Successful bloggers are generally those who keep themselves motivated to blog. Most of those who fail are those who lost interest and motivation to maintain and keep their blogs. It is therefore essential that you keep yourself motivated so as to be successful.
The problem is, how does one keep himself/herself motivated to blog? Here are some of my suggestions to help you keep motivated. These worked well for me, it should work for you too.
Discover Your Motivation
In order to be more successful in keeping yourself motivated to blog, you should be able to identify the factors that will keep you motivated. There are several motivating factors that keep bloggers motivated. Most bloggers are motivated because of the financial rewards of blogging or the potential fame that comes with it. Others are just contented of expressing their thoughts and opinions while some enjoy the attention and the opportunity to argue with other people. A small minority of the bloggers are motivated by the growing number of international friends they accumulate over the course of their blogging.
The only problem is when you forced yourself to blog, in which case, you don’t have a clear motive or you don’t have the right motive. Bloggers who don’t have good motives to blog or don’t have motives to blog usually end up failing. They end up unmotivated even before they start to see the result of their initial efforts, which could have been reinforced by simply continuing to blog. As a result, they abandon their blogs… their blogs die.
Useful Tips To Keep Your Motivations Alive
1. Identify your blogging goals and objectives. Make them clear and more specific.
Your goals and objectives give you a sense of direction. They remind you of the things you want to achieve. Without them, there’s no sense of fulfillment. While goals and objectives are helpful, they should be stated clearly to achieve the most benefits from them. Hence, an objective to increase your blog traffic from 100 to 300 is better than simply and objective to increase your blog traffic.
When setting your blog objectives and goals, remember to make them realistic. If you come up with very ambitious goals that you yourself doubt you’ll ever achieve them, you’ll just end up frustrated which will eventually lead to losing your motivation to blog. Also, it’s worth noting that you should not overwhelm yourself with goals and objectives. You should also consider having a long term and short term goals and objectives. These two sets of objectives have different impacts to your blogging but will ultimately lead to keeping your spirit high.
2. Monitor, evaluate and measure your progress.
Checking how far you’ve been with your goals and objectives helps you reflect on your strategies. You should be able to achieve some if not all your targets. Keeping a tab of your achievements will help boost your morale and will encourage you to be more motivated. It also brings a sense of pride and fulfillment. Assessing your progress is another way of making your strategies better because you are able to identify where you went wrong and do the necessary corrections.
It’s a good idea to keep a note of your goals and objectives and your performance to be able to effectively evaluate and measure your progress. Better yet, get some of your friends to do the evaluation. Their feedback should help you become better in blogging. There comments could be a mixture of positive and negative but in most cases, negative comments actually help someone to remain motivated.
3. Reward yourself. Tell others how much you’ve grown.
So you’ve made some good progress? Based from your notes, you were able to exceed your initial target. You deserve some reward. You can either broadcast your progress for everyone to read or buy yourself a box of chocolate. There are tons of ways to reward yourself… you’re a blogger so you should know lots of them.
4. Breakaway from your blogging routines. Try something new.
Routine activity is the main cause why most people loose their interest. You can observe this in your work place. The argument that accustoming yourself to a set of undertakings in a day and for the next days to come helps improve your efficiency is a big lie. It actually makes people (in the long run) less efficient because of boredom. Likewise, if you set yourself to do a set of routine while you’re blogging, soon you’ll lose your interest.
Breakaway from your blogging routines and try to do something new… something different (radical). If you do your post every morning, try doing it at night. If you feel that something (believed by many to be good) is not really good then you might want to go against the world. You will get lots of criticism but you will certainly spare yourself from getting bored from doing your blogging routines.
5. Identify your competitors and do your best to beat them.
What keeps me motivated to blog are my competitors. I have a set of blogs that I consider my competitors. As my competitors, I always work hard to outdo them in every aspect of blogging (i.e. traffic, Alexa, page rank, Technorati). I’ve been doing this since I’ve started blogging and so far, it has done nothing but to keep me motivated. Being able to beat them in certain aspects of blogging brings so much joy and encourage for me. It could have the same effects to you.
6. Embrace failures. Transform them as opportunities.
Failures are part of blogging. Darren Rowse, Chris G, Seth Godin name it, they all experienced failing. In fact, their ability to transform their failures to opportunities made them what they are today. As a blogger, you need to acknowledge failure as a natural part of your blogging adventure. More importantly, you should see them as an opportunity for you to grow and become better. How you do that starts from identifying the goodness of these failures and the determination not to commit them again.
What else do you think can help bloggers to keep their spirits high? I’m sure you’ve got some more to add. Do share them through the comments.
Thank you for you time. 
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