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31 Days to Build a Better Blog - Sign Up Here

Posted: 24 Mar 2009 07:01 AM PDT

Starting on 1 April (no it’s not an April fools joke) I am planning on launching another ‘31 Days to a Better Blog‘ project.

I’ve run this twice previously (once in 2005 and once in 2007) so thought that I should continue the biennial nature of it.

This year I’m going to run it slightly differently so if you’re interested in participating please read on carefully.

Of particular note - this year I’m asking those participating to sign up as registered participants. You don’t have to do it - but to get the full benefits from it I ask that you do. I’ll explain more on why I’m doing this below.

You can register here:

Here are the details of the challenge this year:

The Idea

The idea behind this is simply to have a group of bloggers setting aside a month of their time to work at improving their blogs. While we all want to have better blogs sometimes it becomes one of those things that we’re going to do…. one day.

I personally find that I improve (in all areas of my life) when I’m more intentional and set aside a specific time to make the improvements. That’s what this project is about.

Yesterday on Twitter I mentioned that I was thinking of running this again and had 50 people express interest in 5 minutes. I quickly set up a sign up page just for my Twitter users and within 24 hours had well over 1000 registered participants. I guess people want to do it.

Interested in joining us? If so, read on…

How it Works

Each day from 1st April until the 1st May I will make a post here on ProBlogger that is part of the challenge.

Posts will be designed to each have two aspects to them:

A teaching component (theory)
A practical component (a task/homework)

The idea is that often teaching remains in the realm of theory and doesn’t actually prompt those digesting it to DO something. This project is more about DOING than learning. I hope you will learn, but to be honest if you’ve been blogging for a while some of what we’ll cover many will have heard before - but this project will give you a framework and hopefully some inspiration to put what you know into action.

Some of the tasks will be similar to previous years tasks and some will be new (some things never change so there will always be some overlap). Some tasks will be more relevant to some bloggers than others so you may not choose to do all of them but they will be on a variety of areas of blogging including writing content, interacting with readers, finding new readers, design, tools etc.

This 31 days are designed for beginner and newer bloggers but many of the tasks will be relevant to intermediate and more advanced bloggers also.

To Participate

As mentioned above - this year I’m asking those who want to do the challenge to register their email addresses. You will receive one email per day over the 31 days notifying you that a new post is up, giving you the link to it as well as a little extra information for registered participants.

You don’t have to do this and can follow the posts via our RSS feed - but I’m asking for you to register for a few reasons:

Sometimes signing up for something is important in making us accountable to do what we say we’ll do.
It will enable me to give a little extra information than the posts contain themselves. On the blog the posts will be written in a way that anyone will hopefully benefit whether they do the full challenge or not - but in the emails that I send each day pointing you to the post I will include a little extra information just relevant to those doing the challenge.
My hope this time is to let the 31 Day Challenge live on way beyond the first 31 days. People will be able to signup and do the challenge at any point as the emails will be sent via an auto responder.
It will give me a little more insight into who is doing the challenge which will hopefully means I can tailor it a bit better to peoples needs.
Lastly - there’s a couple of things I’m working on as a bonus for those who register. I’ll write more of these as they firm up.

If you signup for the 31 days you’re more than welcome to unsubscribe at any point if you feel it is not helpful or not quite where you’re at.

At the end of the 31 days I’m not planning on sending too many more emails. I may add a few more tasks over time but the daily emails will stop. If I do keep sending a few emails, again you’re welcome to unsubscribe if it isn’t meeting your needs.

Sign Up to participate in the Challenge Here

I’m looking forward to the 31 Day Challenge this year and hope that you’ll join me.

Lastly - a special thanks to @Mark_MacDonald who put together the logo above and thanks also to the 15 other friends on Twitter who put together logos - I appreciate them all.