Why I am writing one blog a week for one year
Firstly, an admission. I am a terrible hypocrite. I don’t normally blog, I have a blog gremlin!
I tell other people to blog ALL THE TIME but don’t blog myself! (I have five blogs at the time of writing.) It’s pretty embarrassing.
I should be living and breathing all things website tech and blogging wonderment, but instead I just try and bluff my way through with comments like this…
“It’s like a decorator’s home, it’s always the last to be decorated - ha ha!”
I have a blogging gremlin that has been gleefully digging its finger into my shoulder saying ’I told you so’! You see, I hear so many great success stories from proper bloggers and clients…
“I’m getting to page 1 of Google, Lee It’s amazing!”
“I am getting fantastic traffic and great leads, from a blog I wrote years ago!”
“So and so read my blog and shared it, and now I am getting loads more sales”
“We are turning work away!”
After deep diving into SEO over the last year, I know blogging is fantastic for your website and your business. Google wants you to write engaging and regular blogs so it can serve searchers with valuable and helpful content written by humans for humans ( I will write a whole other blog on my thoughts on ChatGPT and AI - so watch this space)
So why now? Why start a blog?
A few things conspired in the universe to show me (well, tell me) that blogging is something I SHOULD BE DOING RIGHT NOW.
Firstly, I watch the film – ‘Julie & Julia’, a film about a wannabe writer and enthusiastic cook called Julie, who blogs her way through making 524 butter-drenched French recipes in 365 days. It’s a joyful film filled with fights with lobsters and boiling water, gloopy aspic and mouth-watering deserts. But it was also a huge reminder that there are ups and downs to any adventure. You have to go out of your comfort zone, learn from experience - That is what life is all about. It made me want to fry everything in butter and write blogs!
Genuine scenes from the film ‘Julie and Julia’ …
Secondly, I follow a very inspiring Squarespace web designer, Sam Crawford on YouTube, ( Thank you, Sam!) who has challenged himself to making three videos a week, he has been diligently doing this for 3 months and has now been invited to be a Squarespace Community Leader. Not quite blogging, but a challenge that has reaped Sam some amazing results pretty quickly!
And lastly, the amazing SEO goddess Leanne Wong. On her SEO course, she teaches students how you can go from ‘Zero to 1,000 a month’ organic impressions (aka eyes on your website) by blogging once a week for one year. That is framework I plan follow with this blog, so it’s a a bit like the ‘Julie & Julia’ plot, following a guide to get better through experience and gain success (hopefully without the frantic lobster boiling!)
So, what am I going to blog about?
Blogging (Right from a beginner’s mindset)
Website content writing
SEO
Storytelling in business and my love of StoryBrand
Share advice, try things out - report on what top bloggers, SEOists and web masters are up to
Running a small creative business
Books and podcasts I can recommend
Self-care and general work/life balance
And if I become desperate, French Cooking! (Just kidding)
On of my favourite business books - Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
Blogging Tip No 1. Find out what your audience wants to read about
Yes, I will share some of my experience, expertise, and things I find out along the way, but mostly I will be using Google and free SEO tools to see what people want to read about and are searching Google for. This way of working makes it easier to write blogs that ultimately help others. Pay it forward with blogs!
“I hope I can come across with humility, relatable and a bit daft sometimes. I want my blogs to be easy to understand. This is one big experiment and I am learning as I go!”
I am hoping my experiences inspire you to blog!
I will give regular updates on the behind-the-scenes stuff on how my blogging is going, ups, downs, website traffic, the whole kit and caboodle.. and do ask me questions.
If there is something you want to know about with blogging (or anything on my list above), comment underneath any of my blogs and I will endeavour to research it, trial it, and write about it. Think of me as your blogging crash test dummy!
I am going to sign off each blog with a list of vital statistics, so you can see for full transparency how many words each blog is, how long it took me to write it, (adding pictures, etc.), the difficulty rating out of 10 (1 being easy, 10 being difficult), and come back and update its traffic with the date.
That’s me officially starting the challenge of writing one blog a week for a year. Let’s see where this crazy blog train takes us. Hold tight!
Blog No: #1
Words: 840 ish
Time taken: About 2.5 hours (mostly in hair and makeup!)
Blog writing difficulty rating: 9.5/10
Blog Traffic: 69 (13 April 2023)
