30 Articles in 30 Days: April Edition

Publicly stating a goal helps you achieve it

I’ve been watching the 30 Articles in 30 Days challenges rolling out from a number of sources. First, I saw the article by Catherine Mancini, which led me back to David Majister’s original article. Both of those were doing the challenge in March, and by the time I saw them, March was already almost over. I figured I’d just do it on my own.

Then I saw Lena Lojanica’s article about her April challenge. Ah-hah! Here was someone trying to do the challenge in the same month as I was.

So I am officially tossing my hat in the ring as well. It’s well-known that publicly stating your goal helps to keep you accountable and makes you more likely to achieve it.

My Goals

1. Get new followers — my goal is 50 followers. I started the month with 17, so my basic goal is 33 new followers, but if I got 50 new followers it would be awesome. This is both followers for me, personally, and followers for my publication.

2. Connect with other writers — build valuable connections with writers on Medium. I don’t do the “social” part of social media. Most of my writing contacts are people I met in person at writing conferences and events. So this is a new way to meet and engage with people.

3. Increase my income — in my first month on Medium, I made a little over $13. I want to 10x that (technically 8.5x that) and make $110 in April.

4. Raise my visibility and reach — if I’m going to hit that income target, I need to dramatically increase my views and reads. That means finding new publications and getting my work in front of new people.

My Rules

• Split my submissions — I will alternate submitting articles to other publications and publishing them in my own publication. Part of this is because I don’t just want people to follow me, I want people to follow my publication, too.
• Submit (on average) one new article each day — they do not have to be to new publications. But I do want to stretch and explore new avenues of reaching readers.
• Rejected articles don’t count as new articles — I’ll continue either sending them out to other publications or putting it on my publication. That re-submission won’t count as a new article. But the view, read, and profit information from that article will be included in the monthly totals.
• Submission topics are flexible — I will write the most on productivity, self-help, relationships, and life lessons, since those are the categories in my publication. But I will also write about writing, and any other topic that seems appropriate for a publication. I will not be writing fiction, poetry, or other types of posts other than articles.
• No plan survives contact with the enemy — As the month progresses, I’ll look at the results I am achieving. If places seem to have deep pools of readers whose interests match my writing, I’ll fish in those pools more frequently.

This is a work in progress

As I publish articles, I’ll add them at the bottom of this article. Then, when the month is over, I’ll let you all know how the experiment went.

I’ll be sharing the exact results, in numbers:

• How many views did I get in April?
• How many new followers did I get in April?
• How much money did I make in April?
• What were the biggest articles in April, both ones that I published in April and ones from previous months that continued to perform well?

The biggest benefit to readers (in addition to getting some really cool content from me), I think, will be the article I write at the end with lessons learned. That will help the next group of writers who want to do a 30-day challenge for themselves.

If you’d like to join me in the challenge, please drop me a comment! I’ll add your name to the list of authors who are also trying to publish an article a day for April. And if you include your 30-day challenge article, I’ll link that as well.

Fellow writers taking this challenge

• Lena Lojanica

• Natasha
• Kaori Mitsui — submitting *two* articles/day for the rest of the month!

• Tatum Hamernik — an offset 30 days

My April articles

This article in Writers’ Blokke.

That’s the end — 31 articles published in 30 days, with the final one published at 11:50pm on April 30th.