I’ve found there are a variety of reactions to the end of the Blog Challenge. Whether you participated in the Blog30 30-day challenge or the Mini7 7-day challenge, you are now faced with a dilemma.

Do you keep blogging daily? Or do you back off of your daily schedule?

For some people (Connie Ragen Green come to mind) blogging daily is such a part of her day, that they can’t imagine NOT blogging every day.

But for others, daily blogging is NOT the natural way. I fall into that category.

So if you’re like me and don’t plan to continue to blog daily, what can you do? Here are my suggestions:

1. Stick to a schedule. Try 2 or 3 times a week. You already know you CAN do 7 days a week. Just commit to 3 days instead. And stick with it!

2. Make a list of topics. You did this as you worked through the 30-day challenge. Just keep it up so that you always have a list of 10-15 topics you can write about at a moment’s notice.

3. Write in the flow. Just as you’ve done for the past month, when you are in a writing mood, keep writing. That will always ensure you have articles on hand to post.

4. Continue to market your blog. You do this when you tweet about it. You do it when you post your article to article directories, such as EzineArticles. You do this as you post comments on others’ blogs.

5. Keep using the tools. You’ve been using tools like tweetmeme plugin, twitter tools plugin, socialoomph to pre-schedule tweets, and wordpress to pre-schedule blog posts.

Essentially, just keep doing what you’ve been doing!

How often have you found yourself doing something the “hard way” rather than taking the time to figure out an easier solution?

I just did it again. Here I was summarizing the blog posts that talked about lessons learned and results from the blog challenge – but I was doing it the HARD way! You see I was:

1. Clicking on a member profile
2. Checking the RSS feed (if any) for an entry about Blog30
3. Copying the article title
4. Copying the article URL
5. Going back to the main list to do it all over again!

What a time-consuming task! I was thinking “uh oh – what if I miss someone” – and that’s when it hit me!

Just ask THEM to post their article title and link.

DUH!

How many times have you spent more time than you should have on a task – because you didn’t stop ahead of time and ask yourself if there was an easier way?

Share the tasks you’ve found an easier way to do in the comments below.

Okay, yesterday I asked you to share advice with participants in the next Blog Challenge. Now it’s time to advise the next person to run the Blog Challenge.

What would you do differently for the next Blog Challenge?

Would you communicate more frequently or less frequently?

Would you have everyone keep tweeting their articles to the organizer or do something else?

Would you use a central site as we did with Meet Our Members or would you centralize the activity on your own blog?

Would you provide a handbook to participants as they start or would you trickle out the information as we have done this time?

What other ideas do you have to involve more people?

How can we better help new bloggers in particular?

How can we support our more advanced bloggers? Is there a way to highlight many of them – and split the labor?

The next person to run the blog challenge will DEFINITELY appreciate all of the advice you can give!

If you’ve been blogging for the past 26 days, then you are an expert. You understand the challenges – and you have overcome them.

So what tips and advice would you give to someone considering the NEXT blog challenge? Because of course we all know there will be another one – it’s just a matter of time.

What worked for you? How did you get over that initial “oh my gosh, what have I done” thoughts – to still being with us 26 days later?

Did you already know how to do all of the steps or did you learn along the way? HOW did you learn what to do?

Did you get support from your fellow participants through tweets and comments? Or did you feel like you were still doing in all by yourself? How did you start connecting with others?

The advice you offer now may be the difference between someone joining the next blog challenge – or not. And it may make all the difference on whether or not they FINISH the blog challenge.

One of the observations I’ve made during the Blog Challenge is that many people were confused and confounded by the RSS feed.

First, let’s review WHY the RSS feed is important. It’s used by both individuals and search engines.

Individuals use the RSS feed to subscribe to the list of your blog articles. If they use an RSS reader (or their email program) it automatically updates each time you post an article. It’s an easy way for them to keep up with what you’re writing.

Search engines use the RSS feed to update their records as well. That’s how they are notified that you have a new blog post.

So if your RSS feed is not working properly, you are not getting the traffic you deserve! That’s why it’s so important that you have an RSS feed that works.

One of the aspects of your profile at Meet Our Members (if you were a Blog Challenge participant) was your RSS feed. More than half of the participants do not have an RSS feed that works. There are multiple reasons for this:

1. Some chose not to add the RSS feed to their profile.

2. Some made a typo when putting it in. As much as possible we changed these as we discovered them.

3. Others put in the wrong format. While a standard Wordpress blog uses blog.com/feed as the default, some people had a hard time getting that to work. Again, there were multiple reasons for this:

• Some people use feedburner for their feeds. That is fine – you just need to use the feedburner URL for the RSS feed. Again, we tried to correct as many of those as possible.
• A LOT of people have redirected to their blog, either purposely or accientally. The RSS feeds for redirected URLs are problematic.
• A LOT of people use blogspot or other non-wordpress blogs. While these are okay to start, I strongly urge you to move to Wordpress on your own hosted account as quickly as possible. RSS feeds from these other types of blogs do not function as well – and you’re losing traffic as a result.

So what action should you take if your RSS feed is not showing in your profile at Meet Our Members?

1. Add your RSS feed to your profile, if it’s not already there.

2. If your RSS feed is not working, ask your webmaster for help in fixing or finding it. If you don’t have a webmaster, post a $5 job on vWorker.com to have someone figure it out for you.

Recognize that if your feed does not show in Meet Our Members, it is not being seen by other entities as well. We are using an industry-standard tool for showing the RSS feed, so if we can’t see it, no one else can either.

We take social media for granted. After all, we’re tweeting regularly. We check our Facebook account several times per day – or per week. We probably have a LinkedIn account.

But it might all be relatively new to you. After all, these “social media” services haven’t been around THAT long. It was just a couple of years ago that no one knew what Twitter was and only college kids were using Facebook. You still talk to people who don’t know a Twitter from a tweet.

So what’s the state of social media? This video says it well:

So what do you think? Are you surprised by any of the statistics revealed here? Would you agree or disagree?

Has social media use by Big Business helped or hurt the individuals who are using it?

Where do you see it going? There are just so many ways you could view this – and I’d love to get your input!

Blogging provides you with a unique tool to communicate. And while creating an online identity and blogging as that person or company image can be great fun, it can also be profitable. (And making money is certainly fun!)

Here are just a few ways you can monetize your blog:

Advertising Revenue. Whether you choose to sell ad space on your blog (and a blog with high traffic numbers will definitely be able to capitalize on this) you can also participate in AdSense or other PPC campaigns and make money from clicks.

Affiliate Revenue. Blog owners can publish affiliate banner ads, text ads and of course you can write great content with internal affiliate links to generate an additional revenue stream. In fact, many affiliate marketers use their blogs to do this exact thing.

You can also consider setting up niche-specific blogs for different content areas. For example, it’s difficult to promote a toddler-related affiliate product on the same blog where you’re discussing forex trading systems. So don’t be afraid to create multiple blogs for multiple purposes.

Product Promotion. Finally, though certainly not the least of all, you can promote your own products or services on your blog. Just remember to keep it balanced. About 80% of your blog content should be valuable information and about 20% of it can be promotional.

Stand alone blogs can generate tremendous profits; they don’t need to be part of a bigger business that is selling products or services. The most important part of building a profitable blog is to Get Started!