Tristan Higbee Sharing How He Dealt With Loss of Motivation

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As i have announced yesterday that Tristan from BloggingBookshelf will be writing a guest post sharing how he dealt with loss of motivation. I am very please to welcome Tristan for sharing his views. Over to you, Tristan.

Lye sent me an email and asked, “How do you keep yourself motivated to continue blogging?” What I had intended to be only a couple paragraphs morphed into a full-fledged blog post. It turns out that I have a lot more to say on the subject than I thought!

A lot of my blogs have failed because of a lack of motivation on my part. Maybe the best way to introduce the topic of how I currently stay motivated is to share several examples of times when I haven’t stayed motivated. So first let me share examples of why some of my past blogs have failed. More specifically, I’ll share why and how I lost motivation. After that, I’ll talk about how to regain that motivation you once had.

5 reasons I’ve lost motivation in the past

I had a poetry blog that failed because I got burned out after a year of posting daily. Updating it eventually became a stressful chore rather than a enjoyable hobby, so I just stopped. Lesson: Be careful about blogging every day. Blogging is more of a marathon than a sprint. If you constantly feel the pressure of having to blog, you’ll lose motivation.

I had a travel blog that failed because while I absolutely love to travel, I don’t necessarily like writing about it. Lesson: Just because you like something, that doesn’t mean you will like writing about it. Try to determine whether you like writing about your topic before you dive headlong into it.

I had a niche website about dating that failed because I hated everything about the niche. Lesson: Blog about something you’re very passionate about. Don’t enter a niche just because it is potentially profitable.

Now having said that, I think it’s important to be in a niche that could make you a decent amount of money (though that amount, of course, is different for everyone). I had a rock climbing blog that I loved, but I eventually realized that there just wasn’t very much money to be made in the niche. Lesson: Choose a niche that you can make money in.

I quit working on a domain name blog because I wasn’t seeing the results I had optimistically anticipated. But I’m impatient and stopped blogging. Lesson: Realize that success takes time and things probably won’t go the way you want them to. If you know this before you start, it will be less of a shock to your system you become frustrated.

Though I’ve had some success as a blogger, as you can see I definitely have had more than my fair share of failures. But over the past several years, all of these failures have, one by one, pointed me in the direction that I wanted to go. I could cross each idea off of my list and move on to the next one. By keeping in mind all of these lessons that I’ve learned the hard way, I finally realized what I really wanted to blog about and what I could blog about for a long time. That alone makes a world of difference in terms of staying motivated.

How to regain the motivation you’ve temporarily lost

As I said, if you’ve been unhappy with your blog for one reason or another for a while, don’t be afraid of stopping and moving on to something else. But if you’re just temporarily lacking motivation, there are a few things you can do to get it back.

The first thing you can do is simply take a break from your blog. Stop blogging for a week or two and then come back to it. Hopefully you’ll have come up with new ideas and been reinvigorated.

Another thing you can do is take the time to comment on tons of other blogs in your niche. This will bring more traffic and comments back to your site, which could give you the boost of confidence and motivation you need to keep going.

If you’ve temporarily lost motivation, return to your roots. Let me explain. If you’re blogging about woodworking and are lacking the motivation to blog about it, just go back to woodworking for fun without worrying about the blog. This will rekindle the excitement and passion you used to feel, and hopefully inspire you enough to start blogging again.

After all of this you might be wondering how I’ve managed to continue blogging in general, especially after having suffered so much failure and defeat. It’s simple; I love it!

After all of these years (I’ve been blogging since 2003) and all of the above-mentioned failures, I’ve managed to stay motivated to blog simply because I love blogging. I love writing, I love building something out of scratch, I love connecting with great new people, and I love the idea of being my own boss of a location-independent internet business. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m so close I can almost taste it. Just keep remembering why you’re doing this whole blogging thing and some day it will all be worth it.

Tristan Higbee just launched Blogging Bookshelf, where he dispenses smart blogging tips for smart people. Subscribe to the Blogging Bookshelf newsletter and get his ebook, 101 Ways You’re Killing Your Blog, for free!

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