Starting a blog: 100 days blogging challenge | Sad results

You may be wondering if it makes sense to start blogging. Write 1 blog every day for a few months. Before you get into this I would really read through this blog. This is what I did: a 100 day blog challenge. Every working day I wrote 1 blog of an average of 1000 words.

And the results are: sad.

Proof: randomly blogging has no benefits

What would you expect if you added more than 100,000 words to your website? Would you be happy with a growth from 13 to 23 organic visitors per day?

During my 100-day challenge, I kept track of not only the number of words per blog, but also the number of hours I spent per blog.

After writing 100 blogs without preparatory research, I don’t get beyond the following:

  • Number of blogs written: 100
  • Number of words: 103,865 words
  • Number of hours: 165 hours and 42 minutes
  • Average number of words per blog: 1,038 words
  • Average hours per blog: 1 hour 41 minutes
  • Number of visitors from Google 28 days to start: 380
  • Number of visitors from Google 28 days to stop 100 blogs: 698

What is included and what is not included in my count.

It is important to know what I did and did not include. Otherwise, you can’t interpret the data properly. First of all, I did not include the time it took me to come up with or find a new topic. That’s not even included.

The timer was turned on as soon as I chose the topic and off again as soon as the page was added in Google Search Console for indexing. So everything in between was included in the time. This includes reviewing any subtopics for the page, uploading the content to WordPress and publishing the blog.

Here is your recipe to failure

Before I started the challenge, I imposed the following rules on myself. (Meant to be able to write those blogs as quickly as possible)

  • Only write blog topics related to SEO
  • Start writing as soon as I find a new topic
  • Don’t do any research on competition and keywords (except occasional checks)
  • Try to come up with a new topic as soon as possible
  • Try to do as little post-checking of the text as possible
  • Try to keep the number of words per blog around 1000

The challenge for me was mainly making hours and optimizing the process. Then, of course, one of the drawbacks is the SEO part. And that’s a bit separate, because everything had to be SEO related and I’m an SEO specialist, right?

Without any SEO optimization?

Not entirely without SEO. In any case, I did always think about the SEO basics.

The SEO basics:

  • Enough text per page and my starting point was to keep 1000 words as an average over 100 blogs.
  • Use of logical order of heading tags H1-H4
  • Use keywords in the most important places such as in the title, meta description, H1 and in the content.
  • Added images that have at least a clear file name, around or under 100kb in terms of file size.
  • Added internal links to previously written blogs.
  • Shared blogs with SocialBee to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google My Business

Many of the above things are basic parts of SEO and are automatically in the process. As a result, this did not take much extra time.

What blogging tips do I have for you?

1 Split your blog when search intent changes

While writing about a topic, you may suddenly get an idea related to the topic. You might then choose to add it to the page, but you can also choose to include it in a separate page. The intent of your topic is important then.

The most important thing to keep in mind then is this:

  • Is there enough to write about?
  • Does the new topic have search volume?
  • Who are the competitors for that keyword?

An example:

For 1 topic, I had chosen the following: what is a nofollow link?

While writing, I got the idea to also write about how to create a nofollow link in WordPress. Now I could choose to add this to the blog, or use it as a new blog.

The title of the new blog would then be: How to create a nofollow link in WordPress.

So I could have chosen to address this question in the blog I was writing, but then I would have had a problem. After all, the title was still: What is a nofollow link? If someone was looking for how to create a nofollow link, and had seen that title in the search results, they would not have clicked on the search result.

This is because the intent of the title did not match the search query.

Namely, the searcher wanted to know HOW to do something, not WHAT it was.

2 – Use a word processor with automatic storage

During my 100-day challenge, I chose to first type the text in a word processor before uploading it to the site.

Here are the benefits:

  • You can concentrate better on your text
  • You don’t have to think about the layout yet
  • You have a backup of your texts
  • You have automatic spelling correction
  • You can view the table of contents in Google Docs as you type to keep the overview
  • If you use Google Docs, the text is automatically saved as you type (useful if you accidentally close your screen)

The downside to this is that you may spend a little more time uploading everything to the site later. You will still have to format the page and customize it to your blog structure.

