I figured this might be of interest to some people.
My karate dojo held its yearly fundraiser recently, and for my part I decided to write a blog post every day for a month, and Tweet/Facebook them to try to encourage people to chip in a little money. The posts were mostly anecdotes, and mostly related to self defense or the martial arts, although there were a few random ones when I ran out of topics. I also wrote a short story and posted it in three parts, just for the heck of it.
Today was the last day, and I pulled some stats from various places:
- 28 posts
- 1,402 total pageviews
- 384 unique visitors
- 39 Facebook comments
- 31 "likes"
- 10 blog comments
- One link from a well-known women's athletics blog
- Six donors
- $125 dollars raised
This was a reasonable outcome, I think. One problem that hampered the fundraising side was that my audience was primarily members of my own dojo. I think the cause was twofold - I didn't make it clear enough that my posts were really aimed at laypeople (or I didn't succeed in hitting that audience,) and the structure of the fundraiser itself discouraged that primary audience from retweeting/sharing the posts, because any donations through the links I provided would be credited to me.
On the writing side, this was a fantastic exercise. The discipline to post (almost) every single day for a month made me push through the "Dammit I have no ideas" phase repeatedly, and some of the strongest posts were things I thought of because I wouldn't let myself give up and stared at the open window until something came.
Also, somewhat paradoxically, spending all of this time writing on my blog has made my novel-in-progress flow much more smoothly and also seems to have spurred my creativity in general. I never get short story ideas, but I just had another one last night that might pan out.
I don't intend to keep up an every-day schedule - it was a little too much, particularly on the weekends (when almost no one visited anyway) but I think posting more here, on more varied topics, is doing nothing but good for my writing in general.
(Blog link is in my sig, if you want to check it out - the short story is posted on days 16-18, and it's also in SYW here. I'll be doing a rewrite of it based on feedback, but it's not in awful shape now.)
My karate dojo held its yearly fundraiser recently, and for my part I decided to write a blog post every day for a month, and Tweet/Facebook them to try to encourage people to chip in a little money. The posts were mostly anecdotes, and mostly related to self defense or the martial arts, although there were a few random ones when I ran out of topics. I also wrote a short story and posted it in three parts, just for the heck of it.
Today was the last day, and I pulled some stats from various places:
- 28 posts
- 1,402 total pageviews
- 384 unique visitors
- 39 Facebook comments
- 31 "likes"
- 10 blog comments
- One link from a well-known women's athletics blog
- Six donors
- $125 dollars raised
This was a reasonable outcome, I think. One problem that hampered the fundraising side was that my audience was primarily members of my own dojo. I think the cause was twofold - I didn't make it clear enough that my posts were really aimed at laypeople (or I didn't succeed in hitting that audience,) and the structure of the fundraiser itself discouraged that primary audience from retweeting/sharing the posts, because any donations through the links I provided would be credited to me.
On the writing side, this was a fantastic exercise. The discipline to post (almost) every single day for a month made me push through the "Dammit I have no ideas" phase repeatedly, and some of the strongest posts were things I thought of because I wouldn't let myself give up and stared at the open window until something came.
Also, somewhat paradoxically, spending all of this time writing on my blog has made my novel-in-progress flow much more smoothly and also seems to have spurred my creativity in general. I never get short story ideas, but I just had another one last night that might pan out.
I don't intend to keep up an every-day schedule - it was a little too much, particularly on the weekends (when almost no one visited anyway) but I think posting more here, on more varied topics, is doing nothing but good for my writing in general.
(Blog link is in my sig, if you want to check it out - the short story is posted on days 16-18, and it's also in SYW here. I'll be doing a rewrite of it based on feedback, but it's not in awful shape now.)
