What I Learned from Blogging Every Day is a post written by Jen Thorpe on Book of Jen and is not allowed to be copied to other sites.
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