How to Stay Disciplined With Your Blogging

When you start a new blog you’re full of enthusiasm and just can’t seem to shut up.

You’re writing every day and posting frequently on your blog, creating videos, audio and enjoying every moment of the blogging experience. You’re telling everyone on Twitter and Facebook about the blog posts you are writing.

Everywhere you walk you see something and think – that’s a great image for a blog post or a great topic.

Then, one day, you just run out of gas.

Yep, you think you are going somewhere but you’re not going anywhere and you lack the energy to push yourself further.

Maybe you’ve experienced this already, or maybe you’re just getting started and want to ensure this does not happen to you. Either way this post may be of interest to you.

Know your Niche

It is important that you either know your niche inside out, because if you don’t someone else will.

At the very least be willing to research the niche enough to write about it, or hire someone to do it. Yes, you can pay a VA or someone on Fiverr to research your niche and see if it’s the right one for you and how much work will be involved.

I have a blog coaching client that didn’t research her niche very well and struggles to create the right content for a niche area that is too narrow.

Prevention is better than a cure; knowing your chosen niche  in detail means you’ll know if you’re creeping outside of the niche with your articles, blogs and topics. It also makes is easy to stay on target with your content and stay within the boundaries you’ve defined.

Know your Target Audience

Knowing your niche is not the same as knowing your audience.

Your audience is part of your niche, but you’re not going to direct your content at every single person interested in the niche. I have a passing interest in cats, being the mum of two cats.

However, I am not interested in cat grooming, spangly collars or how to train one like Bob DeNiro did in Meet the Fokkers. I am not your audience, but if you drill down and talk about flea treatments that actually work then I might be interested enough to stop by on a monthly basis.

A wide niche is too much and will stretch you too far or dilute your content.  Write for a smaller targeted audience. You should know what age your target audience is, what their fears are,  and what they need to know about the industry.

You’ll need to know what presses their buttons and you’ll need to know what happens when you press those buttons.

Create an Editorial Calendar

You can base your calendar on things like products you plan to promote during the year, holidays, events and special occasions.

Write everything down on your editorial calendar so that you can plan out the types of content you’ll put on your blog, the keywords you will target, as well as what the subjects will be.

This isn’t set in stone, but a fluid and moving thing. Just because it’s Christmas is doesn’t mean you have to blog about it every single day in December.

Plan Your Time

Set aside time each day for each aspect of working on your blog. Find some private space where you can think.

If you’re doing it alone, set aside time just for creating content, and time for working on technology, and time for perfecting the look of your blog. If you do not set aside time for each aspect you’ll find yourself focusing on unproductive tasks and being a lazy blogger.

By creating a plan you’ll enable yourself to stay focused on what is important regarding your blog, which is getting keyword rich content up on your blog for your visitors to view. Without content you are in trouble!

Bribery

If all else fails to motivate you, go with bribery and reward your activity. I find a chocolate bar after every post written helps get them done (now you know why I write so many posts).

If all else fails the fear that I will be forced to read 50 Shades of Grey  soon gets the words flowing!