Make a New Years Resolution: Blog for a Year

New Years is right around the corner. Do you have a resolution yet?

I had one last year - to commit to working on my two websites (or at least one of them) for an entire year to see how successful they could be. Unfortunately, I didn't make it. One fizzled out in the early Spring and the other went by the wayside in the beginning of the Summer.

I'm back to blogging, though, and I plan to commit to publishing, developing, and promoting my blog for the next twelve months. If you've started an online project - or are thinking of it - you should do the same. These things take time to mature, and you can't gauge success or failure in the short term.

By this time, National Blog Posting Month (November) has come and gone, but the people at NaBloPoMo are still there to help.

What is NaBloPoMo?

NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month. It's a collection of people - supported and connected through a social networking site created at ning.com - committed to blogging. Throughout the month of November, each member commits to posting at least once a day on his or her blog.

November is full of prizes and motivation, but the social networking site is active year round. You can sign up for NaBloPoMo any month of the year, get a spot on their blog roll, and receive some gentle encouragement to continue working on your own blog.

What Does NaBloPoMo Do for Me?

Well, that depends on what you want it to do. At the core, it's a place for you to write your name on a ledger - earning a free backlink in exchange for posting on a daily basis.

It can be a lot more, though. The social networking site allows you to browse other people's blogs, promote your own blog, make friends, etc. If you take some time to cultivate a network of fellow bloggers, you'll have a small but steady readership. Their encouragement and comments will go a long way towards encouraging you to continue your work when you begin to think that you should be spending your time elsewhere.

For example, when I signed up for NaBloPoMo, I decided to use the free blog on the ning site as a place to reflect on my weekly writing efforts. Every weekend, I log into my NaBloPoMo account and make a post on the NaBloPoMo blog containing a list of posts that I wrote that week. This allows me to see from a bit of a distance what I wrote about, and I can use this reflection to tweak my practice in the future.

Make a Resolution and Stick With It

If you're blogging or thinking of starting a blog, make a News Years Resolution to remain committed to it. You might find it fulfilling, or you might not. But you'll never know if you don't commit to it for the long term.

It takes months - maybe a year or more - to build a following, garner search engine visibility, and reap the real benefits of blogging. If you give up too soon, you'll miss out on all that.