30 Motivation Hacks for Bloggers

Photo: HikingArtist.com

Blogging is one of the best ways to build a personal brand, become an authority on a subject of your choice and then leverage those two things to generate an income to support the lifestyle that you want.

That in itself should be enough motivation for bloggers, but blogging consistently is tough so it’s not always enough. Therefore, these are my top 30 motivation hacks for bloggers.

1. Know the life you’re aiming for. Be very clear in what you want, and not just in terms of your blog. Define your perfect, nothing out-of-the ordinary day, and remember that whenever you’re feeling unmotivated. Ingrain that joy in your mind.
2. Revisit the life you’re aiming for regularly. Repeatedly write down your perfect day, and never let yourself be without an overall direction in life. Don’t be a ship’s captain without a compass.
3. Set long term goals. Where do you want your blog to be in 6 months? 1 year? 5 years? Write down these goals and revisit them as much as you feel is necessary.
4. Set short term (day to day) goals. Day to day goals act as great stepping stones for longer term goals. Use these to reduce the overwhelm that some longer terms can (and should) bring with them.
5. Have a plan. Write down your plans for every aspect of your blog: promotion, content creation, relationship building etc. Plans aren’t law, so never feel constricted by them, but they’ll provide you with at least a next step.
6. Revise your plan. Keep it fresh. Rewrite it, brood over it, and never let it get stale. A plan that feels old will make your own work feel old and sluggish.
7. Brainstorm ideas in bulk. Lack of ideas for content is a fear and problem many bloggers face. Dedicate at least 20-30 minutes each week solely to brainstorming ideas for content in bulk. Having 10-20 ideas on standby eliminates the worry of being without. Minimal stress = motivating.
8. Read other bloggers stories. Find bloggers you admire and see if they’ve written about their blogging experience. Chris Guillebeau’s 279 Days to Overnight Success and Leo Babauta’s The Zen Habit’s Story are both inspiring and motivating reads.
9. Love your topic. Live your topic. Imagine yourself writing about your niche for the next 40 years: does that make you cringe? If it does, you’re doing it wrong. Change your topic until 40 years of blogging about it seems not only doable, but exciting.
10. Expand your topic. Tight niches have their advantages, but a blog with a broader topic will certainly succeed over one with a more focused topic if the blogger behind it is motivated. Broader topics offer variety for the blogger, which keeps things fresh and dynamic.
11. Take measurable action each day. Define, and then do something every day that takes you towards your short and long term blogging goals. This can be doing any number of things, but I find finishing at least one article per day to be a great goal which is both measurable and provides very obvious results.
12. Create killer content. Not proud of your content? Don’t publish it. Sharing work your not proud of is perhaps the greatest blogging demotivator. Hold yourself to high standards and never let go of those standards.
13. Spend time building relationFRIENDships. Actively go out and interact with bloggers. Send them friendly emails, interview them and comment on their blogs (no spamming your blog address!). Let them know you exist, what you’re about, and build genuine friendships.
14. Experience the lifestyle you want. Want to spend hours every day lying on the beach covered in cocoa butter? Find the nearest beach and do exactly that. The lifestyle you desire may not be sustainable at this point in time, but giving yourself that brief taste of it will motivate you to build your blog so that lifestyle is sustainable.
15. Use negative reinforcement. What would happen if you fail? How would you feel? Acknowledge the negative consequences of failure, but don’t dwell on them. Let them guide you away from failure.
16. Develop a mantra and repeat it to yourself. Just like Dory from Finding Nemo had “Just keep swimming”, create your own mantra to motivate yourself and then repeat it to yourself. Constantly. Repeating your plans to yourself is a simple substitute for a traditional mantra (“2-3 blog posts per week, 1 guest post per week…” for example).
17. Be interesting. Feeling you have something interesting to share helps squash doubtful thoughts and allows you to remind yourself that your blog is fantastic, it’ll just take some time for people to find it.
18. Embrace the future. The internet is still young and blogging is considerably younger. And that is amazing. In such a few short years blogging has already begun to replace traditional news and media outlets. Being apart of that shift in the media feels fantastic so don’t forget that you are apart of it.
19. Be ambitious. Ambitious goals are exciting goals and that excitement is far more sustaining than more traditionally realistic goals. Share your ambition with readers to let them bask in it. People are drawn to ambition.
20. Engage with readers using social media tools. Tools like Twitter are a great way to engage with readers who, for whatever reason, may not be commenting on your blog posts. Having conversations with people who enjoy the content you create is incredibly rewarding.
21. Improve your blogging experience. It’s not selfish, or impossible to make blogging easier on yourself. WriteRoom is a popular app to create a distraction-free writing environment although I’m becoming a Scrivener evangelist. And think outside of your computer screen. How would a new chair or a de-cluttered desk space affect your blogging experience?
22. Simplify. Having and doing less allows you to focus on actionable tasks that are actually important. Begin eliminating the fuzz in your business and life in general. This fuzz could be things like clutter (both physical and digital), negative people, and bad habits.
23. Achieve peace of mind. Don’t continue fretting about data loss or security breaches. Setup automated systems to backup your blog, and spend some time researching blog security. Do these things once (and right) and you’ll never need to worry about them again.
24. Read blogs that resonate. Some blogs will resonate with you more than others. Focus on these. Read blog posts that just *click* with you, as these will inspire you and make sure you’re blogging in a style that is what you yourself love.
25. Take a break. Just 24 hours with my family south of Sydney, away from the internet and my iPhone was enough to get me excited to get back to blogging. This very article was thought of just a couple of hours after arriving home. Don’t feel guilty about taking time to revitalize. Love it.
26. Be professional. Many people vouch that wearing a suit and treating your blogging sessions as a traditional job can be motivating. The psychology makes sense, but it’s not for me – maybe if I’d actually had a job in my life…
27. Be unprofessional. Sitting back on a couch with my feet up (which is what I’m doing now) and having music playing in the background is my idea of a sweet blogging session. It’s not traditionally professional, but that’s all apart of my dream lifestyle.
28. Kill spam. When you’re only comments are related to Viagra and gambling it can be a bit of a bummer. Install WP-SpamFree and be done with it. If you’re not a Wordpress user, slap yourself, and then switch to Wordpress.
29. Automate. Accounting. Sales. Backups. All of these can be automated. When performing a monotonous task ask yourself if this could be eliminated or broken down into a system and automated with software or outsourced. If yes, then go ahead and do exactly that.
30. Spark creativity. There are many ways to jolt your creativity, but I find reading books that challenge assumptions and are centered around personal experiences (The 4-Hour Work Week, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods and Vagabonding spring to mind) get my creative juices flowing. Find catalysts and situations where you’re most creative and exploit the hell out of them.

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