We're coming up on the three-year anniversary of this blog, so I figured I'd provide you with some blogging motivation techniques. One of the hardest things about maintaining a blog is creating rich, original content as often as possible. The second most difficult aspect, however, is making sure your site is properly optimized to take advantage of that content.
There are many motivation techniques for creating content. You can come up with a challenge for yourself like I have (currently on day 22 of a 365 day in a row posting challenge), you can work from a book of writing prompts, you can write out firm deadlines for posting ideas, you can guilt yourself into posting by telling readers when certain posts will come and you can team up with another local blogger by scheduling writing sessions. There aren't as many motivation techniques for catching up on tedious blog chores like link building, ad optimization, fixing errors, internally linking and adding tracking codes. Personally, for most of the last two years, I'd decently kept up on posting without doing squat in terms of the real foundation of the site.
Even though the Site Build It program has showed me the correct process for building up my site early on and I'd gained modest success as a result, it wasn't enough to get all my web ducks in a row. Because of this laziness, I had over 200 pages without the right ads or internal linking. I had turned what could have been a daily molehill into a several month-long mountain.
It's important with long tedious tasks to break them up into smaller chunks. For instance, in my situation, I dealt with removing and replacing the 200 pages worth of ads first and foremost. Later on, I started to deal with proper internal linking and at the end of it all, I'll deal with updating the sitemap to be accurate. Since this tedious stuff is pretty mindless, I've done it while watching television and movies. While I rarely recommend distracting yourself with the TV, getting a few hours of boring work out of the way can mean a lot for your motivation. In fact, since motivation is tough to come by, if you ever feel a burst of it to do these web chores, take the initiative no matter what you're doing.
In just a few weeks of getting back into the swing of things, my site traffic has jumped dramatically, hitting 1,000 unique visitors four times after never having passed 900 before my work. My income from the site has also gone up. This goes to show that one of the best motivation techniques is success itself. Prove to yourself that the blog work you should be doing brings in more readers and you'll find additional motivation in no time.
