Quick Tip: Take Up the Gauntlet

You’ve started a blog, you visit and comment on others’ sites, you hang around with those cool kids over at The Daily Post — all fantastic ways to find your readers and become a part of the WordPress.com community. If you want to try and speed up the process, though, you can jump-start your site by participating in blogging events.

Blogging events can take lots of forms, but typically, a blogger will issue a challenge or task, you’ll publish your response, and the host blogger will round up all the responses on his/her site so all participants can check ‘em out. In essence, it’s kinda like what we do with writing and photo challenges, just initiated by individual bloggers.

There are events out there for everyone — fiction writing, travel photography, cooking and recipe development, poetry challenges, DIY project events, and more — so you can quickly meet other bloggers who care about the same thing you do.

You can find blogging events by skimming the Challenge and Blogging Challenge topics in the Reader. We’ve also rounded up a few examples for you:

• Our own Sara Rosso co-founded World Nutella Day, which invites cooks from all over the world to submit their best recipes using everyone’s favorite chocolate-hazelnut spread.
• Speaking of foodie challenges, Is My Blog Burning? rounds up food blog events from around the web, so you can take your pick.
• Hitch-Hikers’ Handbook organizes a weekly travel photography competition that’s worth a look even if you’re not a shutterbug; the entries are stunning.
• Blogdramedy runs the BlogFestivus writing challenge, asking you to publish one seasonal short story a day for nine days.
• Rochelle Wisoff-Fields hosts the Friday Fictioneers, inviting authors to share 100-word short stories.
• The Trifecta Writing Challenge gives participants a new one-word prompt each Monday and gives bloggers total creative freedom over what they write in response — as long as it’s between 33 and 333 words.
• For you crafty types, Challenge Me Happy posts a new scrapbooking challenge on the first of each month.

Often, blogging events have their own Twitter handles to make following along easier, and many offer badges to show off your participation. In fact, checking out the badges on blogs you already love can be a great way of finding interesting events.

If you have a blogging event you love participating in (or you run one yourself), please leave a link in the comments so others can find you. While we encourage you to keep on participating in Daily Post challenges, get out there and see what else is going on!