As some of you may know I took part in the Ultimate Blog Challenge back in January. It was a great success, not only did it give me the motivation to blog more often but it also increased my blog traffic by more than double.
I recently heard about another blog challenge, the 28 Day Blog Challenge for Authors which I have promoted on all my social networks. I work with a lot of authors, eBook formatting and more recently helping them with their websites and social media presence – so this blog challenge is something I feel would be a great benefit to all authors who want to attract some new followers for their work.
While discussing the challenge on a Facebook group (SelfPubEbooks) someone asked me whether I had blogged about the results of the challenge I took part in earlier this year. The answer was no, I hadn’t… so just slightly belated (only 4 months late), this is my blog challenge results post!!
I think the best way of showing the results is with an image of my stats, taken directly from Google Analytics.
As you can see from this screenshot taken from my analytics account my traffic increased quite a bit. I published my website on 8 November 2011 and as you can see my traffic was pretty much non-existent. The blog challenge started on 1 January 2012 and the traffic pretty much appeared that day. Of course it wasn’t a case of writing a post and then waiting for people to appear – you have to be focussed on sharing your content. The thing about the blog challenges is that you have an audience waiting in the wings and ready to jump on your blog to comment and interact with you.
Some of the things you need to do to ensure you make the most of a blog challenge are:
- Write interesting and unique content.
- Share on all your social media networks, that means Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc… StumbleUpon is a great way of attracting traffic (I unfortunately hadn’t realised this at the time of the challenge, but now use it a lot)
- Reply to any comments on your blog posts in a timely manner and interact with people who take the time to comment.
- Visit and comment on other blogs in the challenge.
- Make sure you have an RSS feed available so people will receive your posts automatically – I received a lot of traffic through my FeedBurner feed.
It’s hard work being part of a blog challenge, to come up with a different post each day and then to share it as much as possible. A good thing about the challenge I took part in is it runs 4 times per year, it most recently ran in April but I just didn’t have the time to take part.
Even though I gained a lot more traffic through doing the challenge I didn’t gain any new clients directly – but I did learn all the skills I needed to attract new clients in the long run. I now get a lot of work through social media, mainly Twitter and I feel that if I hadn’t taken part in the challenge I wouldn’t have learnt the skills so quickly, that I have now.
So if you’re an author and want to get your work out there, I strongly advise you to take part in this blog challenge, it starts on 2 June and I will be following everyone who is taking part. Just remember the points I have made above, if you follow these tips the traffic to your blog will increase as mine did – and I guarantee you’ll get more sales by the end of the challenge too!
I would be happy to share more statistics with you, if you want to know something specific please comment below and I will get back to you.
Check out all the blog posts I wrote in the 31 Day Ultimate Blog Challenge!
