30 Day Blogging Challenge review

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For the past 30 days I’ve been taking part in a Blogging Challenge run by Sarah and Kevin Arrow of Sark e-Media.

The challenge was to post one blog post every day for 30 days, and along the way read posts by others taking part in the challenge, and comment on and share those posts.

The commenting and sharing is the easy bit! Reading other people’s interesting work isn’t a challenge, it’s a real pleasure, and I’ve found some wonderful new blogs to follow.

Writing a blog post every day is a challenge but definitely a worthwhile one.

There are various reasons for taking part in a challenge like this. The main one is to improve your writing – Sarah calls it exercising your writing/blogging muscle.

And it’s the same for you if you’re learning English and you want to improve your written English. The more we do something, the better we get at it. And we also find out where our strengths and weaknesses lie.

Taking part in this blogging challenge with other people has been an incentive to be more disciplined about writing every day. I wanted to increase the content I have for my readers, in addition to improving less important things such as more visitors to the site.

The changes I’ve noticed since I started the challenge are:

• more subscribers to my newsletter
• On one of the challenge days I had the most traffic I’ve had on any single day since I started this blog – compared to the same day in the previous month there was an increase in traffic of 563% on that day
• Compared to the previous month, visits are up 96% overall and pageviews are up 170%
• The average time people spent on the site each visit is up 160%
• I have lots more ideas for posts I can write in the coming weeks (I can see from the challenge which posts have been the most useful and popular with readers)
• And I’ve come away from the challenge with an idea for an ebook that I’m really excited about and I’ve already started writing!

Some days I didn’t manage to post that actual day so I had to catch up the following day, but I have 27 new posts on this site plus three on another site I write for, so I’m very happy with that 🙂

If you want to improve your blogging I highly recommend this challenge – it’s perfect for improving your blog post writing skills, whether you’re a native English speaker, or you’re blogging in English but English isn’t your first language.

Have you ever taken part in a challenge like this one?

If you’re learning English, which learning goals could you reach and which English language skills could you improve if you set yourself the challenge of improving your English every day for 30 days?