Jul 18, 2014 / Blogging U.

Writing 101: Measuring Your Success

Writing 101 produced great posts, fast friendships, and nearly half a million pageviews for your blogs. As we prepare for Writing 201, let’s take a look back at just how much you accomplished.

Before Writing 201 gets underway on Monday, we thought we’d take a look back at 101. You were a prolific bunch, and seeing just how much you accomplished feels great and an is excellent way to get motivated for 201.

*Blogging U. challenges are open to everyone including self-hosted, Tumblr, and Blogger bloggers, who we can’t analyze.

Ready for some numbers? During Writing 101, the 1275 bloggers we’re able to track* got nearly half a million pageviews — 442,717 to be precise — and were responsible for:

Overview

This comes from your publishing 66% more posts than you did pre-Writing 101 — 92% of you posted twice as much. Not too shabby, considering that the main goal of Writing 101 was simply to help you develop a regular writing habit, whether you chose to publish your writing or not!

And what about your individual blogs? When we took a look at Writing 101 participants’ blogs in the month before the challenge and then during Writing 101, we found:

Views

You had 178% more views during Writing 101. Not only that, but 82% of you at least doubled your views, and another 3% tripled them. Compared to the average non-Writing 101 blogger, you racked up 868% more views. Seriously.

Follows

A lot of those viewers liked what they saw, to the tune of an average 72% increase in followers for each of your blogs. Eighty-nine percent of you now have twice as many followers as you did on day one.

LikesEach individual post got lots of love as well, as you got 97% more likes while participating in Writing 101 — and for 86% of you, your likes doubled. Compared to your non-Blogging U. comrades, you see 38% more likes.

Comments

Your posts are also engaging enough to get people talking, inspiring 102% more comments than you got before. Eighty-seven percent of you doubled your comment counts, and you now get 30% more comments than non-Writing 101 blogs.

Even more impressive? These numbers exclude the hundreds of posts, comments, and likes you generated during your rich conversations in the Commons — they represent your personal blogs only.

Of course, Writing 101 was, at its heart, about the act of writing. Judging from the excellent posts we read and fascinating conversations in the Commons, it helped you put fingers to keyboard more often, and that’s what counts. Well done!

If you’d like to keep going and put a spit-shine on some of what your wrote during Writing 101, Writing 201: Finding Your Story starts on Monday — there’s still time to register. But whether we see you there or not, we hope you keep writing, keep publishing, and maintain all the connections you’ve created.

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  2. Nicely done, everyone!! We kinda rock. I love these follow up posts with all the stats – thanks for sharing the before and after, Michelle, and for putting together such a kick-ass workshop. Looking forward to see what y’all have up your sleeves for 201. You’ll be able to make me not hate revisions, right?

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    1. I hope so! I’ve come to love them, because the feeling you get when you re-read what you’ve got and think, “damn, yes, that was exactly what I wanted to say” is such a good one 🙂

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  3. I love everything about 101, including today’s statistics! Meeting new bloggers, making new friends , was the best outcome for me although I was so much more motivated to write (but still didn’t post every day.)
    One suggestion/question – Is there (or was there) any way to go to the commons and read just the day 3 or day 9 posts? By the end, I really wanted to go back and see what others did with a particular topic but couldn’t figure out a way to do it.

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    1. Unfortunately, there’s not a way to sort the Commons like that — it’s all in chronological order, and not everyone did each assignment on the same day. You can try looking back at the actual assignment posts, where people left links to their posts in the comments.

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  11. Thank you so much for running to course and to my fellow participants – I was one of the people that really benefited in expanding the range of my writing as well as in follows, comments and likes. Thank you again.

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  14. That’s awesome news, well done everybody! I’m not taking part in 201 because I know I’m not going to have enough time to dedicate to it but I hope to participate in future courses 🙂

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  15. These are some incredible statistics and it looks like everyone was pleased with their results. Congrats to you all, If I had known about writing 101, I would have participated.

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  16. Oh this is the first time I’ve heard of this writing 101 as I am new to the blogging world. I look forward to hopefully participating as writing is a hobby of mine, I’m no pro but that doesn’t matter. If I enjoy what I write and others do too I believe that it’s a success. Peace, lozzie from Aussie (land down under)

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  17. I really enjoyed taking part in Writing 101, thanks for this great opportunity! I did ‘meet’ other bloggers this way, and this was a great benefit to me. We were (and still are) a great bunch, thanks everyone for the support and friendly comments. I look forward to 201 now and do hope to ‘meet’ more bloggers there!

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  21. Those are pretty impressive figures! Even though I ended up doing just one blog post because of technical difficulties (no darn internet), I gained a couple of extra followers and followed some new bloggerss too.

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  22. Hi Michelle, Before Writing 101 I’d been tentative, confused, and dubious about blogging. Not any more. I’m much more confident about how to manage my blog (still lots to learn though) and happy with how it looks. And my likes and followers have continued to grow ever since. A big thank-you for all the work that went in to the course. I’m very much looking forward to Writing 201!

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  24. I’ve just begun my WordPress journey today, and I am very excited to participate in Writing 201! I am a First Year Blogger for my University in the fall, so I want to provide myself with the best foundation for success in that position and in my own personal blogging endeavours 🙂 Does Writing 201 require Writing 101 as a prerequisite?

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    1. There are no prerequisites; these are all just programs designed to support you in your blogging and writing goals. If you’re new to blogging, you might want to check out Blogging 101, which will run again in September.

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  30. I’ve just started to follow this blog. I’m a writer with a novel Russian Resolution to be published on Kindle at the end of July. So I have just built my first blog site http://www.russianresolution.com but I’m struggling with several aspects of using it. I’m not sure if this is the right blog for help with novel writing/publishing/marketing and blog usage.

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    1. You’re definitely at the right place for learning about blog usage, and the posts in our “traffic and growth” category might be helpful with marketing.

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