How To Start A Blog Challenge Series: The 12-Month Blogging Checklist

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” -Mark Twain

You’ve made it here, which means you’re a business looking to expand your digital footprint, educate your audience or customers, and get your website cranking as a lead generation machine.

You also likely a) know the benefits of blogging and probably b) fall into one of three camps when it comes to business blogging:

1. You’ve started blogging, which might only include the quintessential ‘Hello, blogging world!’ post as the only, lonely active post your blog has to offer.
2. You’ve blogged a bit for your business, but it’s pretty sporadic and honestly tough for your team to prioritize or have the bandwidth to create more content.
3. You haven’t started blogging at all, and don’t have a blog set up yet. If this applies to you, this post will better serve you at this juncture. Meet us back here when you’ve got one ready to rock. 🙂

Which brings us to…

Why should I care about Verblio’s “How To Start A Blog Challenge”?

Great question. Valid question.

To be honest, it all started, as many great blog posts do, with another post, in another format. That format, to be exact, was an infographic — a checklist for starting a blog, broken down by month, spanning for 12 months. And we realized in looking at these tasks in infographic form, while aesthetically pleasing and sparkly-beautiful to look at, wasn’t as actionable as it could be to keep people honest when building a new habit month after month after month. That, and a lot of the ‘why’ was lost in such concise copy.

(That said, if you’d like to dive in without the help of the longer-form blog posts, feel free to opt into the to-dos via infographic, by all means. It’s available to download below.)

And, to keep people honest in the successful development of a healthy habit, according to this study conducted by Phillippa Lally at University College London, it takes a minimum of 66 days for a habit to form…and can take as long as eight months!

So, we’ve broken it down into monthly installments (and have had some fun along the way…), which are all laid out for you below. For those searching for a surefire effective marketing blog challenge, no need to go back to the Googling-drawing board. All you need is right here.

• Month #1: Establish A Strong Foundation
• Month #2: Write Two Blog Posts
• Month #3: Write Three Blog Posts
• Month #4: Make Blogging A Habit
• Month #5: Write Four Blog Posts
• Month #6: Divide, Delegate, Dominate
• Month #7: Get Organized
• Month #8: Read Up On Keywords & SEO
• Month #9: Drive Action Through CTAs
• Month #10: Secure A Guest Blogging Opportunity
• Month #11: Get Guest Blogging Already
• Month #12: Welcome To The Beginning

Throughout these 12 months, we’ll guide you through building your blogging strategy from the ground up. This means starting with setting up Google Analytics, curating a running list of blog ideas, fleshing out an editorial calendar, securing guest blogging opportunities, all the way to the granular to-dos of writing a few posts per month. We run the gamut. Each and every piece is needed to complete a well-executed, scalable content strategy for any business.

To revisit the Mark Twain quote that started out this post, starting somewhere and improving gradually is far better than the waiting, waiting, waiting until the perfect time/team/set of conditions is met. The perfect time to start is now.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet to successful, organic marketing. But there are proven methods to get there with a heaping serving of discipline that are cost-effective and multiply ROI. One of those is blogging.

So let’s jump in.