137: 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back

Have you lost your blogging groove? It’s really easy to do particularly in the middle of the year when so many other aspects of life compete for your attention and where motivation can sometimes go missing. If your blog is feeling a little stagnant, then today is for you. In fact, this whole week is for you because this episode starts a week long daily series of podcasts that’s all about getting back into the groove of creating great, regular content for your blog.

My name is Darren, I’m the founder of ProBlogger. Today, I want to kick off seven days to getting back your blogging groove. You can find today’s show notes with links and all the information about this special challenge in the Facebook group that I’ve started to help us run this challenge over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/137.

Most bloggers lose their blogging groove at one time or another. For sometimes, it’s because life gets busy. In other cases, they feel like they’re running out of things to say or that they’ve said everything before. In other cases, it’s because they’re not seeing the results that they were hoping for, their expectations don’t meet the reality, and sometimes it’s just not flowing.

When those things happen, one of the first things to be impacted is our content. This is something I’ve been through many times before. I’m sure most of you listening, if you’ve been blogging for even just a few months, can relate. Sometimes, the quality of our content is impacted and other times it’s the quantity and regularity of our content. For many of us, it’s both.

This happens to us all as bloggers. Sometimes, to get back on track, we need a little help to give our blogs a bit of intense attention, an intense burst of attention to get things firing up again.

I remember when this first happened to me, the first time I had a blogging slump back in 2003. I’ve been blogging for about six months and after taking a two-week holiday with Vanessa, I came back to my blog feeling completely out of the routine and also feeling a bit disillusion with the progress that I made in those first six months.

The first six months of your blog is typically a pretty slow, hard slug. I wondered at that point whether I should give up and found it really hard to get back going again after that break. I was particularly finding it hard to come up with ideas for the blog post that I wanted to write.

I got onto the phone with a friend who was also a blogger. This friend actually had emailed me and said that they noticed I hadn’t been posting and wondered if everything was okay. I got on the phone with him, I explained my feelings and told him that I was thinking about giving up. He pretty much gave me a rev up, he told me to get back on my blogging horse. I remember those words.

When I explained to him that I was just really struggling to come up with topics to write about, he offered to help. What he offered to do was to come up with ten blog post ideas that I should write over the next couple of weeks. He said trust me, I’ll choose something that’s relevant to what you’re writing about, what I think you can write about, ten topics. It was almost like an editor saying to a reporter, “Go and write this article.” This was something that appealed to me because I was struggling to come up with ideas. I was up for the challenge.

There was something about working with someone else to help get going again that really did help me a lot. I have to admit, his suggestions stretched me quite a bit. Some of the things that he suggested I write I would never have naturally come up with myself. But because I felt a bit accountable to him, I decided to push through and I did all ten posts over the next twelve days which were actually more than I’d ever been writing before. I used to only write a few days a week at that particular point.

Before I knew it, I was back in the groove. It’s this experience that gave me the idea for this next week of challenges that I want to issue you. Here’s the challenge that I’ve got for you. Whether you’re feeling disillusioned, uninspired, uncreative or maybe just a little bored with your blog, over the next week I want to invite you to tune into this podcast for a series of short, daily challenges to create some great pieces of content.

Here’s how it’s going to work. Every day at 7:00PM Australian Time, I’m going to publish a new short podcast that will issue you with a challenge to create a piece of content in the next 24 hours. If that’s too much for you, you don’t have to do it within 24 hours, that’s just what I’m telling people to do. If you want to take it slower, you can.

Each day, I’m going to suggest a particular style of post to write. I’m going to share a few tips on how you might like to tackle it in the show notes and in the podcast itself. I’ll give you a few examples as well of posts that I’ve written in that style and other people have written as well.

The challenge is three-fold. You have to do three things to fully participate in this. Firstly, come up with a topic that’s relevant for your readers and write a post or create a piece of content in that style and publish it if you can on your blog on that day. That’s the first part, that’s the main part. This is a content creation challenge, it’s to help you get back into the groove of creating content.

The second thing I’d love you to do is once you’ve written and published the post, the next part of the challenge is to share it with everyone else doing the challenge. To do this, I’ve set up a Facebook group that will be a temporary group, this is something that I don’t know will continue beyond the end of this week. It’s purely for those of you who want to participate in this. We’ve already had over 400 people sign up for it, and I haven’t even announced what we’re doing yet.

The idea of the group is to keep us accountable to this challenge, to support each other through it, to help us get to know each other, and who knows? Out of this type of challenge, I’ve seen collaborations appear and friendships start as well. It’s really to keep us accountable, give each other a bit of support, and it might just help you find a few new readers and connect with some other bloggers who might be in your niche as well. I’m already seeing that in the Facebook group, people saying, “Hey, I blog about that too. Let’s talk.”

To join this Facebook group, there will be a link in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/137 or you can do a search on Facebook right now for ProBlogger Challenge Group and it should hopefully come up in the results. But again, they’re on the show notes.

