How to Stay Motivated and Keep Blogging
June 2, 2009 Posted by Paul PiotrowskiThis is a guest post written by Paul Piotrowski over at InspiredMoneyMaker.com which is a Blog that focuses on Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online. To see what Paul is up to right now you can connect with him on Twitter.
Learning to make money online takes patience. Learning to make money online as a Blogger takes even more patience. Obviously when we see people like John Chow or Darren Rowse who make a lot of money from their Blogs, it’s not hard to imagine ourselves staying motivated to keep writing Blog posts when we are making that kind of money and Blogging is a full time thing in our lives.
However, do you ever wonder what keeps people motivated to keep pumping out article after article on their Blog when they aren’t yet making the big money? Or more importantly, ever wonder what you can do to keep yourself motivated long enough to get over the “hump” and make it big?
I’ve been Blogging since April 2006, and six months ago I was finally able to quit my job and focus my full time efforts on making money online. The most important aspect of what helped me to stay motivated in the last two to three years and helped me keep me going long enough to succeed has been tracking growth.
I know it sounds really simple, but if you leverage this one simple thing, it will help you to stay motivated. You see, our minds are conditioned to respond to certain things. One of the most important things that keep our minds motivated is seeing progress in life. When we do something and our mind sees that we are making progress, we’ll be motivated to keep going. If we do something and we don’t see ourselves making progress, we give up.
Because of this, it is very important that you track the RIGHT things. This is where most people go wrong. See, you can track almost anything when it comes to running a Blog. You can track how much money you’re making, you can track how many comments you’re getting on each post, you can track how many RSS subscribers you’re getting, etc.
The challenge is that in the beginning, how much money you make is probably not going to be a lot so if that is the measure of progress you’re using, you’re going to get discouraged and de-motivated very quickly. The trick is to find measures of progress that you can track on a regular basis that will show growth based on the efforts that you put in.
For example, measuring your daily visitors might be a better thing to track in the beginning. If you start off with just 5 visitors per day, and you slowly grow that to an average of 25 visitors, that’s 5x the growth. That kind of growth will keep you motivated. However, at 5 visitors/day or 25 visitors/day you may still be making $0/month to start with because income from a Blog doesn’t usually grow linearly like that. It may take a while before all of a sudden people start contacting you and wanting to buy advertising on your Blog.
In the meantime you’ve got to keep yourself motivated by tracking something that grows based on the efforts that you put in. That’s one secret I discovered about the human mind and motivation. We just want to see progress, but really the mind doesn’t give a crap what it is that you’re making progress in. It just wants to see progress.
In the beginning I used to track everything on my Blog. First it was hits and visitors, then when I started getting enough eyeballs to my site I started to really pay attention to my RSS feed counter, and my email subscriber count. Those were all measures of “growth” that fell into place long before I saw any big money coming through the doors.
To this day, I still don’t use monthly income as a big indicator of "progress" on my day-to-day tracking. In fact, recently I started experimenting with Twitter, and using it to connect with my readers and friends online, so now I’m paying attention to my Twitter follower count and I’m using that as one measure of progress.
As long as you keep finding things to track and see progress in, it will be much easier to stay motivated because progress makes us feel good. In the last 3 years I’ve seen a lot of people start Blogs and most of the ones that only paid attention to how much money they were making each month quit within the first few months. There’s a whole graveyard full of blogs like that.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay attention to how much money you’re making. I’m just saying that it shouldn’t be the only thing you track as that will make it hard to stay motivated, especially in the beginning.
So what are the three most important things you’re tracking on a regular basis in your Online Empire?
As you mentioned in your post, before I ever started making any money online, I used my traffic numbers for motivation.
Before I started making good money from my blog, I’d use my RSS readership count as motivation and goal-setting. There’s always something you can use a metric to try to improve…
Good post! Keeps me motivated 😉
I say right now my big metric is how many visitors come to my blog. That might change I don’t know. This is a nice guest post. Greg Ellison
Great post! It’s all about metrics!
By tracking stats on our blog, not only does it allow me to test different strategies to see what is and isn’t working (and make changes based on the data), it also keeps me motivated to constantly improve and make sure we reach all of our goals.
Some of the things I continually track on our blog is RSS Subscriptions, Unique Visitors, Bounce Rate, and referral traffic.
Somethings I use are:
Stats – Hits\Visitors – Statpress reloaded works great for this
Alexia rank – when it gets lower it feels good!
RSS Readers / Commenters
I would say that I use the traffic and stats as a way to track the progression of my websites, just like you and everyone else do as well. I also use the search engine rankings for particular keywords, and their rise and increase in the standings as a motivational factor. But… one website that I have a forum in, I use the number of registered users as a motivation to continue, as I get more members and visitors I keep getting more and more excited about the website. Especially when visitors and members start participating on their own, that is a big time motivation for me!
[…] How to Stay Motivated and Keep Blogging | TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey Great tips for staying motivated […]
Lately I’ve also noticed that the more regular my posting schedule, the more comments I get on my posts. I think it’s because people make a habit of visiting daily if you have a daily post for them.
Great Article! Many bloggers start with much enthusiasm but lose interest . This is a great reality check!
The hardest part for me was sticking with it for the first couple months. When the blog was only generating costs and no profits I felt like giving up. But I powered through this and now I’m earning quite a bit just from blogging.
Traffic and stats make me motivate to blog, especially when I started to see few cents on my earnings 🙂
It is really hard to keep motivated!
Thanks for the advice.
Nice post! I’ve been blogging for a while too. I think the most thing that keeps me motivated is the fact that I want so much more out of life. Granted I’m happy, but have a dream too.
Unfortunately motivation tends to go away as you realize you are not earning much money from all the time spent.
-Mike
A little boost in income always help motivate me.
I have a few blogs and it’s been very hard to stay motivated, but i keep on doing it in hopes that one day I’ll be able to quit my job and make blogging my full time job. Hopefully this day comes soon. 🙂
I think that money should not be main purpose for blogging.
Obviously money isnt the main purpose. It is motivational…like i said.
Thinking about the future can always make you excited and more motivated.
Lol family is the biggest motivation..
DGreat comments. You know as a marketing company, we always talk about motivation and dedication as being the key to success.
Although we have the same main topic in mind, we put different suggestions into play. I always thought about family, retirement, stuff like that as motivation, but your article gives a complete different insight. And, to be honest makes a lot more sense.
Thanks again for sharing.
I measure success by the number of penpals I have in Nigeria.
This is amazing article to keep your blog updated with brilliant stuff.
Nice post! Well motivation of thy self is very important in blogging. I found several tips that will help me and you focus our efforts and produce a better blog and can make you a six digit income. I have posted it here: http://www.internetbusinesspath.com/internetbusinesspath/go/problogger/
You have no idea how much this has helped me. Here I was, thinking about dropping blogging altogether, dissatisfied with my results … and then i get a pat on the back, from you, by the means of this post.
Thank You so much!
This is quite solid! Looking back at what you accomplished really does pay off!
Progress really does make us feel wonderful. I know that starting up a blog and making it a success is not a piece of cake. It requires a lot of hard work and patience. Once you see even the slightest progress you are motivated to write even more and better because you want the people to come back for more.