My Experience with the Ultimate Blog Challenge, Winter 2022 Edition!

Ultimate Blog Challenge—DONE!

My Experience with the Ultimate Blog Challenge, Winter Edition.

Today is the final day of the Ultimate Blog Challenge, a community effort of bloggers who vowed to publish one blog post per day for 31 consecutive days in the month of January. I am pleased to say that I have stuck with this goal and completed this challenge.

Here are my thoughts:

Who?

• Anyone who blogs can join!
• Anyone who agrees to the group rules, which are straightforward and fair.

What?

• A challenge for bloggers who want to improve their writing, consistency, and networking abilities.

When?

• This Ultimate Blog Challenge took place in the month of January. I understand they happen quarterly for one calendar month each time.

Where?

• I signed up on the Facebook group Ultimate Blog Challenge Facebook group
• You can also sign up at the website Ultimate Blog Challenge

Why?

• I chose to participate in the UBC to motivate myself in my blogging. I honestly wanted to see if I could do it!
• Accountability to others. Everyone else is also focusing on writing and sharing their blog posts too, so there’s no point in lamenting how difficult it may be. We are all in the same boat!
• Connecting to others. The UBC forced me to meet other bloggers that surely I would not have stumbled across ordinarily. Some were a lot like me, and some very different! I’m sure I was a burr in the saddle to a couple, but we learned better how to play nicely even though we had different life outlooks.
• Broaden my horizons. Like I mentioned, a couple of the blogs I visited were similar to my point of view, but not many. But when you get to know a person as a person and not just their different beliefs, you look at them differently. We all come at things from a different set of life experiences and training. We can at least listen. If we can’t say something nice, we shouldn’t be there. But, if we really can’t think of something that would be uplifting, we can still drop in and thank them for their time. Because blogging is hard work.
• Blogging regularly improves your site stats and visitors and comments help out too! By following the rules of the UBC, everyone gets at least a couple extra comments, shared, and visits. It’s really encouraging!
• Iron sharpens iron. If you want to improve yourself, then choose people who have similar skills that you’d like, and who are striving in the same direction. Reading others’ writing gives inspiration and makes me look at what I can do to improve my own writing. And, on the days when you just can’t do much, you can see that it’s ok to do a short post and give yourself a little leeway.

Finally:

I’m glad I participated.

It feels good to have completed my goal.

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I’ve met some wonderful people and read some very interesting stories and accounts. I’ve learned new things and been challenged.

Also, I’ve watched a group of nice writers also achieve their blogging goals, which is gratifying. Shoulder to shoulder, we’ve kept each other going, have stayed with the task, and persevered.

Would I do it over?

Absolutely I would!

The motivation and accountability have really helped me, and I have enjoyed this experience thoroughly!

Thank you to Paul, the group facilitator, for his guidance and leadership! He is an inspiration in many ways!

Congratulations to all who have joined in! I’m glad to have met everyone!

Until next time,

Laurie