I made a video-per-day for a month a year ago, and it proved to be an invaluable exercise for all my future video production endeavors, especially live video. It also helped with my public speaking confidence and clarity. During that month, the videos themselves varied in quality and usefulness, but quite a few people told me they enjoyed most of them.
If you have followed this blog for long enough, you might remember that I was featuring blog posts from Phoenix bloggers every week for a couple of months. I may or may not get back into that, but when I travel, it’s hard enough to keep up with what’s going on in Phoenix. Reading all the Phoenix blogs I can find, filtering out the most interesting ones, and blogging about them proved to be a little more than I could squeeze into my schedule permanently.
I usually do these types of exercises with no end date, but this time, I’m going to make it exactly one calendar month. Starting today, I’m going to write about something every day. I might not write every day, but something will be posted every day here on this blog — meaning I may write stuff in advance and save it for days I don’t write. Also, since it is mostly about posting regularly, the posts may be short and they may even be video.
After January 31, I can guarantee I will not keep up the blog-a-day, but after that, my average posts per month will hopefully be higher. That’s part of the reason I call this an exercise. If you can run a certain speed when you’re out of shape, running every day for a month will very likely result in a faster pace thereafter. Until you get fat and lazy again, that is!
Thinking about it a bit more about this “30 day challenge”, I think I too need to commit to something similar to this. Much like all of these “small projects” in my head, maybe it’s time to step up to the plate myself and commit to biting off a small piece of a project each day with a single targeted task that I can complete each day.
Sounds like a great exercise, Good Luck!
Think about Ze Frank’s the show, which was 5 days a week for a year. Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week for a year. Those didn’t make them “famous” but they were great exercises to make them better at producing content, public speaking, etc.
I tried something similar to this a while back and it didn’t really work, probably because I didn’t put enough commitment into it.
I think if I’d planned it better it might have worked but I was very vague in my goals apart from I wanted to make a $1 day from each of them or a day! But there were no real ideas other than that about what sort of content was gonna go on there and most importantly what I was going to do with the blogs afterwards, which meant most of them died.
I’d love to do something similar though as soon as possible as I’ve recently become unemployed and I’m struggling with motivation.
Matt, one of my upcoming posts will cover why the $1/day goal is not reasonable. Blogging is part of social media, and social media is by nature very indirect. If you try to extract something from it directly, you will likely compromise the effort altogether. If you go into something and simply strive to create the best content you possibly can, good things are more likely to come.