Yes, that's right, another 30-Day Blog Your Brand Challenge starts today! In June of this year, one of my members (Stacia Guzzo, if you want to know which one) told me that she had seen stunning increases in traffic to her website since she started blogging more regularly. Since I have been a blogger for over a decade, this was no surprise to me. What was somewhat surprising was that she said she was planning to blog for thirty straight days. I asked her if she would join me in hosting a blogging challenge for Indie Business Network members, and she graciously agreed.
I announced the new challenge, with a prize of a full year of membership in IBN. I thought a few members would participate, but I was shocked when over fifty members posted a blog link on Day 1 of the challenge. Twenty-two members blogged every single day from June 14 to July 13.
Why Another 30-Day Blog Your Brand Challenge?
Well, because we can, that's why!
That's actually sort of the answer. Really though, my members asked for it. And when they ask me for something, I do my best to deliver.
Here are three other reasons I am hosting the 30-Day Blog Your Brand Challenge again.
- To build community. Entrepreneurship is tough, and it can also be very lonely and isolating. In the Blog Your Brand Facebook Group, we minimize a lot of the isolation that comes with entrepreneurship by encouraging each other to push ourselves the extra mile to make those blog posts work for us.
Like any other difficult life tasks, the load is easier to carry when you have friends. Not only are we building our brands, we are building community. We are establishing relationships, and at the end of the day, that's the best part of being in business anyway.
- To exercise our leadership muscles. Entrepreneurship offers plenty of opportunities to do this, but there's nothing like having to coordinate your thoughts enough to actually publish them in a way that makes sense to the world. Blogging is not always hard, but it is often scary. You are sharing your opinion with the universe, and not everyone will agree with you. A blog opens you up to criticism, ridicule, haters, etc.
Blogging, especially if you are committing to do it for thirty days straight, forces you to take the bull by the horns and stand by everything you share publicly. If you haven't had an opportunity to fully embrace your role as a leader, blog for thirty days. That will solve that problem!!
- To better understand our target customers. If you have an online business, a lot of your success depends on whether you can be found by your target audience. Since they are not sitting on their favorite search engine looking for your brand name all day, you have to create content that is responsive to what they are looking for on search engines. There is no better way t learn how to do that than t blog.
Sure, you could hire an SEO firm, and maybe you should. But there is no credibility like organic credibility, and you can only get that by knowing your target customer inside and out. Communicating with them for thirty straight days will help you do that, especially if you share your posts across multiple social media channels and in your email newsletter. Do it.
Question
Time to get busy! Are you joining us? What results have you seen from your blogging efforts? Do you feel the need to step up your game? What are your tips for doing so? Please do share thoughts and experiences in the comments below, or share on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
