10 Days and I have a Better Blog

Today marks the last day of the “10 Days To A Better Blog” workshop by Desk.pm. The workshop has forced me to look deep, answer hard question and I am much better off for it.

Coming into this workshop, this blog had a handful of posts published and has been around since 2007. With a little motivation, this site has sprung back to life and is back in action. The author of  the Desk Publishing Machine, an app developed by John Saddington, led the workshop. If you are looking to a great example of someone who consistently blogs everyday, look no further than his blog. During the workshop, he did a great job of setting us up for success by painting the perfect picture of what we needed to do every day.

Let’s recap all the posts I did from the last 9 days.

Day 1: 10 Day Writing Challenge – This was the day I declared to the world that I was making a commitment to the workshop and we were underway with the learning.

Day 2: Why I write – Right out of the gates we were forced to answer a tough question. I had to spend a lot of time pondering and looking for the motivation I have to write. It’s something I tend to look back on often to remind myself why I got into this and not give in to self defeating thoughts.

Day 3: The Creative Environment – Where you write can just be as important as to what you write. Finding the correct balance in your physical space so that you are the most inspired and productive is a challenge in of itself. Some people do better with music, others do well with minimal distractions, I of course am the latter.

Day 4: Community Reflection – Today we spent a day reflecting over the the first few days of the workshop. It was an opportunity to really open up about what we are really thankful for.

Day 5: Reboot Sequence Initiated – We were required to go back and look at our blog to see what categories worked and which ones did not to understand what it is we should be writing. Even though I want to write about everything, there is something natural that I as a writer will gravitate towards in my posts. I learned that I needed to move my focus to those efforts.

Day 6: Rebuilding my About Page – The most visited page on the site will undoubtedly be the about page. This is the one chance I will get to make a great first impression. I rewrote my about page to tell a story of my life in hopes others can draw a connection closer to me. I am a not a robot or a faceless user of the internet, I am human and I can offer value to my readers.

Day 7: My 2015 Goals – Analytics is a tool necessary to install on the site to make better decisions about managing the content of the site. I’ve had Google Analytics installed for the life of the site, so I had a crystal clear understanding of what posts drew a bit of attention and why others under performed. This was an opportunity to talk about installing Analytics, post the top 10 post from last year or just write my 2015 goals. I chose to announce my personal goals so I have something to refer back to next year.

Day 8: Blogging Objective for 2015 – On the heels of writing my goals for 2015, I had to be more specific about my blogging goals. I committed to writing 2 posts a week for the duration of the year. I feel that this will help quench my creativity and help me organize my thoughts here on this medium.

Day 9: Rightsizing – This was a free day to write about whatever we wanted. Admittedly this was perhaps the hardest day because I started with an incredible amount of writer’s block. Before, I just needed to respond to a given topic, now I was supposed to totally pick something of my own to talk about. I ended up writing about my goal to rightsize my house and get into something more efficient.

I hate that the workshop is over, I did get quite a bit out of it. I also hope that John got a lot out of it as well in terms of driving more traffic to his site for is already wildly successful Mac OS Desktop Publishing Machine application.