Today is day 13 in my quest to 100 days of blogging. While I’m only a mere 13% of the way into this journey, this has already been an interesting experience.

Going into this the thought of coming up with enough content to span 100 days was concerning. As it is, there have already been a few times that I was unsure if I could come up with a topic for the day. A couple of times there’s even been a bit of stream of consciousness writing in order to cobble something together at the last minute. This is probably not the best way to succeed in the long term with this project. A change in strategy is probably warranted.

Feed the Beast

The first few days of writing seemed to be the easiest. Each post I put together was fairly lengthy, but I realized pretty quickly that trying to write an essay each day was going to be tough. As a result, I’ve switched directions and started thinking in terms of micro content. How can I take a larger topic or thought and break that down into smaller, compartmentalized components that can each be a blog post. This is leading to shorter posts, but content worries have started to fade into the background because there is so much more to write about. This whole process is getting me to rethink how I generate content for other areas as well. It’s a definite point of growth for me as a writer.

The Proof and the Pudding

I hadn’t really thought about numbers at all going into this writing experiment, but a healthy increase in traffic has been a welcome surprise as I cobble together these daily thoughts. To put it into perspective, in the first 12 days of blogging my traffic has increased 122% over my best numbers in the previous six months. If this continues, I could see a 300-350% traffic increase by the end of the month. That’s a pretty healthy jump.

Remain Strong

As I head into the back half of the first month of writing it will be time to start planning out my posts and topics a bit better. Again, micro content will be a big part of this strategy. The thing I keep reminding myself is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. I’m slowing my roll to enjoy the journey. If I treat this as a deeper learning opportunity I think real growth will manifest itself.