What I’ve learnt after blogging daily for 1 month

Today marks my 30-day blogging challenge (writing and publishing a blog per day) and I am ready to share some of my insights and thoughts on what I’ve learnt after blogging daily for 1 month.

Thirty days seems not that much, but it is when you set to do something you don’t normally do EVERY DAY!

To put things into perspective, I want to share some of the highlights and low moments of my 30-day challenge blogging journey. It started after I lost my job, in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis in Romania, before I needed a signed paper to leave the house and walk my dog.

Since starting this blogging daily challenge, the entire world got very aware of the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic and all chances of planning any travels for the next 6 months shattered.

So here I am, a travel blogger, trying to make the best out of the worst possible moment for travelling and to fight with all my words the imminent death of my travel blog. Did I succeed? I don’t know, but I got some people interested in my rants and other travel-related facts.

What I’ve learnt after blogging daily for 1 month

Practice does make you better at your craft

Practicing the craft of blogging is a necessary action to take if you want to become better.

When I was in school, writing was never one of my strong points, or so I thought, but it turns out that practising does help you improve. A lot.

Yes, it didn’t all happened in 30 days. Year after year, as I look back at some old blog posts, I can see improvements.

But during the last month, this challenge to blog daily has pushed me a bit further. It urged me to find that writer’s mood more quickly and to execute faster.

Blogging daily for 1 month helped me write better blog posts.

Blogging daily helped me write faster

Knowing that you have to publish something before midnight is a great incentive to get something done.

Of course, I have never imposed any topic or the number of words a post should have. The sole objective of the challenge was to get used to getting things done and to write. And that’s what happened.

Most of the times, research is needed before you start writing something. Unless you are writing a personal travel story or some rant of how the social media world got the coronavirus crisis all wrong, then you need to put some time into researching. That’s how real bloggers and content writers start their work.

To be honest, the only limit I impose was to write over blog posts over 300 words, and there were times when I was checking the word count because all I wanted to do was to go to sleep.

But knowing that I have to write, got me to write. Sometimes I would start writing about something and then change the topic after a few paragraphs, having to adapt the entire thing.

Blogging daily for 30 days made me feel more confident

… About my blogging skills.

Sure, I am not the best, and I don’t pretend I am better than any other blogger out there. But that’s not the point. The point is to become better than I was before, and I feel that I have improved.

Always remember that you can only compare yourself with the person you were yesterday.

Most of the days, it would get around 8 or 9 pm before I started writing (it’s past 9 pm as I write this) and that urged me even more to finish the blog post. Some days, I hit publish at 11 30 pm, half asleep.

But it didn’t matter as long as it was before midnight. And I did it for 30 days.

Blogging for 30 days is my small achievement I can use to lift myself up whenever I will feel down. I can tell myself that I can do whatever I set out to do because this 30-day challenge seemed a big task at the beginning, but then I managed to get through it.

Blogging daily for 30 days made me be more creative about my topics

I’m not going to lie and say that I have great ideas all the time, because I don’t. Some of my ideas were lousy, but I went through with them anyway. It wasn’t so much about the topic of a blog post. But it was about the act of writing, publishing and keeping my word to get through the challenge.

And this process got me more creative.

I realised I have a lot of things I want to write about.

Some of these things I want to write about are meant to get more traffic for my blog, while other topics I want to write about are meant to make my soul feel better. After all, it’s my blog, and I am a person, not a company.

Blogging is a work of passion, not a chore

Blogging can’t be done if you don’t love what you do. And if you don’t love your topics.

If you didn’t love it, blogging would turn into a chore and sooner or later, you would give it up. And giving up is the safest way to fail.

If there’s anything I hate in this world, it’s having to do something because you have to. I guess that’s why I don’t get along with office jobs or having a boss. I don’t like doing things just for the sake of it.

Blogging daily helped me understand that I wouldn’t be able to do it without absolutely loving it.

I am committed to blogging, and I take joy from it. And if you don’t feel the same, then you should stop and start doing something else, because you are wasting your time trying to blog.

Blogging takes a lot of time and energy

After blogging for 30 days, I realized that blogging takes a lot of my energy.

Properly planning to write a travel blog post takes time and energy, and some topics aren’t 1-day assignments. Not for me, anyway.

As I said, I got really creative and wrote down many blog post ideas for later, but not all can be written in one day. I need more time for them, as I don’t want to sacrifice the quality of the article just for the sake of posting.

But my challenge proved that I can write other blog posts in just a few hours. Some of these are topics that I was postponing because I was thinking it will take me more than 1 day. The only conclusion is that you need to try and test out.

And remember that in the end, doing something is better than nothing.

Quality can suffer when you are thinking about quantity

Coming up with a new topic and writing every day can be energy draining. And the quality of your blog post may suffer for different reasons. You may not have enough time to proofread, or to add the necessary photos.

When thinking about a great blog, I’m thinking about a remarkable quality.

I don’t feel I have achieved that level yet, but I can and am still working for improvement. I don’t strive to be perfect, but I strive for improvement.

Yes, the quality wasn’t always the first thing you could identify in my blog posts, but my aim was to improve at all levels: researching, choosing a topic, concentrating, speed of writing, proofreading, editing.

What my 30-day blogging challenge any good?

It’s not perfect, but it wasn’t bad. It’s something. And something means you have something to work with. And to work on. It means that you can always go back and improve some of those blog posts.

It means that you tested some things, and if something performs well, then you can spend more time improving that particular blog post. That’s how blogging works.

I’ve noticed a lot of typos in my blog post, and a lot of things missing, because my goal was to write a daily blog post for 30 days.

My goal wasn’t to create 30 viral blog post or to write 30 super niche posts. It was something to do, to get me started, in this crazy crisis that encompassed the world.

I believe we all need to keep our minds busy, and to feed it with ideas. If you let your mind get bored, then that’s when you start dying. That’s why I never say I’m bored. (And I dislike people who use that word).