Blogtober 28 - Was it worth doing Blogtober?

This one is probably not going to be very interesting unless you are thinking about starting a blog, building a blog or doing Blogtober sometime. I'm afraid there is not a lot of pretty pictures, odd facts or random musings and connections on this one. You're still welcome to have a read if I have not put you off!

 

A random pretty picture from one of our wanders along a river

 

OK, I know it's not the end of the month yet but I've got some things lined up for the weekend so today seemed like a good time to reflect on wether it has been worth doing Blogtober. 

It has taken quite a bit of time and a fair amount of brain power. I thought that I had prepared for it but there was more I could have done including having more pre-made blogs ready to go for those days when it's getting late and I haven't posted yet. If I did it again, I would certainly do this. I also realised that I hadn't thought through the sharing of each blog and belatedly worried about sharing my stuff and constantly shoving it in peoples faces. I usually blog infrequently so am less concerned about this as I mix lots of different stuff on our boat page but daily updates felt a bit spammy for a personal blog that many would not be interested in. It also had a knock on affect to me posting anything else, partly through time and partly though not wanting to be posting lots of stuff. Some pre though about this would have helped I think and working out how often I wanted to link to where (twitter/facebook etc.).

I fiddled around with tagging and @ing through the month and could see the difference this, and sharing in different places, made looking at the statistics. From that viewpoint alone it was a worthwhile exercise. Having daily posts meant that I could fiddle around with different things and see the results much quicker. It also gave me the chance to try things I may not have done otherwise. Particularly the much shorter blog posts about a single item or a quote and I am much more likely to do that again.

Two of my aims with the challenge were to launch a 'British holidays' stand alone page which could then be added to in the future and to complete some or all of the many half written blogs I had sitting around, some of them for a long time. Having managed the former, I have nearly completed the latter. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I will no longer have lots of 'draft' posts sat around. To be honest, several of the drafts were binned because they were not good ideas - presumably why they never got beyond draft stage but the challenge made me look through them and sort them out. 

So was it worth it? Yes, I think that for me, having a couple of concrete aims was helpful. I certainly wouldn't now start blogging every day all the time but maybe having discovered some shorter formats I will blog more regularly. 

As a bonus, I've also explored many new blogs and made new connections in the blogging community which despite what some would have you believe is certainly very much alive and kicking.