For the fifth year in a row I have participated in the challenge 28/29 Days of Blogging, i.e. publish a blog post on every day of February. This year is the first time that I fully succeeded. In 2017 I had been close with 27 out of 28 blog posts, but this year I managed the full 29! Woohoo!

I feel very accomplished. This year I expected the challenge to be a little easier because my current job is less demanding and I also didn’t have plans to travel during winter break. But the challenge is still stressful. Blogging for me is a hobby. That means I wrote those 29 blog posts additional to my full-time job. Usually in the evenings. Every evening I would tell my boyfriend that I had to finish that and that task for work and then I still had to blog before I could go to sleep. When I was at that professional training in Washington at the beginning of February, I would blog every evening in my hotel room wishing that I could have gone to sleep that half an hour earlier.

At the same time, I greatly enjoyed the challenge. It made me put a lot more effort into blogging again. I blog way faster when I do it regularly. Also, the more I write, the more ideas I come up with. This month I used the work management tool Asana for the first time. It helped me to obtain an overview of all my post ideas and then of my work status. I installed the app on my phone so that I could jot down ideas wherever I was. That way I even collected plenty for the next month.

The 29 Days of Blogging challenge made me blog more and more efficiently as well. This is also why February for those last five years has always been the month with a high rise in visitors to my blog. More content usually equals more readers. Hopefully I didn’t bore you. I tried to vary the topics and wrote, besides the usual weekly posts, more about my engagement and wedding plans, my trip to Washington D.C., new recipes I recently tried, a bit of beauty, about movies, …

I attended a New York Fashion Week event for the first time in my life. The more invested I am in blogging, the more opportunities arise. This month I went to several blogger events, I received an invitation to a cool one in two weeks, and I even had a paid add on my Instagram account. While that might make only little money, it still makes me proud. And it pays a bit of the monthly hosting cost.

My wish is to keep up the blogging game. But without publishing a post every day. I feel more like three to four posts a week, depending on my actual job workload. There is a good reason why blogging has been my hobby for ten years now. And also why I stop following blogs that only publish new posts every few weeks. I try to continue blogging more regularly. My managing tool is definitely already full of enough post ideas to cover several months.

© janavar

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