Why I failed my 100 Article Challenge Vocal Media

A few months ago, I embarked on a 100 articles Vocal Media challenge to post daily on the platform. I failed. In fact, I failed miserably.

I think I published 30 articles in that time. The goal was to publish 100 articles in 30 days, I thought it would be easy because I’ve done it before on Medium. But instead of sailing through this challenge, I hit a wall and quit.

What happened?

Honestly, I didn’t understand it at the time, but I’ve had some time to reflect and now I understand why I failed that challenge.

Here are 4 reasons why I failed to complete my 100 article challenge:

I had done it before so I thought I could do it again

In 2021, I did a 100 articles challenge on Medium.I sailed through and took my earnings from $5 a month to $1000 a month in that time. It was a 30-day challenge, and I’d never done something like this before. I went in feeling scared and nervous, but I pushed through and got it done. In fact, towards the end, it felt easy.

When I made the decision to do the same thing on Vocal Media,I went in feeling like it would be the same as posting 100 articles in a month on Medium. I was wrong.

Things are different here.

Firstly, there is no scheduling feature on Vocal, but on Medium there is a convenient scheduling option. This makes batch creating articles much easier.

With no option schedule content, I had to add articles to my drafts and manually post daily. This got tedious after a while.

Secondly, unless you publish poems daily, articles must be 600 words long to post them om Vocal. Whereas, on Medium there is no word count requirement, so I wrote short-form pieces whenever I felt like posting something quick.

Yes, I could have written poems for the Vocal challenge instead, but the goal was really to focus on articles, not poems. With poems, 100 to 150 words is fine, but my main focus for the challenge was engaging articles, not poetry.

Slow Earnings

You won’t get rich from Vocal Media’s built in monetisation options, especially if you only have a free account. Vocal pays $3.80 per thousand views for free accounts, and $6.00 per thousand views for Vocal plus accounts.

Even with some great traction, and a top story during this time, the earnings from Vocal itself were pretty slow, I got disheartened after a while.

One thing did motivate me to keep going though, and that was two digital product sales. But this wasn’t enough to keep the fire burning for me.

This challenge made me realize that I prefer shorter challenges on Vocal, that’s why I’m doing this seven day challenge to post two Vocal-focused articles daily for the next seven days. This is day four.

I didn’t document the challenge on YouTube

I’ve noticed that when I document challenges, I’m more likely to stick to them. When I only discuss the challenge on the platform and no other social platforms, I fail. So next time I do a longer challenge, I’ll document the whole process on YouTube and most likely, Medium.

No collaboration this time

For my biggest challenges, I collaborate with other creators to post daily. It’s great because it helps with accountability and focus. I usually do online work sessions with other creators too and it’s so effective for staying focused on the goal to complete the challenge. I tried to do the challenge alone, and that wasn’t the best decision.

I’m not sure if I’ll do another long challenge on Vocal, but if I do, I will certainly collaborate with other creators for accountability purposes.

Have you ever done a Vocal Media challenge? If not, would you do one?

💡I’ve built several six and seven figure, content-driven businesses over the years. If you’d like some guidance on building successful content-focused digital businesses, learn more here.