First part, you’ve got to write a piece of content or create a piece of content, it doesn’t have to be written. Secondly, I want you to come into the Facebook group and share that piece of content that you’ve written so that we can see it. This will help everyone because it will give us another example of that style of content but it might also just drive a little bit of traffic to you.

The third thing that I would love you to do is to commit to reading at least four or five other posts that other people in the challenge have written. If we can all visit four or five posts a day and show a little bit of support to the other participants, we’re all going to get a little bit more traffic and we’re all going to get a few more comments hopefully in our blog. If you see a post that you really like, share it on your social network. Pay forward the love. Hopefully as a result of this, we will all get a little bit more traffic and we’ll all learn a bit more and ultimately get back in that blogging groove.

To be clear, I’m going to suggest a style of post for you to create, a style of piece of content. You choose the topic that will be relevant to your audience. Some of the styles that I’m going to suggest are going to be very easy for you to do because you will have already written in those styles, in fact you might already write all your posts in that style. Some of them may take you into new territory, they may stretch you a little. That may be a bit uncomfortable for you but I encourage you to push through because you might just find in being stretched to write a new type of post that you’ll find a new post that might be a regular part of your blog.

I know some of you are listening to this and going, “I cannot create seven pieces of content in seven days.” I completely get that. Life is busy. I will say that some of the things that I’m going to suggest are fairly easy to do, some of them are heavier than others. You may find some of them you can whip out pretty quickly but some of them you may need to take a bit more time on. You might like to spread this challenge out a little bit further, that’s fine. You can do it over ten days or fourteen days or twenty days. I’ll keep the Facebook Group live for at least a month so that you can get through it.

If you’re listening to this and the challenge has already finished—a lot of our podcast episodes do get listened to months or years after I create them—that’s totally fine. All you really need to do is work through the next seven episodes of this podcast in order and you can do it in your own time. You may even like to find another blogger that you can do it with to support one another through it as well.

My hope with this challenge is that in pushing yourself to create seven pieces of content in seven days or ten days or whatever you choose to do it over, that it will help you to get back into that creative groove. Perhaps, rediscover your love for blogging, perhaps find a new style of post that you can continue to produce.

I guess another thing I do want to say is that you can use this challenge to create different mediums of content as well. You may choose to write all of your blog posts and that’s totally fine, most of the things I’m going to share with you I do have a written piece of content in mind that I have written in the past. All seven things that I’m going to suggest over the next seven days could equally be done as a video, as a podcast, or in some other form of content whether it would be an infographic or something else.

Be as creative as you like. You might want to challenge yourself to do seven videos, you might want to challenge yourself to do one podcast, one video, and five blog posts; it’s totally up to you.

I’m really excited about this next week. I actually did this same challenge with a few differences about five or six years ago now on ProBlogger. It brought all kinds of opportunities out for those who participated. I’m really excited to see what will happen over the next week.

Here’s what I would encourage you to do to prepare for tomorrow’s first challenge. I suggest that you do three things. Firstly, join the Facebook group. Search on Facebook for ProBlogger Challenge Group or find the link on today’s show notes. Second thing I encourage you to do is subscribe to this podcast if you’re not already to get notified of when each episode goes live.

The episodes will go live at 7:00PM Eastern Australian Time. I’m in Melbourne, that’s 7:00PM Melbourne time if you’re in Australia. It doesn’t really matter if you’re not awake right then, it’s gone come up 2:00AM in LA, 5:00AM in New York, 10:00AM if you’re in London, 5:00PM if you’re in Singapore, 2:30 in the afternoon if you’re in Delhi. It doesn’t really matter if you’re not there right at the moment. Just from when you hear that podcast, give yourself a 24 hour deadline to get a piece of content out.

Make sure you’re subscribed, make sure you’re in the Facebook group. If you can, clear a little bit of time over the next week. Every day for the next week, it will be seven more episodes. To listen to the podcast, I’ll try to keep them to 10 or so minutes, and then to create a blog post. Create a little time if you can.

Lastly, if you do get a little bit behind over the next seven days, I totally understand that. Life goes on, we have families, we have work, we have other commitments. That’s totally fine. Take your time through it and remember, this can be done later as well. You may want to come back to this or you may be finding this for the first time when it’s already finished, that’s totally fine to work through the next seven episodes at your own pace.

Join the Facebook group, ProBlogger Challenge Group, make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast to get notified when they come through, and clear a little time in your diary each day for the next day to be able to participate in this challenge.

Lastly, once you’ve joined that Facebook group, introduce yourself there. I’ve pinned at the top of that group a little place where you can introduce yourself and it’s amazing to see the variety of bloggers that we’ve got coming in from all over the world and participating.

Lastly, this is completely free. I’m not going to sell anything to you at the end of this, it’s completely free. It’s really for me, for my perspective, to help me build a bit of community amongst the ProBlogger readership and to get to know you a bit more as well and to see what you do. I really get a lot out of just reading the posts that you write and that gives me all kinds of ideas for future content as well.

Thanks for listening, look forward to connecting with you in the Facebook group over the next days. I’m excited to where this might lead for all of us. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you tomorrow, 24 hours from now.