Congrats, You started a blog! You are ambitious and ready to impact people's lives. A week goes by with a well-written post each day but no one is reading. Now you are on a new week, looking ahead to the amount of work is involved to make these posts. No one seems to read them and now your motivation slumps.
What's the point of all this if no one is reading?
This is the struggle that most bloggers come to face in the early days of blogging and even well into their seasoned years. We find barriers to staying motivated and produce the best work if we receive zero feedback, comments, or views on the posts. This is the most critical time for any blogger. When we lack motivation to continue even if we get views and comments.
This will happen on and off for all writers. Over the past fourteen or so years that I blogged I find myself looking for motivation several times per week.
When we find ourselves in this state, it always looks easier to quit and do anything else. To be honest, that feeling is correct, not doing something is always easier than doing anything, with a few exceptions. I am sure that not smoking when addicted is much more difficult than smoking. But you get the point, we as humans will never loose the desire to take the easy path.
We can do many things to keep the motivation rolling or to get started. Motivation does not always need to be a whirlwind of enthusiasm about your blog. Motivation is about sitting down and typing the post, editing, adding pictures, and pressing publish. No one said we need to be enthusiastic about our blog, we just need to motive ourselves to write.
Habits
Forming habits around writing our blog posts are a big part of creating motivation. Most of the time we won't have the motivation to even start writing. When we put habits in place, we will start to put pen to paper out of habit. The more we write the better the chance for us to enter the flow state. Once there, we no longer need the motivation since the words speak through our finger tips.
Don't look for the "motivation to start" to magically show up. It may appear but it most likely won't. We need to drown out everything but the text we create. We must allow ourselves to enter tunnel vision. I'll share some habits that work for me but make sure to find your own rhythm. Find the discipline to stick to those actions every day. Before we know it, the habits are creating our motivation even when we don't have it to begin with.
One thing that works well for me is where I write. Staying in the same place each day keeps my mindset from drifting off into email or social media. Our surroundings play a big role in the writing process. Find the best place where you can focus without distraction.
Music is a game changer for many people. What works for me is having a few playlists across genres that have no vocals. One is "chill-step" the other is classical symphonic music. Both playlists only play when writing that is the key. As soon as my headphones play either playlist, my mind enters writing mode.
Divide & Conquer
Once we sit down, our music playing, and a cup of coffee off to the side we must write. This becomes daunting because we visualize the result in our mind and its huge. It's a big wall of text we have yet to begin. Writing daily makes this seem even worse as if we run out things to say.
Chop it up! This helps a lot, take the topic we want to write about and dividing the idea up into sub-topics. That is what I did for this post. I knew the topic so the first chunk to work on was the title.
We want to get the title nailed down first for these kinds of posts so we don't disappoint our readers with a promise we did not fulfill. Once the title is ready, the next step is to create the subsections. Align the subtitles with the main title and once that is complete we fill in the gaps taking one chunk at a time.
If there is a word goal, we set for each of our posts this tactic makes that process easier. Instead of seeing an empty page that needs one thousand words we now see five section that need two hundred. We start with the first section and work our way down as the sections fill. We often find that our minds will pass the two hundred word sub-goal with ease.
Networking
Networking can be a great way to motivate ourselves by finding inspiration in other people's work. It is important to be careful and not to get discouraged by work we deem better than ours. This also swings the other way, we must not get to cocky and inflate our ego when we deem our work better.
What networking is most useful for is forming new ideas, bouncing off the old, and learning from other writers. As we meet new people, we meet new cultures and attitudes. It is easy to spark an idea from a new friend and find a breath of motivation.
We can also bounce our ideas off the people we are networking with. This allows us to form a great message for particular blog post. The best motivation comes when another writer speaks highly of our idea or helps us form an even better one.
If you want to get started networking with other steemians I recommend using Discord and joining one to start. If you are a creative writer and post poetry or fiction on your blog, @thewritersblock is the best place. You can find the link to their Discord chat here.
Then there is the P.A.L Discord group by the @minnowsupport project. This group is full any many steemian form all around the world. It does not focus an any one niche and is open minnows and whales alike.
Thanks For Reading!
If you have a topic that you would like me to cover and share what I learned over the last ten years of blogging please let me know!
Other Posts In The Series:
Simple Networking Skills To Unlock Success
How To Nurture Emerging Community Engagement
How To Breakthrough Mental Blocks Into Flow
Keep Them Pining: Generating Evergreen Content
How To Schedule Your Content
Writing as a habit is difficult for me. I bought into the "you have to have motivation" thing for a lot time. One of my friends, Ned Hickson, wrote a book and that was one of his biggest things is taking time every day to write even when he didn't want to! :)
Exactly! We need to create the motivation by sitting down and putting thought to paper or keyboard.
Thank you.
How about the topic of how not to blog. Prioritizing spending quality time with your family and friends, limiting time on social media overall, and don't forget the physical detriments of looking down at a device (neck, shoulders, back, posture, overall health). Consider the possible addiction that can negatively affect a person's life. Blogging should be a joy... not a job. And who knows... you may just come up with a blog topic... just by enjoying life outside of the media world.
Lovely idea! I shall add it to my list of topics <3
This is really nice from you @jrswab. You not only care for yourself but other bloggers especially new ones and you're helping them stay on track..
Nice of you...
It is the best way that I can give back to help make steem the best blogging platform out there.
It's a good one though...
Keep it up..