Guest Post: Struggling to Keep Motivated and Keep Blogging?

Guest post by Annabel Candy from Get In the Hot Spot.

The trouble with blogging is that you have to stick at it for the long term. If you just do it for a month or two you won’t get much benefit out of it but after 6 to 12 months of blogging you should start to see results.

What kind of benefits can you expect?

Bloggers used to be looked upon as some sort of social pariah but these days people are starting to realise that there is method to the blogging madness.

I started my blog about a year ago to build my profile as a writer. I had about 12 years experience as a web designer and web copy writer but I didn’t know anything about blogging. I’d written a fiction manuscript and started researching online how to find a literary agent or publisher. Somewhere along the line I read that if you’re a writer having a blog with 1000 subscribers will make it easier for you to find a publisher for a book. So that’s what I set out to do.

It sounds easy doesn’t it? 1000 subscribers isn’t much, especially when you consider I already had about 200 friends on my personal email newletter list. I was sure they’d be interested in my blog so I reckoned I’d have 200 subscribers straight away. How wrong I was!

Although a handful of my friends signed up for my brand new blog and two of them spontaneously decided to comment on every single post I wrote, most of them just weren’t interested. I think it’s partly because many of my friends don’t even know what a blog is, let alone read them. If you’re in your twenties you might find this hard to believe but I’m twice 21 and it’s true. I asked one friend if she’d subscribed to my blog and she said she hadn’t because she was too scared of spam email. I didn’t bother to explain that I already had her email address anyway and wasn’t bombarding her with junk mail.

It was then that I realised I had to find first blog readers elsewhere.

I noticed everyone else with a blog used Twitter so I decided to give that a go. I signed up as @getinthehotspot, met some cool people and even got a copywriting job. I built up a few followers but still wasn’t getting much traffic to my blog.

I felt that with my background if I couldn’t reach my blogging goal nobody could and the slow progress depressing. I’d been doing everything I could to get people to visit my blog including Twitter, Facebook, comments on other blogs and helping people out in topic-related forums, but the results were poor so I tried guest posting.

Guest posting failed at first too because I chose blogs that were too small so I decided to try to get my writing featured on some more popular blogs and that approach worked better. Each time I got a guest post on a well read blog I’d get a huge spike in traffic to my blog and many of the visitors subscribed and came back for more.

It was tight but I got those 1000 subscriber after one year of blogging and since then my blog’s been growing faster. After 14 months of blogging I have around 1,400 subscribers.

Is blogging worth the time and effort?

That’s probably what you’re thinking and I can understand why. It’s been a long, tough journey but my answer is a resounding yes! Here are some of the things blogging has got me:

• A free business class all expenses paid trip to Shanghai in China with Coca-Cola because they “liked the tone of my writing and my blog topics”.
• Paid copywriting work
• Friends all over the world who I Skype and local friends who I’ve met in person.
• My writing featured on some of the most well-read blogs in the world including Zen Habits, Problogger, Copyblogger, Dumb Little Man and many more.
• Networking connections with bloggers of all types from pros like Darren Rowse to total novices and everyone in between including my host here today, Srinivas Rao whose work ethic, positive attitude and helpfulness I hope I share.

True, blogging hasn’t got me a literary agent yet but I have got a publisher who’s interested in my writing. I’m putting that on hold for now though so I can carry on writing articles and growing my blog. I already have a great audience for my writing and a chance to create my own books and sell them to my blog readers if I want. It’s an amazing transformation.

So how can you stay motivated and keep blogging?

1. Get a blogging buddy – someone who will comment on all your posts, give you feedback and cheer you on even when you want to give up.
2. Chill out – the professional bloggers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers didn’t get there overnight. Most of them have been blogging for years and you’ll need to too if you want to achieve your goals. There are no shortcuts to blogging success.
3. Make a posting schedule and stick to it – once a week is a minimum to get you in the habit of writing and build up a good foundation of content on your blog.

Follow these three rules for blogging and keep going long enough to see what opportunities blogging brings you. It’ll be a long journey with lots of fun and some rough patches too but hang in there, you never know where you could end up.

Annabel Candy helps people live the life they want at Get In the Hot Spot. She writes about self improvement, business development, blogging and more. She’s recently redesigned her blog to make it more user-friendly and fun. If you like to get success tips, stay motivated and be surrounded by positive people subscribe by email for free updates.

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