How to Survive a 30 Day Blogging Challenge?

TIPS. Here are some tips on how to survive a 30-day Blogging Challenge.

As of this writing, I have yet to survive the 30 Day Blogging Challenge of Cebu Blogging Community. Will I survive? That is the question.

Confession: It’s just the fourth day of the challenge and while I have a list of possible ideas already, I haven’t fully written down these blog posts yet. 

For other bloggers who wanted to survive this challenge, I have here some tips on how to achieve this.

1. Read Tips Online

Before starting to write your first blog post, you should at least consider reading some tips online. Searching for “blogging challenge tips” or “how to survive blogging challenge” in Google will yield relevant results.

Keeping an editorial calendar for your future content is the most generic tip you’ll get. Given the fact that blogging daily is a definitely a challenge, planning your future content and not anything-you-feel-to-write on the day itself is what you need to do.

In joining any battle, making yourself ready is always the best weapon.

2. Brainstorm Ideas

Given that you’re already sold to the idea of keeping an editorial calendar, you need to brainstorm content. In brainstorming content, think about what your blog is about and list down the topics you want to write about.

In my case, I write about events in Cebu and fun facts about being a Cebuano. For this 30 Day Blogging Challenge, I have 3 major topics to write about: Cebu, UP Cebu and Blogging. For Cebu, I have listed down Vispop, Events and Social Media-related content curation. For UP Cebu, I plan to write about things that UP Cebu community would love to read. For Blogging, tips on blogging and some update on this journey will become stand-alone blog posts that I will be sharing to my readers.

Think about what you write about and write down all possible topics you can write. Bonus Tip: online content curation (tweets, Instagram photos, videos) is a heavenly gift of technology that will keep you sane in times you have no idea what to write or in hurry to finish a deadline.

Make sure to save your files in a secured place. Keeping your files online is the best way to do it. If you haven't heard about Google Drive, go ahead and know more about it. As a blogger who can always go online, online storage like Google Drive will fix your problem. It's secured, easy and very user-friendly.

In Google Drive, the Google Sheets and Docs are two of the bestfriends in blogging. Just in case you can't keep yourself online everyday, better yet create a folder, sync it to Google Drive, and write your blog post and editorial calendar in Microsoft Word and Excel.

Why do I advise you to sync it to online? Just in case, especially during emergencies that you don't have your laptop/computer with you, you can still access your files since they are saved online!

3. Write Blog Posts Ahead

Again and again, don’t cram. Don’t write a blog post and submit it on the day itself. Possible exceptions: you’re taking a challenge and you just wanted to comply to that challenge given on that day. Confession: I’m guilty.

For each blog post, include at least a header image to make it appealing to your readers. Reading a blog post with no images may not be the best idea considering that it’s 2015 and people are visually engaged to online content.

4. Schedule

Blogging platform like Blogger allows you to schedule posts ahead. You can either save these contents as draft or schedule them ahead. In this way, you’ll have no problem in writing daily blog posts but you can just simply review your post on the day itself.

Keeping a mobile device with you for possible revisions is best especially if you can’t wait to get back to your computer or laptop and you found something erroneous on your content.

5. Revise and Update

Yes, taking time to read your entire blog post before publishing it is a good habit. If you wanted to be a good blogger, consider reading your previous blog posts randomly then you’ll eventually find that these blog posts need some update.

As bloggers, especially if you are a copy reader on your own, we are prone to errors. I’m guilty of this but this doesn’t make us an excuse to have blogs full of grammatical errors. We have to find a way to fix our grammatical and spelling errors. Asking a friend to read it or reading the blog posts aloud may fix this problem.

If you're taking the 30 Day Blogging Challenge, wishing you all the best!

(Note: This is my entry for Day 4 of 30 Day Blogging Challenge organized by Cebu Blogging Community from October 1-30, 2015. #iBlogforCBC #CBCLevelUp #CBC30DayChallenge)