31 Days of Blogging: Huge Success!

I did it! I blogged every day, 7 days a week, for 31 days.

When I first started my self-imposed challenge of reinvigorating my blogging, I hoped I would feel different in the end. My goal was to breathe new life into what it meant to write this blog, interact with my readers, stay current on news, and once again focus on growing something that brings me immense joy.

I'm happy to report it was all a success.

I Feel Excited About Blogging Again

This is the best outcome of all. I'll go into some stats and numbers in a minute and why those are great and all, but most important of all I once again feel like I can sit down and just write. I lost that somewhere along the way. I really don't know how or why; It just happened. 

It wasn't 100% all roses this month. There were times this month when 8:00pm would roll around and I'd think, "Ugh I want to sleep or watch TV but I have to write a blog." On more than one occasion I felt like I had nothing to say. Despite that, I pushed through.

Now as a result, blogging is easier. Coming up with topics is easier. The desire is just there.

How Traffic & Stats Changed as a Result of Blogging Every Day

Organic Traffic (visitors who come from Google): +30.11%

Direct Traffic (people who type in keenandgraev.com directly): +10.05%

Social Media Traffic: +127.65%

Referral Traffic (links from other sites to us): +44.82%

Those are simply incredible numbers. The most significant change by far is the organic traffic. That's people finding the blog simply by Googling something. 

I don't use specifics when it comes to our blog data, but the changes above represent thousands of new visitors who I hope will become new readers. From my analytics, looks like 7% of the new visitors at the beginning of the month stuck through and remained active on the site the entire month.

Most Read Posts (Published in August)

• Dauntless Looks Boring
• Fortnite Review: So That's Why It's Not on Steam
• Minecraft Survival Game
• Path of Exile: My Newbie Adventure Begins
• What Happened to Ark

There was nothing necessarily ground-breaking this month to write about, and none of the content necessarily stood out as something to go viral or generate long-term traffic. So despite the lack of a "wow factor" post, these every day run-of-the-mill topics still generated buzz.

Interaction & Commenting Has Increased

I was going to run some numbers on how much our commenting has increased here on the blog, but that felt overwhelming. 😛 

Suffice it to say, commenting is on the rise again. Many of you have commented for the first time, and that's awesome! Welcome to the community. 

Many of you who comment regularly now have more opportunities to comment, obviously, so that's awesome too.

Part of why I blog is to start a conversation with other people on these subjects. I want your feedback, thoughts, insights, etc. 

What's Next?

31 Days was such an accomplishment for me, and because of the success and how good it felt to accomplish the goal, I'm setting another one!

100 Days of Blogging

That's right! I'm going to blog every day to hit 100 Days of Blogging! If 31 days resulted in such a radical difference in how I feel and how well the blog performed, I can't imagine how much better 100 days will be.

Same rules go for this challenge. I'm going to post in some way every day. Some days it'll be an article, others a video, some maybe even just screenshots that inspired me. There are no rules for what I publish, just that I publish.

Thanks for making this fun and rewarding! I look forward to seeing where the blog will go in the coming months.