Limping In

Well, this is it.

Today is day 30 of my 30 day, daily blog challenge to myself.

As I write this I’m somewhere over the Nevada desert en route to Las Vegas, for a trip I take a trip with friends every year.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember my daily vlog experiment from a few years back, where I did a couple videos with the same crew:

And now a month into it, as I sit here and can’t help but think two things:

• I’m glad I did it
• I’m glad it’s over

On the one hand, it’s helped me re-engage with the site, have dozens of fantastic conversations with readers and Academy members, and sparked new creativity and ideas for the site and business.

However on the other, while it didn’t take as long as doing the daily vlog, it did take a considerable amount of time, that could have been spent on things that would more directly grow the site and business.

So I would go back and do it again in a heartbeat, but right this second I’m excited about the next phase.

3 Takeaways from Blogging Daily

I’ll be totally honest, I’m a little burnt out from the writing.

And considering the guy in front of me just put is seat into recline, this is probably going to be a more abbreviated post than it should be considering this is the last day of the challenge.

Here’s the low res photo I sent to myself via crappy in-flight wifi, of me finishing my daily blog challenge.

After I’ve recovered I’ll share more thoughts on the process and what I might do differently if I was doing it all over again.

But in the meantime, I’m going to share three of the biggest takeaways I had from the process

1) It doesn’t matter how much you write, but rather how much your promote

I alluded to this a bit in my two-week update.

Writing every day did absolutely nothing for traffic. Traffic was almost exactly the same as if I published once a week.

A big reason for this is due to the lack of promotion.

I emailed my list 3 or 4 times about posts or updates from the week.

Those emails got a lot more clicks than a regular email because there was more to share, but when I didn’t promote, traffic was flat.

Now, traffic is not the be all/end all by any means, but for what my goals are here, it’s clear it makes more sense to write fewer posts, and do a better job promoting each one.

Over time it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see a bump in traffic from these posts as they start to rank, but for the month, we only had a few thousand more visits than the month before.

2) The more you write, the more creative your ideas become

I’ve talked about this a lot in the past, but it was interesting for me to really put it into practice. Over the past few months, my ideas have been few and far between.

But when I started writing every day and gave myself permission to break out of the box, the ideas started flowing – and it felt good.

While I might have veered too far off the main theme of Location Rebel (building a lifestyle business), the extra creative license allowed me to put some of myself back in the site, which was important to me.

Even now, I have plenty of ideas and drafts for the rest of the year, so the exercise was well, well worth it.

3) The more nervous you are to hit publish, the greater the chances of success

This has held true for my entire blogging career. The more nervous I am about posting something, the more emails, comments, shares etc. I’ll get about it.

The two I was most nervous about posting:

• Hi, My Name is Sean – This was one that had a lot of personal facts and truths about me that I don’t often talk about.
• An Open Letter to Apple – A rant about how much I hate my new MacBook Pro

These are the two that by far had the most traction.

These days the bolder your opinion, the more you share something against the grain, and the more willing you are to be vulnerable, the better the chances of your post gaining traction quickly.

What’s Next at Location Rebel

Liz and I have been hard at work talking about what the rest of the year is going to look like.

I’m going to take the rest of this week off to relax from writing a bit, before jumping back in next week.

I’ve also been getting more interested in revisiting the vlog, so you can expect to see some more videos coming your way soon.

Between now and the rest of the year I’ll be heading to Vegas. Philly, Singapore, Tokyo, and Bermuda – so there should be plenty of opportunities to create some compelling stories and vlogs.

We’re one subscriber shy of hitting 9k on YouTube, so I’d love it if you’d go push us over the edge!

We’ll still be blogging here on a regular basis, and we’re working on a lot of updates for our products as well.

Here’s a big one to start: for a few more days you can pick up the Complete Beginner’s Guide to Building a Lifestyle Business for just 10 bucks. We’ve had dozens of people get down on this, and the responses have been fantastic.

So with that, I hope you have an excellent Sunday, and you’ll be seeing more of me very soon 🙂

Sean Ogle

Sean Ogle is the Founder of Location Rebel where he has spent the last 12+ years teaching people how to build online businesses that give them the freedom to do more of the things they like to do in life. When he's not in the coffee shops of Portland, or the beaches of Bali, he's probably sneaking into some other high-class establishment where he most certainly doesn't belong.