Half Way Through My Thirty Day Challenge – The Results

So I’m officially half-way through my 30 day challenge. I’ve blogged every day for 15 days now..

This has been a bit of a test to see two things..

1) Do I have it in me to write every single day..

and

2) What sort of results will I see in the way of post engagement, social media following, and business growth.

So I thought that here, at the half-way point, it would be a good idea to discuss where I’m at and what I’m seeing.

Let’s begin by hitting on point number one…

So far, I’m doing pretty good with the daily blogging… There’s two major stumbling blocks for me.

Issue #1 – Thinking of things to write about every day…

When I’m trying to make good posts every day that I want people to be interested in and enjoy, I begin to run out of ideas. I don’t want to post just for the sake of posting. I want everything I write to be interesting to at least most of my audience. Finding creative and interesting things to blog about daily gets difficult. Luckily, I’ve got some little tips and tricks up my sleeve to keep me going. At the end of my 30 day challenge (assuming I complete it successfully) I’m going to share a post with you about how to write everyday and the tricks (or hacks) that I use to stay on top of things.

Issue #2 – Opening up my WordPress dashboard to start writing…

This seems weird but one of the biggest barriers I have is actually opening up WordPress, clicking “Add New Post”, and beginning to type. I don’t know what it is but, when I know I have a post to write, I procrastinate, I open Facebook, I answer phone calls, I check me email, or I do something that I know is a distraction to what I really need to do.

The funny thing is… Once I actually have the idea and I type the first couple words, the rest just flows out. I find myself continuing the post effortlessly. To be honest, the majority of the posts that I’ve written during this little challenge have actually been longer than I intended them to be. This is because I get in a flow and just keep on typing.

When I do a post, later in the challenge, about productivity, I’ll explain a bit more about how I get past this stumbling block.

So, half-way results of test number one are that I’m keeping up with it so far (although it hasn’t been the easiest challenge ever).

The results of the second part of my test are probably much more interesting to most…

I’ll break these results in to three parts… Post engagement, social media following, and business growth.

Result #1 – Post Engagement

This is a screenshot from my WordPress dashboard.

While a look through my blog may not show a ton of comments on every single post, I do have 93 comments across 16 posts in only 15 days. That’s over 5 comments per post and over 6 comments per day. That’s not too bad for a blog that’s barely existed 2 weeks!

I do my best to ask for engagement in the comments on my posts. I love to see comments and feedback. However, comments aren’t the main goal of this blog (or most blogs). The main goals of any blog (in my opinion) are to have an outlet for yourself to vent and to teach as well as to have a platform to help advance your business.

Comments are definitely nice. They add to the social proof of your site, they add to the original content that you created, and they help bring your readers closer to you be giving them an avenue to directly connect with you. However, comments are not the gauge for whether or not a blog is a success.

I’m happy with the amount of comments I’ve had so far and those numbers will only grow as I continue to write and as others find posts that really resonate with them. The more diversity in my posts, the more likely I am to find a topic that really resonates with someone.

Result #2 – Social Media Engagement

This is a screenshot from my Facebook insights over the past week.

As you can see, my page likes have skyrocketed, my post reach is climbing, and I’ve had 118 clicks on my posts…

I’m actually pretty impressed with these results. Just by posting on my blog more often, my Facebook following is growing and becoming more engaged.

However, social media isn’t just Facebook…

Twitter is a major player when we’re discussing results from social media.

Twitter has been a bit harder to track. However, I am noticing more engagement from a platform that I’ve pretty much dismissed for so long now.

Since starting, I’ve gained 14 new followers and my posts have been tweeted about 17 times by people other than me! That’s a pretty good result and I only anticipate it growing…

Result #3 – Business Growth

When it comes to almost any effort online, business growth is what I’m looking for. We obviously achieve business growth by helping others, building our list, and adding new revenue streams.

I’m assuming that I’m helping others based on the comments and increase in social media response.

Let’s take a look at other aspects of business growth.

Have I built a list?

Actually, I haven’t really put a lot of focus on building a new list from this blog. I made a post a couple days ago about a publishing course that I’ll be releasing and asked people who were interested to opt-in to get notified but that’s all I’ve really done.

That post resulted in 12 people opting-in to receive more information.

It’s not a stellar result. However, keep in mind that I only made a blog post about it. I haven’t done really any other promotion to the page. So adding 12 potential buyers of my next product to a list from a single blog post a couple days ago isn’t bad.

Another metric I can look at for business growth is my Feedburner statistics… This is the amount of people that subscribe to my blog.

I don’t really trust these stats anymore because Google doesn’t really support Feedburner anymore. However, it’s an indicator of how many people are reading my blog posts on a daily basis off the site…

As you can see from the stats above, my subscribers over the past 7 days have fluctuated from 256 subscribers to 335 subscribers. When I make a new post, it’s seen by an average of about 45 people who are subscribed.

I’m not sure how many people actually use feedreaders anymore. I’m assuming most of the views are from people that are getting the posts delivered right to their inbox.

Not bad numbers. However, I must disclaim that much of these subscribers were moved over from my old blog subscribers. So I had a bit of a head start.

Finally let’s look to see if this blog has grown my income at all…

One of my earlier posts in this challenge discussed why I like GetResponse over Aweber these days.

In this post, I used an affiliate link to GetResponse a couple of times when I mentioned their service.

Since making that post, I’ve had five people join GetResponse using that affiliate link, adding approximately $25 per month to my business. That may not sound like much but that’s an extra $300 per year… That’s one of my car payments per year completely covered.

The beauty is that this post is there for good… It’s not coming down any time soon. More people will read my review over time and sign up.

Yesterday, I made a post about my new Udemy course that I built with Joe Fier. I offered a coupon to get the course for free for the first 15 people to sign-up with that link. As of writing this, 7 people have taken me up on the free offer and there are 8 coupons left. However, once those coupons are gone, I’ll have another revenue stream. I’ll make a little cut on every sale of that course, adding an additional revenue stream to this blog.

That’s pretty sweet I’d say.

Anyway, this post is getting a bit longer than I anticipated (imagine that). I’ll wrap it up by saying that I DO believe that the first half of my challenge has been a success.

I’m hoping to continue to grow all these metrics though. More comments, more social media engagement, more list growth, and more income..!

Help me out my leaving a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback and I’ll do my best to respond to everyone..