This is also the reason I switched from Beaver Builder to Gutenberg. When you copy text into Gutenberg, the tool will automatically split all the text into blocks. You can then more easily edit your text and add images.

3 – Roadmap blog start: tips for new topics

You want to create a blog, and you may ask yourself the following question: What do I start writing about?

Then watch out for these pitfalls as you search for new topics.

It’s easy to get distracted during your search for new topics. As you go through Facebook groups looking for topics, you may suddenly find that you’ve only been reading. I noticed this during my daily roundup. You are then no longer critically searching for topics but are too quickly distracted by “interesting things” you see or read.

It is therefore very important to convince yourself each time to look only at words and not at texts. This may sound funny. By this I mean to say that you should not get into a reading mode.

For example, you can grab a question in a Facebook SEO group and dwell on the most important words. You might come up with an interesting topic when it wasn’t covered at all in the text you were reading.

Some ways I used to come up with new topics while browsing forums and Facebook groups.

  • Use What questions for the topic: What is a nofollow link
  • Use How questions (these are often topics with a different intent than What)
  • The best of / top 10 / most common
  • The difference between
  • Writing a review about a product or service

1 problem with this, however, is that you often produce the same kinds of blogs. What’s this, what’s that, what’s this, what’s that. Now that’s not really something people often come back to your blog for!

In addition, it is also a difficult one to be found for in Google. After all, these types of questions have already been asked and answered dozens of times, so the competition is much stronger.

So yes, you can use What questions for content and content, but it becomes harder to rank for those search terms.

4- Limit your sources for topics.

The better you know an environment, the faster you can find something. The same is true in the online world. When looking for new topics or inspiration for your blog, you can save time by visiting the same sources.

If you don’t have good sources yet, try to find them first. The most interesting ones for me are the Facebook groups, forums, reddit, quora, etc.

My sources were the following:

  • YouTube SEO channels
  • Authority Hacker podcast
  • SEO Facebook groups
  • Quora
  • Google Webmaster Help Forum
  • Answer the public
  • Google Search Console
  • Emails and phone calls from customers
  • Questions from fellow business owners
  • Google trends
  • My SEO analysis template

Therefore, decide which sources you want to use and focus a bit on them. It’s best to choose sources that are updated daily with new questions and topics.

5- Trending topics bring the most visitors to your blog

Do yourself a favor and keep an eye on all the news within your industry. Why should you ask? First, because it can be important to your knowledge, and second, you can that Because newsworthy articles are the most likely to get visitors. (Trending topics)

This is not a big deal because there is little or no competition yet!

My approach during the 100-day challenge was to write 1 blog every day.

To get new topics, I often opted for What questions. What is this, and what is that. But the problem with this type of blog is the fierce competition. These What questions have been around for so long that there are already many blogs about them. And that does not benefit your findability. And that’s also the problem with my approach. For SEO, this approach had little value!

I’m not saying it has no value at all. You’ll read more about that later.

Newsworthy topics, on the other hand, are often the best and fastest way to get visitors. That’s not just in the SEO industry, but in every industry. It’s mainly because there is still so little competition for that topic. It is something new for a reason.

A good example for my blog was the news that Amazon.nl (Netherlands) also started selling products and started the Dutch Affiliate program. I wrote about that then and now most people come to my blog because of that. Just because it was newsworthy I had a chance to be found on it. This blog gets more visitors than 50 blogs combined.

Whatever you are going to do with your blog, definitely try to keep an eye on the news and write about it. This will give you a much better chance of getting visitors than the frequently asked questions of What and How.

If you want to write a photography blog, don’t focus too much on How a camera works, What an aperture is, but rather write about newsworthy topics. Like the latest camera or lens.

6 – Add content with getting backlinks in mind

As you have read above, the what and how topics have already been amply covered on other websites. And the lower you rank in Google’s search results, the less likely you are to get backlinks!

One of the strongest signals for Google to get a page high in search results are backlinks. A backlink is a reference on 1 website to another website. Because this is such a strong signal, you should include this in your strategy.

1- Blog/topics that can earn backlinks.

