21 Day Blog Challenge Review – Blogging For Beginners
Are you wondering if the 21-day blog challenge is for you? Do you want to have a blog? Are you someone who has struggled to get your blog up and running? Or, maybe you are like me and have had a blog but have not been very successful.
I have had my blog for years and I have created quite a bit of content. When I look at my analytics I see that I have not been getting much in the way of organic traffic. I always wondered what I was doing wrong.
At the end of this blog, I will be sharing the top three things that I have learned by going through this challenge. I actually learned a lot more than three things but these were the top three. 😀
Who Is This Course For?
- People who want to start a blog.
- You want to develop a passive income.
- You are an introvert and you don’t want to be on YouTube or do Facebook lives.
- You love to write or just want to develop your writing skills.
- Interested in affiliate marketing.
- Want to get your site up and running quickly with minimal tech overwhelm?
- Not sure what tools and software are essential?
- Do you need a blogging step-by-step guide?
- Are you a blogging beginner?
Who created the 21-Day Blog Challenge Course?
Spencer Mecham
The 21 Day Blog Challenge was created by Spencer Mecham and Nate McCallister. I had heard of Spencer Mecham long before I took this course. He is one of the top Clickfunnels (landing page builder software) affiliates. He is a seven-figure earner, so a very successful affiliate marketer.
Spencer Mecham – Creator of Affiliate Secrets 2.0
Spencer has developed other courses. The other course that I am the most familiar with is called Affiliate Secrets 2.0. I wrote a review of his program which you can read here.
There are numerous affiliates that have attributed their success as Clickfunnels affiliates to Spencer Mecham and his Affiliate Secrets 2.0 program.
Nate McCallister
Nate McCallister is a successful entrepreneur and full-time blogger. Nate has also been very successful as a Clickfunnels affiliate. I had not heard of Nate before this 21-day blog challenge. He has been very successful with Amazon FBA which is a niche that I am not familiar with.
Now after having gone through the program I can say that he really knows a lot about blogging and being successful as an affiliate marketer. This is how he makes his full-time income.
Nate McCallister – Blogger Extraordinaire
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What is covered in the 21-day blogging course?
When I took the course the material was dripped out over the 21 days. What this means is that we could not binge-watch all of the modules in one day. There were assignments to be done and software to set up. I was lucky in that I already had my blog.
My issue was that I was not getting the organic traffic that I wanted. Within each of the modules, there were a number of videos.
Nate and Spencer shared doing the video instruction. The way that they broke the information down made it very easy to follow.
Week One:
Week one of the 21 day blog challenge was the introduction and all about how to decide on a niche. The three main markets are health, wealth, and relationships.
Within these markets there are niches. For example, if you choose the health market your niche could be exercise or diet.
Within the niches there are sub-niches. For example diet for diabetics or diet for men over 40 or exercise programs for runners.
The more specific that you can get in your niche or sub-niche the more successful you will be. You will end out being much more targeted with your blog and marketing.
Some niches are much more competitive than others. The Make Money Online (MMO) niche is VERY competitive.
That being said if there was a sub-niche that you were interested in or a different angle it would make it easier to rank. You will hit the bullseye if you can match your content to your market.
Week Two:
Week two of the 21 day blog challenge was about branding and choosing your blog theme. They also covered the plugins that you will need.
One of the things that I really appreciated was that they were very careful about what they recommended.
On your blog, it is very important that you don’t get too many plugins because it can really slow your site down. They were also very good about recommending low cost or plugins that had a free option.
This week you also learn about your basic pages. What pages you need to have on your blog as well as how to create templates. Not having templates was one of the mistakes that I made.
Every post and page I was creating from scratch. I was spending way more time on my blog creating pages and posts than I needed to.
Once I created my templates it made it so much easier to get things done. Doing this also gave my site a little more consistency with how it looks.
Week Three:
Week three for the 21 day blog challenge covered the topics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), analytics, social media, and keyword research. This was a huge week with a ton of information.
SEO is a very big topic and it is always changing as google changes its algorithm. Nate and Spencer could have made a full course just on SEO and then it would be outdated very quickly.
I learned that there is a difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO includes things like your title, description, URL, content and internal links.
Off-page SEO inlcudes things like getting backlinks from other sites as well as social signals from social media. Is your content being shared? Is it viral?
I think one of the things that I appreciated most about this course was that it took me through blogging step by step. I had not realized how important keyword research was.
Blogging For Beginners Tip: Do Your Research
I always thought that if I just put out good content people will get to my website. Almost like “build it and they will come”. Well…as I found out…I built it and they did not come to my site. No one was looking for blog posts.
If you do your keyword research properly you will learn what topics/subjects people are interested in and looking for. Once you have that information you can tailor your blog posts to answer the questions that your audience might have.
In your keyword research, you can also find out who your competitors are, and if you have a chance of getting your blog post to show up on the first page of Google.
If your article is going up against 6 other large companies with a high rating, and you are a new blogger with no history and a low rating on your site…basically you don’t have a chance of getting your post to show. 😭
If you are going to spend your time working hard on your blog and trying to build a passive income you will want to work smarter not harder. Don’t waste your time writing about topics that people are not actively looking for.
The last things to consider for your blog has to do with marketing. Do you have an email autoresponder? Is it connected to your website? Do you have a capture page, optin form to get your subscribers over to your autoresponder?
I have written another article about email marketing and why its important. You can read that here.
I am linking this to my recommended tools and software page.
The top 3 things that I learned in this 21 day blog challenge.
The Top 3 Things I Learned In The 21 Day Blog Challenge
1: Page speed is critical
Before doing this challenge I had not realized how important page speed is and that if you have a website/page that loads slowly Google will penalize you and not show your content. WOW!
After going through this blog challenge I improved my website speed on desktop and made some gains with my mobile speed but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Now I know what I need to work on to get better results.
2: Skyscraper technique
The skyscraper technique is where you find your competitors web-pages and look at their content. Are they showing up just above you in google search? Can you improve your content enough so that you show up in the search in front of them?
You can do this by making your blog post more in-depth or adding more information. Look at the competitors’ posts and really figure out how you can make yours better.
3: Importance of backlinks
I had heard somewhere that it was important to have links to your own material but I did not realize how important backlinks are. I recently started linking back to my blog posts in my YouTube video descriptions so that would count as a backlink.
It really makes a big difference in how high your blog rates if you can get a link from websites that has a very high domain authority. I need to work on this.
UPDATE
Below is a screen shot of my traffic results since I finished the challenge. As you can see my blog results were not very impressive in the beginning. Basically I was a flat line.
I started the challenge at the beginning of July. I have slowly been implementing what I was learning. My impressions have been going up and I have actually made a couple of sales from my organic traffic. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that.
If I can make one sale I know I can make more!
If you have not checked out my FREE step-by-step blogging checklist you can get it here.
