A Month of Blogging about Anxiety: The Results
I’m guessing a fair amount of you with blogs or platforms are wondering what the results were of focusing intensely on one subject for a month of daily blogging. Since I was writing up a note-to-myself about it, I thought: why not share?
Results
- It helped several people. I received a few emails from people who tried and liked the techniques. Some were inspired to take action. That alone makes the project a success.
- I learned more about what I really thought. This is true of any public writing.
- The posts strengthened relationships I had with some bloggers who linked to me, and established at least one new relationship.
- There were a handful of new subscribers to my newsletter (the thing I care about most) and a handful of unsubscribers who probably wanted me to stay in my lane. Fair enough.
- Traffic to my blog went up 100%. This isn’t a surprise. Switching to daily blogging is bound to increase traffic. It’s what you do with it that matters.
- It seeded the content needed to create a book or course on the subject. I’ve been talking with a doctor about providing a lot more content on the topic of anxiety, and November proved there’s both amble supply and demand.
- For the first time ever, daily blogging didn’t burn me out. I attribute this to a few things. It had constraints: one topic. I had scheduled writing time each week to pound out 4 posts at a Starbucks while waiting for one of my son’s after school activities (the rest came naturally over the week, usually late at night). But most of all, I didn’t stop to care about perfection.
- I realized how much I hate the platform I have for blogging. The design and function are terrible, because blogging just isn’t a thing anymore to the masses, and hosts/CMS’s don’t need to care about it to make money. I appreciate the simplicity of newsletters so much more (stop trying to suppress them Google!).
- It woke me up to the possibility of doing this multiple times and seeing which topics you respond to the most. What people say they want, and what they actually read, are very different things.
Which posts were the most popular?
It’s cheating a bit to look at the numbers now, since the first posts will naturally have higher numbers just because they’ve had more time to collect views. But it’s really all we have. Here’s the top five posts in terms of page views (not counting the intro):