5 Benefits of Undertaking a Blog Challenge

Done .

We're right on the other side of completing Blog-vember, a blog challenge where we put out a blog post, a podcast episode, and a YouTube video each day for 30 days. For those of you who are doing the math, that is 90 posts in 30 days! (—This is our third time attempting Blog-vember and our second time attempting the 3 posts a day.) We bet that some of you reading this think we’re absolutely nuts for attempting this and, in fact, when we first considered taking on ANY kind of content challenge—psst! We’re in the middle of a song-a-week challenge too! (http://bit.ly/19for2019blog)—we were apprehensive. I mean, it’s not like we don’t have a full life with lots going on or that we can put all of that down in order to focus on just doing this, so why do we do it? Well, over these last 3 years, we have found more reasons TO do it than NOT to do it. Here are just the top 5 benefits to doing a blog challenge.

Top 5 Benefits to Doing a Blog Challenge:

1. Builds your social media platform stats (across the board)

We noticed that our stats seemed to increase last year during our blog challenge, so we were at least hoping for the same scenario this year. ‘Turns out that it was a Motherf*cker! We experienced much more of a bump on our stats than we have ever seen—so far, we are seeing a 10-fold bump and we’re only a month out…. That, alone, was worth it. We WANT to grow, so this was just the way to do it. We can see a bump in social media stats on YouTube, more engagement on Facebook and on Instagram, as well as some new, promising “peer” followers on Twitter. What a win! It seemed that we had been stuck on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and even though we can’t see an appreciable bump in numbers, we do see a noticeable bump in engagement and in the quality of people we have attracted—even a retweet from Fender!—so we’re excited.

2. Builds posts on your targeted topic(s)

As you might know, we are trying to position ourselves to get speaking gigs related to building one’s musical artist/producing/branding/synch music licensing empire. Well, yes, the book and the courses are on the way, but since we are already sharing regularly on these platforms—video, podcast, and blog—we know that by stacking our posts toward topics that respond to this target markets’ interests and pain points, we would be able to gain some traction in that big goal. —In fact, we can see that there is more interest in our posts this Blog-vember versus Blog-vember 2018 (though we realize that this could be for a myriad of reasons). We KNOW, however, that the people that are responding to our posts are more our tribe than what we received last year, so we know we must be sending out a signal that they are responding to, so to speak. In other words, it seems to be working.

Vision Board Cheat Sheet --Blooming Prejippie

3. Is a reason to get excited about posting

It’s not that we didn’t get excited about posting weekly, but it’s just that this was a REALLY big deal! We wanted to see if we could post 3 posts a day for 30 days, so it made every day either exciting—most days—or nerve wracking, and never just meh. There was always a fire under us to be SURE that no matter what else happened, that the videos were shot, they were edited, transcribed, the graphics done, the podcast created, and the blog post put together. It was a machine. —And, after ALL of that, we had to be sure that they were shared on all our 8 various social media platforms! It was a real three-ring circus. But it was exciting. Every day of November.

4. Is a reason to shout about what you do

Well, we feel as if we’ve been under a freaking rock for nearly 30 years now—(If you don’t know our story by now, check out this post: http://bit.ly/allthethingsprej )—so to have a REASON to share what we think with the people we hope to meet was worth doing it—and had been worth doing it for the two years leading up to now—was reason enough to WANT to do it. And to do it with fidelity. And we did. And that feels good.

Tips for Better Band Photos --Blooming Prejippie Zine

5. Allows you to feel proud at meeting a challenge

As you might know from our song a week to SoundCloud challenge and our song clip a week challenge that we instituted at the beginning of the year (http://bit.ly/19for2019blog ), we are not strangers, nor do we shy away from challenges. This one, however, was QUITE a challenge. Our time was more limited than it was last year. Plus, we had the song and song clip challenge going, but we still managed to come up with a system that worked for making them all work together. And we are happy to say that it got done, SON! (—We’d love to tell you how, but THAT particular blog post has not been written yet! You can check out our BIG plan for Blog-vember 2018, though. http://bit.ly/2r5Hlqw )

Prefer to watch the video for

Gab & Jam Episode 92 Tips for Productivity for the D.I.Y. Rock Star? Here it is.

Not sure where you—and your band—stand?

Download this Check Your Brand Cheat Sheet

to see how you shape up

(and what you need to shore up).

Results:

I KNOW for a fact that our YouTube subscribers have continued to rise and that our number of views have gone up—according to some online growth calculator—566%! We’re cool with that. It’s been 3 and a half years of working at it. Daily. It’s our third year of doing Blog-vember. We had a more systematic approach to Blog-vember this year. We feel some progress beyond what we had before and beyond what we could have expected. The bottom line: We are happy. —When we look at the stats from last year compared to this year, we see a massive increase in the number of views for each post, so we’re thrilled.

Here is the final list of episodes (with topics, episode numbers, and links): http://bit.ly/blogvember2019

The dust is settling and it’s hard to believe that we were able to do it all in the required amount of time. Yay! —And thank you all for supporting us in this effort by listening, sharing, and by just being there…..