I blogged every day for 60 days. Here’s what happened.
Spoilers: The second 30 days were SPECTACULAR.
I was planning on waiting to update my Medium post-a-day challenge results until I’d blogged for 90 days.
But I can’t.
I need you to know, right now, that all of the “I blogged everyday for a month, and here’s what happened” posts you see on Medium — they are the tip of the iceberg.
I kept going. And I seriously can’t believe the results.
Here’s the post I wrote about the first 30 days of my challenge.
And here’s the results of the second month:
I relaxed with regard to Quora.
It’s still a great idea, to answer questions on Quora and crosspost to Medium.
I’ve just been posting so much here, that I don’t have time to write there, too. Instead I go to Quora when I need some inspiration or I want to add to my list of story ideas.
Posting on Quora every day for the first thirty days was good discipline and great for building up my idea list. This month, I just didn’t need it as much.
I was turned down as a paid writer for Medium.
Pretty self-explanatory. My application, which was invited, was rejected.
I’m okay with it. I did pretty well with Medium, anyway, and I got to write what I wanted.
My page views nearly 10X’d .
I was pretty happy to have 36,262 page views in March. That was about three times my February page views and ten times my page views from January. It was twice the traffic my blog received in the same month.
So, imagine how fun it’s been to watch my page views increase by 10X in April!
More than 300,000. Just . . . holy cow.
There are a lot of reasons for writing. It’s cathartic. It’s my creative outlet. I love it. But there is something truly magical in knowing that people are reading and enjoying what I write.
Seriously, there isn’t anything like it.
My blog page views, by the way, decreased by 3000, from about 18,000 to about 15,000.
I’ve had some interesting conversations over the last few weeks about my belief that a self-hosted blog maybe isn’t the way to go anymore, for writers. Not at first anyway. Not when you’re just starting.
There is no way to argue that I’ve had more eyes on my work on Medium than I’ve had in a whole year of blogging at my own site. My blog was hacked last week — I had to pay someone to fix the problem.
My overwhelming response to that whole business was an intense gratitude that I don’t have all of my eggs in that single basket anymore. If my site was completely destroyed right now, I’d be okay.
(I did back up all my work though. Hacking is an eyeopener.)
My email subscribers increased by 1000.
In March I added about 150 new email subscribers to my email list, using Upscribe forms in my posts.
In April I added another 1000.
You can see here that I had a nice increase in subscribers from March to April. I had just about exactly twice as many subscribers in April as I did in February.
November and January are two big months for writing blogs, thanks to Nanowrimo and New Year’s resolutions, respectively. Aprils subscriptions were about equal to January’s, even though I turned off my Facebook Ads around the 20th of the month.
Even better: my email open rate has risen from 15–17% to 25–28%. The quality of my list has improved so much thanks to Medium that I’ve stopped using Facebook ads, which has saved me about $300 a month, without affecting the rate of my list growth.
My Medium Followers more than doubled.
On March 1 I had 2800 followers, on April 1 I had 3600.
Today, April 30, I have 8400.
I’ve written a few times in the past several weeks about list growing, and I’ve been asked why it’s so important to me. What exactly am I going to do with my list?
The answer, of course, is that I’m going to write for my list. I’m going to share things and learn things. My list is my community. It doesn’t belong to Medium or Facebook or ConvertKit or Wordpress. It’s mine.
There isn’t a real way to quantify the most incredible thing — the feedback and conversation that’s happened on my posts. I had dozens and dozens of comments here on Medium. I had exactly one on my blog.
If you’re one of the people following me or if you’re on my list — thank you. I’m really glad we’ve connected.
One of April’s posts had more than 50K page views.
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Several of April’s posts had more than 20K page views.
One of April’s posts had 10K page views.
Several of April’s posts had 5K page views.
I started a publication + shared fiction + didn’t die.
This was maybe the scariest thing I’ve done in a long time.
I started a publication, The 1000 Day MFA, and started posting short stories every Sunday. I’ve also shared a couple of posts about publishing and reading.
This is an experiment — in fiction publishing and in having a Medium publication.
In the first month, it’s grown to 376 subscribers.
And I’m still alive. That’s good news.
I earned $879.
Two of my posts in April had Amazon affiliate links. Between the two of them, I earned $879 in April.
They’re both still getting small, but steady amounts of traffic and are bringing in about $15 a day.
I was offered four affiliate opportunities (I took two.)
Four companies asked me to be an affiliate for their products.
Two weren’t a good fit, for one reason or the other.
Two were.
One was ConvertKit, which is the email service that I use and a product that I truly love. I participated in as an affiliate in a promotion for a free course they were offering. I won’t know until the end of next month (so the end of my 90 Day Experiment) whether or not I’ll earn any money as a result.
The other is StoryShop, a fiction writer’s app from Sterling and Stone. I’m still not 100 percent sure how that’s going to work, but it’s another product that I really love and I’m excited to share it. I’ll write more about it in the next couple of weeks.
I was given a ticket to a conference I really wanted to attend.
Sterling and Stone offered me a press ticket to their sold out Smarter Artists Summit, which was last weekend in Austin, Texas.
I had such an awesome time, and I’ll write up a post about it for The Startup Grind — which is a connection I made last month thanks to my post-a-day challenge here on Medium.
I won a ticket to another conference.
ConvertKit is hosting their first conference in June, in Boise, Idaho. Seth Godin is the keynote speaker and I’m so excited to have won a ticket to the event during the promotion I mentioned.
Overall, seriously cool stuff happened pretty much everyday in April, thanks to daily posting on Medium.
Opportunities. Income streams. Meeting amazing people. Building a following. It was an awesome month. There’s another month left in my 90 Day Challenge. Stay tuned!
I’m hosting a Medium Post-a-Day Challenge in May (and probably forever.)
Every month, Ninja Writer’s $3 (and up) patrons on Patreon get a digital reward. In May that reward is a hosted challenge — post on Medium everyday in May and see what happens.
I can tell you now that there is no way that I’ll be closing the challenge down in 30 days. Because for me the second 30 days has been pretty extraordinary.
There’s a Facebook Group where participants can share their daily post. They can also connect, ask for and offer help, get ideas, share ideas, and start to use Medium as a way of building an audience for their work.
I’m so stinking excited!
I you want to join, come on over to Patreon and get signed up at the $3 level and above. We’re starting officially on May 1, but it’s open ended. Whatever day it is that you’re reading this, we’d love to have you.
I’ll be back in a month with a big fat report on how the whole 90 day challenge went.
If you enjoyed this story, give it some love with a heart. ❤❤❤
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