Once upon a time, I offered content creation workshops for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and job hunters.

No matter how diverse the group, their end goal was often the same: build up a body of content from which marketing materials, sales objectives, or organizational storytelling can flow.

To that end, I created and sponsored an annual "30 Days of Blogging Challenge."  Everyone taking my workshops was expected to publish new content every day for 30 consecutive days.[ref]I held the challenge in either December or January - both months with 31 days.  This allowed one "day off" exception for attendees, often a holiday.[/ref]

I participated in the challenge myself but, to be fair, never really lived up to even my own goals.  Creating thirty days of meaningful content is difficult, so I used filler posts around the holidays or meaningless journal entries about hiking to fill my calendar.

Fast Forward

Now, a few years after these workshops, and I publicly announced my intention to blog daily for a year.  As of yesterday, I've officially kept pace for 2 full months, and I'm not expecting to slow down.

Have my articles been meaningful?  I hope so.  Amongst technical tutorials and proposals, I write about business.  In the interest of being super meta, I also write about writing.

It's helped me develop a discipline of daily content creation and, like my workshop attendees from long ago, build up a wealth of content to which I can refer time and again.

How Much Content?

The rate at which I'm developing content is astounding.  For comparison, I ran some simple word count statistics on my site to compare the past two months will all of last year.

January/February 2014 against all of 2013.

Last year, I published 32 posts containing 28k words.  The vast majority (91%) of those posts would be evaluated "basic" in literary terms.  Traffic-wise, I brought in 52,000 visits during the year (from approximately 43,000 unique visitors).

Over the past two months, though, things have changed. Drastically.

Screenshot 2014-02-28 11.15.22

My 59 posts contain over 34k words.  The majority (56%) of those posts would be evaluated "intermediate," meaning the average reading level of my site has gone up quite a bit.  Also, my traffic has increased to 91,000 visits by more than 74,000 unique visitors.

In two months.

Yes, I started writing every day to scratch a creative itch.  But writing - and publishing - daily has also brought in almost twice as many visitors in about a sixth the time!  These visitors also represent what I would call higher-quality traffic: in 2013, only 17% of my site traffic was from repeat visitors.  So far in 2014, this has jumped to 19%.

Not necessarily a huge improvement by percentages, until you realize these 2 percentage points really represent 8,000 repeat visitors.[ref]According to the analytics, I had only 9,000 repeat visitors last year (which was 17% of my traffic). So far this year I've had 17,000 repeat visitors.  While this is only 19% of my traffic, it still represents a nearly 100% increase over the entirety of 2013![/ref]  This is Definitely movement in the right direction.

For those of you on the fence about daily blogging, do these numbers convince you of its value?