Incheon, Korea
30 day blogging challenges seem like popular ways to get your blogging mojo moving again.
Successful bloggers offer challenges for a month to motivate readers who lost their blogging fire.
Should you do a 30 day challenge?
Do 30 day challenges work?
Before engaging in a month long blogging blitz consider these ideas.
Why Are You Doing the Challenge?
Why do you want to do a 30 day blogging challenge?
What motivated you?
How do you feel?
Why do you feel the need to dive in to a challenge for a month?
Does challenging yourself feel fun? Does tapping in to the power of community feel freeing? Do you appreciate the support?
If engaging in a challenge feels fun, freeing and supportive, consider diving in to a blogging challenge for the month.
Motivators make or break the challenge.
For example, if blogging feels hellishly difficult now and a challenge feels like a last ditch effort to salvage your blog it may be a poor idea to join a month long blogging blitz. Fear in your mind makes blogging hellish. Fear in your mind makes a challenge the improbable savior of your blogging campaign.
Does trying a challenge make sense if fear scares you into taking the challenge?
No.
Fear destructs. Fear stops, blocks, makes excuses, finds obstacles, quits challenges and pretty much guarantees a failed effort.
Fear in the mind believes that a challenge can save your blog, or make you inspired, or conquer your blogging obstacles. YOU, with your mind, thoughts, feelings and actions, save your blog, become inspired and conquer blogging obstacles. 30 day challenges stimulate ideas that guide you to dig deeper into your mind. But the challenge itself does not do anything because it is a non-sentient concept dreamed up by someone who uses the tool to goad you along…..if the idea resonates with you.
What About the Time Frame?
As you likely know by now, going pro requires slow, patient effort executed over years.
Blogging challenges potentially place you on a 30 day track toward a 300 day, then 600 day, then 1200 day, then 2400 day challenge that we professional bloggers call: the long blogging game preceding a professional blogging career.
I love the idea of getting your blogging motor running over a teeny weeny 1 month stretch. Baby steps my Young Blogging Padawans, baby steps.
Some bloggers dive in to a month long challenge expecting to experience massive success 30 days later; not gonna happen.
Some desire dramatic results after 30 day’s worth of blogging effort; not gonna happen.
Some believe that if they work hard and long enough over 30 days that this intense blitz creates a blogging short cut cancelling out the 3, 4 or 5 year’s worth of effort required to establish a granite-like foundation for a professional blogging career; not gonna happen.
Stop reading for a few seconds. Revisit these words from above:
“Blogging challenges potentially place you on a 30 day track toward a 300 day, then 600 day, then 1200 day, then 2400 day challenge that we professional bloggers call: the long blogging game preceding a professional blogging career.”
1200 days divided by 365 equals roughly 3.3 years.
Picture yourself patiently working on your blogging campaign for 3.3 years.
This is what it takes to go pro, and, to go beyond.
Doing simple things for 30 days is a fantastic way to set the proper tone for a blogging career.
Doing simple things for 3 years on a daily basis is THE way to go pro. Perhaps you go pro before the 3.3 year mark. Maybe you go pro after the 3.3 year mark. But realistically understanding how a 30 day challenge is the starting point and nothing else places you in the proper frame of mind to run a realistic blogging marathon versus a deluded sprint.
How to Frame 30 Day Blogging Challenges
See a month long blogging challenge as one step toward developing a lifelong blogging habit.
Have you ever followed a diet?
Did you expect to lose 50 pounds in a day (minus amputating your right leg)?
People expect to diet patiently on a daily basis for many months or years before losing 50 pounds.
Did you ever engage in a 1 day diet challenge?
Nope.
Dieters think in terms of 3, 6 or 12 month intervals because dieting and weight loss require a slow and steady lifestyle change over years in order to see lasting, long-term results.
Blogging for a 30 day challenge is step 1 of many steps aspiring pro bloggers take. After 30 days you have 11 months’ worth of blogging steps to take this year; this means engaging in a 335 day challenge after the 30 day challenge. That’s how blogging works.
Do Long Term Time Frame Goals Scare You?
Does the 335 day blogging challenge scare you?
Move in a different direction.
Either continue doing 30 day challenges or if you genuinely want to tap into unlimited energy, consider removing time frames, challenges and outside motivators from your strategy. Choose inner inspiration like having fun, enjoying the process of helping people and trusting in yourself and the blogging process to tap into the pro-level mindset well before going pro.
Hold a little goal of being free by going pro. No one needs to completely let go worldly ambitions. I even share “How to Retire to a Life of Island Hopping through Smart Blogging” in the Blogging From Paradise tagline.
Instead of looking at a calendar to get motivated how about creating a vision in your mind that leads you forward from a calm, confident intent?
Going within to find limitless drivers is one secret exhibited by happy, free, highly successful entrepreneurs.
The world looks outside of the mind to lose steam. Happy, free, thriving folks look within at an inexhaustible source of inspiration to keep going as the world quits, throwing up their hands when nothing in the outside world seems to be working.
Look within to go beyond challenges.
Conclusion
Engaging in a 30 day blogging challenge can stimulate you to commit to blogging.
Look within to find deep, pulsating, limitless inspiration after the month expires.
Doing this goads you to create a long term vision which instills confidence, peace and a commitment to seeing the journey through no matter the bumps and bruises you encounter along the way.
Related Posts
7 Tips for Starting a Blog and Sticking with it
Why Promote Other Bloggers on Your Blog?
What Is Blogging and Why Should You Blog?
Blogging Mindset Training: Do You Use Technology or Does It Use You?
What Is the Biggest Downside to Making Blogging Income Claims?
What Is the Main Problem with Lengthy But Generic Comments These Days?