Annaliese Henwood
If you’ve been following this series of articles on blogging, you know why it is important to your business. You know how to get started, and now you also know the best practices for staying organized.
This article provides a great collection of expert advice on how to stay motivated and inspired in your blogging.
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What can I do to stay motivated?
Although this article is primarily meant to share the advice of blogging experts, I do have my own advice on this topic:
I am just getting started with my blogging activity. I haven’t had such a large commitment on my personal schedule in memorable history. Blogging is a very large responsibility that you have to consistently work on to be successful, but how do you stay motivated throughout the process?
I haven’t had too much interaction so far. My website analytics show a pretty low traffic rate. This is predictable with a new blog. However, it’s still very discouraging. Yet, even though I sometimes feel like this is all a wasted effort, I keep these things in mind:
- I’m staying current in my field through all the research I’ve been doing for my articles.
- I’m staying busy with writing, editing, publishing and promoting my content/brand.
- I’m developing my skills as a writer and marketer.
- I’m developing strong samples of my knowledge and career interest.
- Having a consistent readership and a high interaction rate are goals, not requirements.
- Having a blog is a great way to build a strong (personal/business) brand online.
Now it’s time to get to the established blogging pros and their input.
I start with Kevin Duncan‘s article on the Boost Blog Traffic site. Kevin provides 20 milestones to work towards as a sort of “bucket list” for bloggers. In his article, you’ll learn why it’s important for bloggers to set meaningful goals from the very beginning. Kevin recommends that you start small and build incrementally, and the rest of his advice is just as valuable.
My biggest milestone so far with my site is number four: getting my first email subscriber. When I saw the notification of my new subscriber, I felt excited beyond measure. It was a huge confidence boost and gave me so much more fuel to keep writing.
Taking a different approach, Jawad Khan wrote an article about the damaging effects of neglecting your blog. This article confirms the crucial importance of staying dedicated to your blog writing, especially in the beginning. Jawad gives readers seven bad signals that neglecting your blog could send, which could easily hurt your business. This is a great fear-based approach to staying on track with your blog.
I use this article to remind myself of just how important it is to stay consistent. It motivates me to keep writing despite my struggling readership, but I always keep this one point in the front of my mind:
Don’t let these risks convince you to sacrifice content quality for quantity.
The final article on staying motivated is one of my favorites because it fits well with my own newbie status. Carly Stec of Impact writes several reasons why you should keep blogging despite the possible lack of readership. She writes that while low readership can be disappointing, you shouldn’t let it bring you down. In the end, it’s practice and commitment that will help you grow your readership because it gives you the chance to learn and improve over time.
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What can I do to find inspiration?
I haven’t had too much difficulty finding content to write about so far. My own creativity and the blank slate I’m working with certainly helps, but that won’t last forever. My biggest help has come from the following sources…
Jean Spencer of Kapost gives four steps to help you consistently develop blog topics. I happen to like bonus number four the most because it could be especially helpful in my case. Getting help from those around you can be immensely beneficial because everyone else sees things from their own unique perspective. They can give you ideas that you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of at all.
On the HubSpot blog, Rachel Sprung provides the means to build a content inventory. She gives you seven steps that can help you develop one to make your blogging process significantly easier to maintain.
I especially agree with Rachel’s point about including others from your company. Creating content alone can be draining, and your content may suffer from having just one author. By giving other staff the chance to contribute their own content, you’re giving your company’s blog a fresh perspective and more variety. This can really help you grow your readership and keep it strong.
One note of caution though: make sure you have established editorial guidelines to maintain the design and feel for the content of your blog. Have these guidelines readily available for everyone to access.
Have you been writing and writing but still can’t maintain strong content idea generation? Is it getting tough to keep coming up with ideas for your blog?
Buffer has several articles to help, and I’ve provided two examples here…
Kevan Lee, the author of both articles, gives you an article on evergreen content ideas as well as one with 95 blogpost ideas to share on social media.
The first article helps you create content that can last for months or even years and can be repurposed over and over. However, if you’re going to reuse your evergreen content, make sure it can still help your audience. It may help you to have this easy, ready-to-go content, but if your audience doesn’t want to read it, why would you keep rehashing it? On a different note, I especially appreciate Kevan’s “3 Keys to Creating Evergreen Content.” It helps me out with my own efforts and could possibly help you, too.
The second article Kevan wrote is pretty much THE source for idea generation. It gives you every content type you can think of for the future. Along with the 95 ideas, Kevan links to several more helpful resources to get you moving. My favorite part of this article is the 32 types of blog posts. I’ve been trying to create a variety of content types for my blog, but I’ve found myself only publishing standard posts. I look forward to changing that in the near future thanks to Kevan’s suggestions.
Now that I’ve said Kevan’s article on the Buffer blog is “THE source for idea generation,” I have to contradict myself, in a way. While that article is a very thorough resource, it doesn’t directly help with topic generation in the same way that the below tools do.
I’ve been doing some research so that I can develop more topic variety, and there have been three tools that I very highly recommend. They each generate topic ideas for you based on categories or keywords you provide or choose from. These resources help with my efforts to get past writer’s block and can absolutely help you, too.
All three of the above serve the same purpose, so I suggest choosing the one that is most effective for your needs. I’ve used them all, and I’ve found that Impact’s service has been most helpful for me. However, Portent’s generator is more fun to work with than the others. They’re each worth a bit of experimenting to see which holds the most benefits for your needs.
Well, there you have it! I hope this collection of expert advice and resources helps you with your blogging motivation and inspiration, whether it be for business or personal purposes, in the very near future.
This article first appeared in modified form on the Marketing Innovator blog.
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