Archive for January 2020

2020 Challenges: January Update

The first month of 2020 is already coming to a close, and so it's time for an update on my progress for the various challenges I'm taking part in.

The Blog Audit Challenge 2020

This is a challenge I created aimed at improving our blogs. You can find full details here in case you missed the introduction post. The goals for January were all related to planning and organising.

The mission statement:

The hardest part of this months tasks was writing my mission statement for my blog. Whilst I was working on mine I came across this article on the CoSchedule blog that gave a great break down of how to write a mission statement.

I basically narrowed it down to books and blogging. My mission for my blog is to encourage a love of books, whilst helping others make the most of their blogs.

SWOT:

I'm incredibly bad at doing SWOT analysis for myself, so this part of the challenge was a must for me. I was at least happy to see that my list of strengths and my list of weaknesses were fairly even.

It was also comforting to see that the items on my weaknesses list shouldn't be too difficult to improve on.

Other blogs I like and why:

This was the most fun part of the challenge as it meant I got to scroll through social media and blogs, and could put it down to research for once instead of feeling guilty for wasting time.

I visited a wide variety of sites in terms of the topics they cover, but I noticed that the ones I felt drawn to all had similar elements.

A clean, clutter free format is a must. They need to be easy to navigate, quick to load, and easy to read. Dark text, light background. Less is usually more. Images matter. White space matters. I do not like long blocks of text. I much prefer short paragraphs and bullet points for faster reading. When a site doesn't have social share buttons I find it incredibly annoying.

Content schedule:

I've decided on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and some Saturdays. More than that just wouldn't be practical for me. I just don't have the time to do more. I also think it's better to publish a few quality posts as opposed to lots of meh posts.

So far, I'm really happy with my progress for this challenge and think my blog will improve a lot over the coming months.

The Audiobook Challenge

I'm actually pretty sure that this challenge is meant to be done just in January 2020. Well, I'm not realistically going to manage to complete it in just a month so I'm going to be continuing to do it over the year. I hope that's OK Eline.

I didn't actually get off to that bad a start. I confess, I didn't have very high hopes for this challenge but decided to take part in the hope that it would motivate me to listen to more audiobooks.... which it did. Win!

I also discovered some excellent narrators this month. This is a huge bonus as far as I'm concerned as a narrator can make or break an audiobook. It's good to start building a list of narrators I enjoy.

The Audiobook Challenge 2020: January Update

Audiobooks listened to:

The A to Z Reading Challenge

I've taken part in the A to Z Reading Challenge in the past and failed, but this year I'm going to complete it! I'm off to quite a good start, despite already having doubled up on letters.

The one without a tick by it (Stone Cold Heart by Caz Frear) is because I'm still currently reading it (although I am close to the end now).

Armed with a bingo

I'm not off to too bad a start with the Armed with a Bingo challenge either.

Books read:

A book you meant to read last year: The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri
A book in the middle of a series: Mayan Mendacity by L.J.M. Owen (2nd book in the series)
A book published in the last decade: Hidden Pearl by J.E. Laufer (Published August 22nd 2019 by Little Egg Publishing Company)