What I learned from doing Blogmas

So this year I decided to do Blogmas in 2015 – for those who do not know what Blogmas is… basically you upload a new blog post every day for the month of December up until Christmas. When it was coming up to the 25th I actually cut back as I was spending more time with friends and family and it is always vital  to remember that your offline life is so important! Some bloggers do all Christmas themed posts and although I have done quite a few gift guides – I just wanted to get back into the habit of writing regularly.

It is a tall challenge to post everyday when you work full time and that also means that there are zero hours of sunlight that you have to work with for taking images for posts. So I thought I would share what I have learned from doing blogmas over the last month as one of my final posts of 2015.

Time / Planning  – 

Blogging every day has taken a considerable more amount of time than I thought it would. I knew when I decided to do Blogmas that it would take up time but I had not forseen the nights staying up until 2am editing images for posts. If you want to do a blog post a day then you need a schedule. I did do up some pre-scheduled posts to help me when I was running short on time. I have found that I cannot just come from work and write a blog post as I like to post at around 18:30pm each day so I need to be a minimum of one day ahead.

Quality –  

One of the reasons that Blogmas has taken up so much of my time is the detail that goes into each post. I realised many years ago that I am not someone who likes to do things half-assed and blogging is no exception. There were over 30 posts in my Drafts folder before I started this challenge so I could have easily just scheduled each post and sat back BUT that just isn’t me. I appreciate quality over quantity so putting out so many posts has been very challenging.

Daylight–

I had not realised that when you leave for work when it’s dark and come back home when it’s dark means no daylight for taking blog post images! I think that photos taken in natural light are much more aesthetically pleasing regardless of your subject and not having any images really has bothered me. If I was home even just for an hour when there was any natural light I would go into photo taking mode.

Social Media –

As part of Blogmas I also decided I would try and post one Instagram post each day or at a minimum 5 days a week. I am quite particular with my Instagram and I like the images to be primary colours and bright and cheerful. This is my preference and I know others prefer the sleek, white look but that just isn’t me on Instagram. My blog is much more minimalistic as I want the posts to stand out more and finding images that I thought were good enough was tough on top of coming up with daily blog posts. But I have to say that my Social Media stats have increased this month and I am back enjoying both Twitter and Instagram.

Connecting –

Since I am on my blog a lot more I am actually reading more blog posts by other bloggers and being more interactive on Twitter. This has meant that I have connected with some really amazing people and I really love this element of blogging. As you know I am a member of the Into the West Blogger Network and I really have gotten to know some of them really well.