When you start writing about a topic, try to think about whether the content is so interesting that someone would want to link to it. A few familiar ways are statistics, interviews and controversy.

In most cases, this is about the information, or content. Content that gets shared faster has What works well to use are statistics and interviews. Then you don’t have to create backlinks yourself, you can get them faster that way.

2- Use your content to create backlinks yourself

If you do choose to use What is and What are questions, it may be worthwhile to link to them yourself from other websites. For example, consider forums, Facebook groups, Reddit and Quora. These platforms often feature questions that you can answer along with a backlink to your website. This is a great way to get visitors and backlinks for your site. It does take a bit more time, but time-consuming link building is anyway. This way you can easily publicize your blog.

7 – Decide what the purpose of your blog is

Early on after starting my 100 day challenge, I got all sorts of ideas of what else I could use the blogs for. Hence, I said earlier that they are not 100% useless, but can still be good for SEO.

However, I don’t recommend using the same strategy. But learn from my “mistakes” and do the following:

  • Is the content or topic I’m writing about link worthy?
  • Will the new page be part of a content silo?
  • Can I possibly use the content later for something else, such as email marketing
  • Is the content or topic good enough to use as a source for a guest blog

What exactly do you want to achieve with your blog?
Do you want to make money with your blog?
Do you want to sell your blog later?
Do you just want to start a free blog and see where it lands?

What are my conclusions of blogging without a preparatory plan or research:

Without a plan, keywords research and competition research, blogging makes very little sense.

When might it make sense/benefits to just start blogging vigorously:

  • If you have enough time, and not dependent on income
  • If you just want to expand your blog that already has enough visitors
  • Want to delve (again) into certain topics. (Often you learn something new anyway)
  • You want to get better / faster at writing
  • If you focus on trending topics you can get more visitors quickly, without lengthy keyword research, without lengthy competition research
  • If you are going to use the blogs for backlink building, SEO testing or supporting pages.
  • Want to collect data to make calculations. For example, if you want to know how much time you spend on average typing 1,000 words. Or how many words you can type on average within an hour.
  • If you want to collect keyword data in Google Search Console

Pointless:

  • If you think you just need to add a lot of content to rank high
  • If you want to get more visitors (quickly)
  • If you want to get a lot of visitors
  • If you have to pay for these types of blogs
  • If each blog costs not only time but also money
  • If you blog for a company with few visitors (and therefore it costs money)

So has my 100 days challenge been completely pointless?

No, SEO is a long-term approach. Visitor numbers still increased after quitting the challenge, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tackle blogging in a much better way. In those 165 hours, I would have been much better off doing better keywordresearch, and focusing on a small number of blogs with sufficient search volume and thereby getting many more visitors.

The “blog making tips” in short:

In addition to all the above tips, here’s a quick rundown:

  • Don’t start blogging haphazardly if you want to get more visitors. That’s a waste of time.
  • Keep an eye on the news within your industry. Not only for your expertise but certainly as a source for new topics.
  • Do keyword research before you start a new blog. Look at volume and competition. Also look at the current layout of search results to see if you have a chance of ranking well. You may be optimizing for a zero-click search.
  • Update existing blogs to rank higher faster. In fact, old blogs can rank higher faster than new blogs because Google has already given them “value.
  • Spread a topic across multiple blogs if search intent changes.
  • Decide what you want to use the new blog for. In a silo, as a landing page, or just for entertaining your readers.

Frequently asked questions about: what should I blog about:

Why would you want to start a blog?

You may want to in order to get more visitors. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It takes more time and effort to make it work well.

What problems do you often see with beginning bloggers?

I think the number one is : giving up. Within a few months they are fed up. Other problems is structure. And last: awkward topics that no one is looking for.

Is blogging always good for SEO?

No, definitely not. Blogging a lot can have a positive effect, but blogging with a plan and good research makes 10 times more sense. Sense before you begin and take the time to start blogging.

What kind of content works well for SEO?

You probably mean, what kind of content can get a lot of visitors? Hmm. I would say it varies by industry, but good content for SEO can be news related, as well as evergreen. So read this blog for ideas and tips.