In July, I celebrated my fourth year on the blockchain, witnessing the evolution from Steemit to Hive. In that time span, I've written hundreds of posts and made thousands of comments, which helped increase engagement on the platform. However, after all this time, there's one thing I've never managed to do.

Write 7 posts, in 7 days...



Zero, zilch, nada. It dawned on me recently that due to my busy schedule, between school and work I'd usually create content on just a few days out of the week. As we all know, consistency is the key to growth on Hive and LeoFinance, but finding that time has been elusive so far. And of course, I'm unwilling to be one of those guys who posts just a pic or a meme and calls it a day.

Fortunately, I have a window this semester where one course started in August, and the other one doesn't start up until later in the year. So I might just be able to do this at least once before I get run over by a cement mixer and head to that blockchain in the sky. So I've created a personal challenge for me this week. Is it doable? It'll be fun either way!

Turning ideas into content

Here's the deal. I usually write at least one epic post (over 1K words), per month. Over time, I've noticed that these don't get quite the interest that my less ambitious content does. Seems some people just skim long-form articles, picking out sections that interest them. The question for me was could I write shorter pieces while still including important information along the way?

I have an "Unfinished Posts" folder with a number of files in various states of undress. Currently there are seven, with some consisting of just working titles or a starter paragraph. These are added to over time and once in awhile I have enough content to finish and publish them. Everything I do in this space begins life as a writers skeleton that I flesh out step by step. Stuff gets added and deleted, moved around and tweaked for readability. The working title is just that, and usually gets changed by the end of the process.

There are no sacred cows when it comes to writing.

Grammatical errors always seem to slip through the proofreading gate I've setup to catch them in. A misspelled word and readability issues irritate me and I've been known to return to an article to correct one word that somehow escaped my notice. After all, this is going to be on the blockchain forever and I want leave good work behind. However, the Gods of content creation always have the last laugh, and I won't be surprised if they highlight some gaffe in this piece as well. :)

Goal!

My last two posts were published on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Today we're on day three and my fear of lower-quality work and running out of things to write about seem unfounded. Turns out, the solution is to write whenever you see something memorable that sparks an idea. Even if it's just a line or two, those can grow into a complete post over time. Do that often enough and you'll be able to complete your own Hive 7-Day Challenge, week after week.