The history of the WordCount Blogathon

If you’re joining the WordCount Blogathon for the first time, you might be wondering what it is and how it started.

The WordCount Blogathon is an annual event that brings together writers for the purpose of becoming better bloggers by posting to their respective blogs every day during the month of May.

You can follow the 2011 WordCount Blogathon on Twitter using the hashtag #Blog2011.

I started the event four years ago. It was spring 2008, and I’d  recently relaunched a freelance business after taking a break to raise my family. I had been a business and technology reporter and launched a blog when I restarted my business to catch up with changes in the tech and media industries.

Still getting acclimated and with a birthday coming in May, I committed to blogging every day that month as a way to get into the habit of posting more often. But why go it alone when I could ask other writers to join me? I did, and the WordCount Blogathon was born.

Flash forward to 2009. Magazines were folding. Newspapers were getting skinnier by the week. Freelancers who once made their living writing for print publications were looking to expand their repertoire to include podcasting, multimedia reporting – and blogging.

Once again, I challenged myself to blog every day and was joined by other ex-newspaper reporters as well as an assortment of freelancers and bloggers. In 2009, I added a guest post exchange day to the event and celebrated the end of the month with a live chat on  Twitter.

The 2010 WordCount Blogathon was the best yet, with more than 110 freelancers, writers, bloggers and others from across the United States and as far away as Japan and India – more than double the number of people who participated the previous year. In the 2010, I added a raffle and sponsors donated more than $1,200 in writing-related prizes that anyone who made it through all 31 days was eligible to win. The 2010 event also included participant badges, a guest post exchange, live chat and themed post days, including a blogathon haiku.

The 2011 blogathon promises to be every bit as fun.

If you haven’t sign up yet, you’ll find the registration form here.