How to improve your motivation for blogging

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Jul 10, 2015 / by
How to improve your motivation for blogging

The benefits of blogging are well documented. It helps you to attain the status of a thought leader in your niche; helps direct search engine traffic towards your site; facilitates a better understanding of your audience; and generally improves the reputation of your brand.

Unfortunately, you won’t reap these rewards overnight. They will only come as the result of long-term graft.

This often tempts business owners to slack off their blogging responsibilities and instead focus on seemingly more pressing issues. However, by focusing all of your attention on short-term goals, you are not investing in the future of your business. Ultimately, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

So, what’s to be done?

Reward good effort

cambridge-web-marketing-co-blog-content-image-chocolateThe pay-off for blogging is never instant. Unless you strike gold with a particular article and receive a huge spike of new traffic, it can be difficult to find the motivation to blog – especially when you could work on securing a new client instead.

By rewarding yourself each time you publish a new blog, you are making blogging far more appealing in the short-term – which will consequently benefit your business in the long-term. Whatever reward you choose should be personal to you, but common ideas might be a meal in a great restaurant, a beer (or two), or even a couple of completely irresponsible hours playing computer games online!

Read other blogs

Art inspires art, and blogging is no different. If you’re stumped for blogging ideas, one of the best places to get new ones is, well, other blogs. You may wish to check out bloggers within your niche or you may wish to go further afield. Either way, engaging with topics which might seem completely unrelated to your area can kickstart a train of thought, and, eventually, some excellent content. For this reason, art, literature and industry periodicals may also serve as a good source for inspiration.

Feature a guest blogger

While guest blogging for SEO purposes is effectively dead, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still get the occasional guest to feature on your blog – just so long as you’re confident they can deliver high quality content to your audience. As well as the obvious networking benefits of this, having a highly qualified expert discuss their favourite subject in-depth might just be the fresh perspective your blog needs. Furthermore, guest blogging is beneficial to both parties, since the author is likely to repost the article to their own network. This allows you to ‘share’ audiences, and you might even see a surge in new traffic as a result.

Schedule, schedule, schedule

If you only blog when you’re feeling inspired, this might lead to some erratic upload schedules – a nail in the coffin if you’re looking to build up a loyal following. Instead, designate a particular period of time to blogging every week. Put the slot (2 or 3 hours is usually fine) in your calendar and resolve to do nothing but write. That means no cat videos on YouTube, no browsing your friends’ holiday snaps on Facebook, and absolutely no picking up the phone! Once you leave yourself with no options but to write, you’ll be amazed how quickly the creative juices start flowing.

In order to get into a distraction-free writing zone, copywriter/entrepreneur James Chartrand has a few choice words:

“I have a coffee and clear out my email so that I can ignore new ones for an hour or two. No stress,” he says. “Then I break my mental state from ‘email processing’ by getting up to walk around for five minutes. I loosen up, relax, and step outside for a few breaths of fresh air.


“Within 10 seconds, ideas for blog posts start flowing. It never fails. My brain knows that coffee, email, walk, and fresh air = writing. Then when I sit down to write, my brain is ready to hand me the words I need.”

Outsource

Okay, so this isn’t exactly a way to improve your motivation for blogging – but if you’re struggling to the schedule and nothing else is helping the situation, you may want to hire some outside help. Employing an agency to take on some (or all) of the workload can free you up to work on other areas of your business.

Although it can be daunting to pass on tasks such as these to someone who isn’t one of your full time employees, using a reputable agency with a selection of testimonials can really help to take the pressure off your shoulders. Experienced copywriters not only know the nuances of writing SEO-optimised copy. They are also experts at adhering to a multitude of different tones and styles. Your brand integrity will not be damaged just because you’ve hired an external writer, so long as you are clear, open, and communicative about the sort of image you want to put across.

Keep at it!

As you can see, there are a multitude of methods to increase your motivation and allow you to actually put pen to paper instead of procrastinate. If things aren’t working, sometimes you need to approach the problem from a different angle in order to create a solution. In the age of information, a regularly updated blog full of high quality content is an asset to any business – so don’t allow yourself to slack off. Consistent, quality work always pays off over time.

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