Conclusion of February 2022 Blogging challenge and Way Forward

Welcome to Day 28 of the February 2022 blogging challenge. Today is a Monday, and the theme for Mondays is on podcasting under “MyPod Mondays”. I will be publishing a separate post on my podcasting blog, something that I haven’t done for the past two weeks. I had planned to publish 500 words every day. For the two months (January and February) I exceeded my word count, even though I was not able to publish one post for each day. This year, my goal was to publish at least one blog post of 800 words, for every calendar day.In other words, the target was to publish 28 blog posts of 800 words each, which brings the total to around 22,400 words. As of yesterday, I had published 25 blogs totaling 24,500 words. Additionally, there are four posts are scheduled, to be published. They were written in the previous weeks, but they all require some updates or minor tweaks.

What are the goals behind blogging challenges?

In this segment, let us take a look at the idea behind a blogging challenge and how it compares to last year. I had started this challenge last year to overcome Writer’s Block. All went well in January and February but then COVID hit, which hampered out podcasting business and I had to turn my focus there. Writing in general and blogging in particular took a backseat. This year my goal was to start from where I had left off. But I wanted to take things a notch higher.

For February 2022, a theme was set for each day of the week, such as MyPod Mondays, Travel Tuesdays, and so on. You can read about the themes in this post. Seven days of the week, seven different topics to talk about. I also tried to introduce short videos and audio (not just the audio converted from text, but my own narration and AI generated audio!).

This year, I intended to publish in multiple languages. However, I did not publish a single post in Marathi or Hindi.That was a big miss.

Adjustments to the total count

I will update this segment separately,once the remaining posts have been published. For now I can confidently say that with over 30 posts published, the wordcount comes to around 28,000 words. There is one post of about 2,100 words that is yet to be published. Till the time the post is published, it cannot be counted in the final tally. In any case, it comes to nearly 1,000 words published every day. That is not a bad number at all.

Way Forward

There are three distinct goals that I am setting going forward. Number one, I would like to continue this challenge and extend it at least by two months, that is March and April 2022. Last three days, I was preparing the content calendar and simultaneously consolidating images across different servers.As I began sorting over 11,000 images into different categories or themes, in the process, I came up with less than 210 different topics!  Now that’s a lot of writing, yet to be done, considering that I have only published 30 posts. Practically speaking, 210 posts means

I can publish one new post per day over the next seven months before I run out of topics to write about.

It is a crazy idea, probably doable, but that will be doing some injustice to this blog and the readers. Publishing new content is one part of the equation. Making the site more user friendly, and posts more readable is equally important Particularly so for the older posts. Many posts, especially VPS reviews, etc. have horrible formatting and layout. Then there is the perennial issue of broken links and images. And many posts are not optimized for SEO. In February, I refreshed the content and republished over 50 posts. But there are over 200 posts that still need to be revised. So one addition to the goal for March would be to: 1. Publish one new post everyday, i.e. 31 new posts in March, Another 30 in April, i.e. 61 new posts 2. Refresh or update three previously published posts for SEO, updated content, fix images and broken links. i.e. about 180 previously published posts. By end of April, this blog should be back to where it should have been in the first place: good content, quality content. I am publishing this goal here because it makes sense to include ‘content refresh’ of old posts a part of blogging goal. This would mean there is more discipline, structure and transparency to my writing. Hopefully this will lead to better visibility and traffic for this site, which of course is one of the goals behind this blogging challenge. I intent to add more video posts, Last year  I had experimented with an idea called “One Minute SaaS Review” under which I reviewed a SaaS application in literally less than a minute. You can watch a sample video here. About This Post This post was written as a part of #bloggingchallenge for February 2022. Wordcount: 700 words. Time taken for writing, editing and publishing: 45 minutes.

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_{This post was updated on 2022-06-04}