Blogtober: the best of times, the worst of times. October is my favorite month of the year and so it always feels like the shortest. This year especially it seemed to really fly by.
I wanted to talk about how Blogtober, as an exercise, made me feel. At the end of October, I sent out a newsletter where I talked about how I enjoyed Blogtober because being busy, mentally and physically, helps me to relax and keeps me from going into an anxiety spiral. For that reason, Blogtober was really fun and I had one of my best “mental health” months for a while.
The Pros
What are the pros of Blogtober?
Firstly, I had the absolute best month, sponsorship opportunity, views/visits, and social media wise, in a long time. I know these numbers are slightly inflated because I was posting every day and so, purely, I just had more posts for people to visit. But after so long of feeling like I was putting in so much effort and seeing no growth, it made me so happy. I feel like I picked up some genuine new readers too (hello!) and email subscribers. I’m so happy to have you here.
Secondly, Blogtober gave me some really good ideas as to what kind of content people like the most, what brings in new readers, and what helps me keep readers coming back. These are technical, kind of business-focused topics that sometimes bloggers don’t talk about. I fully believe that blogging should be about enjoyment, first and foremost, but at the end of the day, blogging into a void isn’t exactly fulfilling!
The Cons
Firstly, there were a few times throughout the month where I thought: is my content suffering here? I personally picked each topic I wrote about; each blog post was from a list of ones I had been meaning to write. But when you’re writing a ton in advance, not having time to take pictures for each, relying on stock photos… it starts to feel a little anonymous, you know? However, I don’t think my content suffered overall; sometimes, I just felt a bit rushed and didn’t write what I really wanted to write.
Another con: sometimes it felt like my Blogtober posts got lost in the jumble of other Blogtober posts, as well as my own. At a certain point, I completely forgot what was scheduled for what day; it was really hard for me to remember, working a week or two in advance of each post. It’s not how I usually operate, but it’s what I had to do to stay on top of things! I do need to work on being more organized (oops) about my blog posts, but I’ve yet to find a system that truly works for me.
What did you think of Blogtober? Did you participate? Would you?
