If you work full-time as a freelance writer, it can be brutal to juggle paid assignments along with maintaining a personal blog.
If your blog isn't a money maker, it's easy to let a couple days - or weeks or months - slip by without adding new material. After all, why put the effort into something that's not paying the bills when you could spend time working on something that does?
But there are plenty of reasons to post regularly, especially if you have any desire to turn what started as a hobby into paid work.
That's where I was four years ago when I started blogging after a hiatus from writing to be a SAHM. Blogging was my way of getting up to speed on everything I'd missed. It paid off almost immediately. My blog, WordCount: Freelancing in the Digital Age, helped me reconnect with former colleagues who gave me assignments, and eventually landed me contract work as a paid blogger and freelance editor of a finance website - positions I never would have gotten otherwise.
There was a time not long after I'd started blogging when my enthusiasm waned, so I challenged myself to post every day during the month of May, and asked some writer friends to join me. That was the start of the WordCount Blogathon. Since then, hundreds of other writers and bloggers have joined me for the annual 31-day challenge.
If you're thinking of starting a blog or have one you'd like to take to the next level, join us. The 2011 WordCount Blogathon starts on Sunday, May 1. It's free to sign up and everyone who enters gets the participant badge that you see in this post. If you make it through all 31 days you'll be entered in a raffle for hundreds of dollars in writing-related prizes that will be drawn during a Twitter chat on June 1 at 10 a.m. PST.
To make it easier on everyone, the blogathon includes a number of theme days, including a haiku poetry day and guest post exchange. You can see the calendar of events here. You can read more about the blogathon or sign up here.
Need more convincing? Here are other reasons for blogging every day:
- To gain experience to look for paid blogging work.
- To gain expertise in a subject you want to write about for paid markets.
- To build traffic.
- To establish yourself as an expert.
- As part of building a personal brand.
- To help promote a book, e-book, e-newsletter or other product or service you’re selling or hoping to sell.
- To start a blog – or a second or third.
- To improve your SEO skills.
- To make money from advertising, affiliate programs or other blog-based enterprise.
Michelle V. Rafter is a Portland, Oregon, freelance business journalist and proprietor of WordCount: Freelancing in the Digital Age, which covers writing and the writing business. Reach her at wordcountfreelance AT gmail.com.
Interested in contributing a guest blog post of your own? Check out the guest blogger guidelines.