Challenge – I wrote 100 articles in 100 days, what did I find?

I help people succeed in the online world. But not many people know about it. I’m trying to change that with a blog, but not many (anyone other than me would say no one) read it. I decided to change that.

Introducing the challenge

I told myself I would write 100 articles in 100 days. I’m going to write every morning. I’ll ask and hire someone handy to read and proofread the articles for me (I don’t quite master grammar) and probably someone to publish them afterwards (I do master that, but the challenge would almost become a full-time job)

A number of people discouraged me from the idea, as they didn’t believe it made sense to write “for volume”. You should write for quality, right!?

No. Many people don’t understand one thing.

Quantity & quality

From quantity is born quality. And if you put a gun to my head to make me choose between quantity and quality, I will choose quantity.

I know, I know… People don’t like quantity and I get it. However, people take it from a consumer perspective. As a consumer, I hate quantity too.

Either way, for producers, quantity is a blessing. They love it because it can turn a statistical headwind into a tailwind that propels you along without you feeling like you’re trying.

There’s nothing stopping you from taking a Darwinian approach and working things that catch on despite not being very good (they were made for quantity) into quality, since they obviously deserve it.

The key difference is that who determines what deserves elaboration into quality and what doesn’t is not you, but reality.

And reality knows more.

Why do something like this?

Before we get right into the results and lessons the challenge taught me, let’s take a little closer look at why you should actually strive to get people to come to your site in the first place.

Before the challenge started, something between 0-5 people a day were coming to my site. Zero much more often. And I wanted 100 people a day to come to my site.

Because if 100 people come to your site a day (and you have something to offer them) you’ve won.

Why?

Meaning of traffic

I’ll describe this using my site as an example, but the principle is general.

I help people succeed online. And once those people start showing up on my site:

• I get another powerful marketing channel that I have a lot of control over compared to social networks,
• I may interest someone -> contact/inquiry,
• the site will become an interesting advertising venue,
• you can use affiliate links etc.

Simply online valhalla.

One reason that played a role for me was that I like to write and wanted to learn about SEO. Practically.

Because there’s no other way to learn.

What was the specific plan for the challenge?

The cornerstones of success I saw were three: writing every morning, finding people to help me with proofreading and “publishing,” and writing the article you’re currently reading after the challenge was over.But there was more to come up with. Let’s take a closer look at the plan and processes involved in the challenge. Time Setup

• I started writing 10 days before the first article was published (“to get a head start”)
• Consequently, I wrote every morning (first thing after waking up, for at least 50 minutes) and tried to get as much written as possible “to get a backlog”

️ Technical Setup

SEO tools (research): Collabim, Keywords Everywhere, partially Surfer SEO,

Membership itself: Notion

Graphics: unDraw (illustrations), Canva (gifs)

Publications: WordPress, Elementor

SEO Tools (after publication): Rank Math, Collabim, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free)

Workflow of individual articles

1. Selecting a topic (me)
2. 1st draft (me)
3. 1st edit – occasionally :Dd (me)
4. 2nd edit + proofreading (help Magda)
5. picture selection (sometimes help, sometimes me)
6. uploading to WordPress (help)
7. setting metadata and RankMath optimization (help)
8. scheduling article publication (help)

So somehow the whole challenge went like this. I wrote and published the articles (although I could never have done it myself) and the results surprised me.

So what did I learn and discover through this challenge?

7 things I learned

There were a lot of things. However, I’ll pick out 7 things that may be of interest to readers of this article, mainly because they can be easily translated into practice.

1. Something is happening on the web

The fact that there is an article coming out on the site every day has helped my past articles climb up the SERPs (search results) extremely well.Even for pretty competitive terms like Web Development Brno and the like.

Personally, I think this is probably the biggest surprise and will definitely motivate me to keep creating regularly. And I can safely recommend every website owner to do the same.

2. Processes + a small number of capable people -> an unstoppable combination

I couldn’t have done the challenge alone. That’s obvious, and no one will be surprised. However, what surprised me myself was the fact that all my helpers spent minimum time on the challenge/in the tools and brought me huge value.The challenge convinced me that three people with good tools and processes can generate results that you would trust to big agencies, media houses or corporations.

No, I don’t mean the articles we wrote in this challenge. Those are probably nothing special, but if we all had the opportunity to work together full-time, I believe we could move mountains.

The future will tell.

3. There are still a huge number of topics in the Czech Republic (with a search rate of typically 10 – 100 searchers per month) that you can just write about and you’ll be on the first page of the search

Nobody writes about them.

I don’t know why, but they don’t.

It is true that many of these topics will not be easy to monetize. However, it still seems to me that this is too sweet and low-hanging fruit to need to think about.

4. Writing articles without AI is like hunting mammoths for a living

I did not use any generative AI when writing – not on any of the articles.

However, having looked at various AI tools over the last few weeks, I would use them again without hesitation.

They’re great, cheap, “can do Czech”…

Of course, gibon can’t write a good article with them. However, when you use them in your writing routine, you will see that you will be surprised by the results.

5. Good analysis – half the job

Vilfredo Pareto would laugh. I’m laughing too.

That the top 10 articles produced the same results as the rest is no surprise.

But I’m sure that any of the 10 articles I’ve written from the 30th onwards have produced the same results as the first 30.Because I started looking for keywords, for example. Oh genius… And stuff like that. Jirko, thanks.

6. UX of articles is a (pretty) underrated thing

I have traffic, but I’m not exploiting it yet.I’m pretty sure it’s primarily the poor structure/UX of the articles.

I’d start there.

We’ll see if I was right once I’ve adjusted the structure.

7. Promotion is redundant

I didn’t believe that it would be enough to “just publish” articles and that anyone would read them (without further promotion).

Reads.

Further promotion certainly helps, but as it turns out, it is not necessary.

Overall summary of the challenge

• 141 hours of writing (my time)
• I estimate at least 50 hours of helpers
• multiple times more inquiries (correlation but not necessarily causation)

And that’s about all I would tell you about the challenge.

Or is it?

Want more charts? Data? Contact information for my wonderful helpers? Let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to add to the article.Thank you for reading this far and may you thrive (not only) in the online world!

P.S. Many thanks to Magda Ordelt, who had to read all the articles and do the proofreading for a paycheck that surely won’t cover the narcotics she’d use to get this experience out of her head. And to all the others who do not wish to be named, it couldn’t have been done without you, thanks ❤️.