One good reason to stop the #100blogs challenge

I should stop doing the 100 blogs in 100 days challenge because of what Derek Halpern says.

Who's Derek Halper? And what does he say? I hear you ask.

He is a very successful American on-line entrepreneur.

He runs a website called Social Triggers and styles himself as an authority on the psychology of on-line marketing.

He makes his money by selling training courses in various different aspects of blogging and building up email subscriber lists. And, if his figures are to be believed, he's very good at it.

And, though his style isn't everybody's cup of tea, what he says does make sense.

This post in particular sums it up nicely.

Basically, he says, to attract more readers, followers, subscribers, more business, it's not the quantity of the content you produce that matters it's the quality.

So the initial goal, for me, for doing the challenge was to add content to my site, and thus increase my search engine rankings, and hence increase business.

But after having done it for more than 50 days now, I can say that just adding content isn't a sure fire way of getting up the search engine rankings. My rankings have gone up and down during the period, and the biggest gains have been related to new links that have been made to my site, rather than the new content (which, by the way, wasn't the reason for the links).

What Halpern recommends is that you spend just 20% of your time writing your content and 80% of the time promoting it. He says if you spend almost all your time creating the content and hardly anyone reads it what's the point? Instead what you should do is write really good content and then make even more effort to get people to read it.

And Halpern's own site is a case in point, he only posted on average 5 times every 2 months, not every day! Yet managed to get 27,000 subscribers. I have managed to get a grand total of one person subscribe! (Though, to be fair, that wasn't the main goal of the blogging).

It all makes sense and what I should do is switch to that strategy.

But I'm not going to.

Why not!?

Because....

• I'm enjoying the challenge
• I'm learning new skills
• I've built up some momentum
• I'm generating lots of ideas, and resources I can use for bigger, better quality "epic" blog posts
• I think there is some benefit in the long tail aspect of the content I am creating. I now have more related phrases that might appear in the search engine rankings
• I will eventually stop at 100 days, and then I can change my strategy to include more promotion
• Pride: I don't like pulling out of challenges
• Foolishness?

There are pros and cons and at the moment my eyes are being more opened to the cons. But I shall continue, for the moment

Tomorrow I look at another reason not to post every day.