In yesterday’s post I shared the exact strategy I use and recommend for how to make money blogging in 2015 and beyond.
One of the key parts of that strategy revolves around building the habit of daily blogging as shown here in this snippet for the flow chart I laid out yesterday.
Blogging on a daily basis is probably one of the most challenging parts of building a successful blog.
It’s not hard to write a few blog posts here and there, whenever we feel like it, but to develop the habit of blogging daily is a totally different thing.
In this post I’ll share some tips and strategies that I’ve recently started utilizing to help me stick to a daily blogging schedule for 33 days now.
Each one of these strategies can help you to be more consistent with your blogging.
#1 – Join the 21 Day Blogging Challenge
When I decided that I wanted to develop the habit of daily blogging, one of the first things I did was to join the 21 Day Blogging Challenge.
The 21 Day Blogging Challenge is a challenge put on my Empower Network that helps bloggers around the world develop the habit of daily blogging.
Psychologists have said that it takes a person at least 21 days to develop a habit, so the idea behind the challenge is to encourage you to make a commitment to blog every day for 21 days.
Anyone can participate in the challenge – regardless whether you’re using the Kalatu Brand Station to blog or your own WordPress site or any other blogging platform out there.
It’s free to join and once you join the 21 Day Blogging Challenge, you’ll be granted access to a private group of bloggers who are participating in the challenge and offered daily encouragement, and motivation to continue on your journey.
Each day you simply write one blog post and then you share it in the community page on facebook.
At the end of the challenge, there are some small prizes you can get access to and some training resources that can help you to build an even more successful blog.
I did my first 21 Day Blogging Challenge at the end of December, and have continued to blog ever since.
There is actually a brand new group starting tomorrow – February 2nd – so if you’d like to join, simply click on this link to get free access – 21 Day Blogging Challenge
#2 – Find a Blogging Style That You Enjoy and Can Stick to Daily
Each person has a different personality type and a unique style of communicating.
Some people, like myself, are most comfortable communicating in written word when it comes to Blogging.
I do also like to use videos from time to time, but I find creating videos too time consuming to be able to do it on a daily basis.
The main reason for this is that I prefer to make long videos and not the short 30second to 3 minute videos that some people enjoy making.
So for me, I have chosen to use test-based blog posts with pictures as my primary style of writing posts.
However, other people prefer to make videos. Writing a post such as this one might be too time consuming for them.
My friend and team member – Chris Landry – he prefers to shoot short videos for his blog posts, instead of writing text.
That’s HIS style of Blogging, and that’s awesome!
Some people prefer to make audio podcasts, where they just speak into a voice recorder and record their blog posts that way.
And of course some people prefer to mix things up and do all three.
The point here is don’t try to be something you’re not!
If you’re reading my blog post and the idea of writing so many words makes you want to throw up, then TEXT based blog posts are probably not your thing! That’s fine!
You can use video and/or audio blogging as your preferred method and keep the text to a minimum.
Nothing wrong with that.
Just realize that your style might be different from mine or anyone else.
#3 – Make Money an Incentive
One of the biggest incentives besides sharing your passion and wisdom with other people can be to make money with your Blog.
I’m not just talking about building a full time business with a Blog, but making ANY amount of money can be a HUGE motivator.
When I first started Blogging, I installed Google Adsense on my Blog I think the very first week.
If I remember correctly, at the end of the month of sporadic blogging, I think I made around $3 – $5 with my Blog.
That is NOT big money at all.
It’s almost completely insignificant, right?
WRONG!
There’s something magical about making money from blogging.
Even if it’s just a few dollars here and there which flow into your pocket and pay for a coffee, it can be a LOT of fun to get paid for blogging.
Over time, my Adsense earnings started to add up, and eventually I would receive cheques in the mail for over a hundred dollars which was pretty exciting to me at that time.
It can be a LOT of fun to get a cheque for over $100, just for blogging about your passions.
If you’re using the Kalatu Branding Station, then a monetization strategy is already built-in for you from the get-go, but if you’re using some other blogging system then find a way to monetize your Blog.
It can be a lot of fun and as many successful bloggers have proven, those seemingly small amounts can start to add up very quickly and you could potentially start earning a significant income from your Blog!
#4 – Reading Other People’s Blogs
I have found that reading other people’s blog posts can be really helpful for maintaining consistency.
There’s something about seeing another person writing on a daily basis that helps you with your belief that it IS in fact possible to write a blog post every day.
This is yet another reason why the 21 Day Blogging Challenge can be so helpful.
When you join the challenge, you’ll be given access to a private group for all the participants and you will be able to see all of the blog posts that are written every day by the participants.
When you see 100, 200, 500 or more people blogging on a daily basis, there’s just something that happens in your mind where your excuses that it’s not possible melt away.
Also, by reading other people’s Blog posts, you’ll get ideas for what to write about yourself as well.
You might read someone’s Blog post and not really agree with their opinion – great, so write a Blog post sharing YOUR opinion on the subject.
You might read someone’s Blog post and realize that they just skimmed the surface of the topic – great, so write a Blog post that goes into more depth on the subject.
You might read someone’s Blog post and realize that what they have written could be summarized in a 3 minute video instead – great, so shoot a quick 3 minute video on the subject.
Or you might read multiple people’s Blog posts on a similar topic and decide to combine all the best information from all of those blog posts, along with your own experience and opinions into one single blog post that has it all.
It’s just like how some of the most successful authors out there are also prolific readers of books, if you want to develop your skills as a blogger, it can be very helpful to start reading blogs.
#5 – Have an Accountability Buddy or Two
Another very useful thing to have is an accountability buddy.
Someone who is also committed to blogging daily and who you can share your blog posts with, get inspiration, motivation and ideas from.
Sometimes you might be having one of those days where you just hit writer’s blog and have no clue what to Blog about, and your accountability buddy can help you out with some ideas.
Even just having an accountability buddy that reads each post you write, and leaves a short comment and you do the same for them, can be of huge help.
There’s something about being accountable to another human being, who we don’t want to let down, that can help us to stick to our desire to become a successful blogger.
If you don’t know anyone like this, you can join the 21 Day Blogging Challenge and you’ll get access to a group of several hundred bloggers who have made the commitment to blog daily.
I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least one or two people in there that you could introduce yourself to and become accountability buddies with.
#6 – Track Your Stats!
If there is one thing that I have heard more times than I can remember from people who started blogs and were about to give up on blogging because of feeling discouraged, it would be this statement:
“Paul, I don’t know…this blogging thing is not working… I’ve written a bunch of posts, and NOBODY is even looking at my site…I haven’t gotten any comments on any of my stuff, nobody is reading anything.”
You have no idea how many times I’ve heard this.
Look, the fact is that when you invest time and energy into writing a blog post, or creating a video, one of the DEEPEST DESIRES that we all have is for other people to consume our content.
If NOBODY is reading your stuff, you’ll stop Blogging!
One of the reasons that people are SO ADDICTED to Facebook is because of the “LIKE” Button and the comment sections.
When people post a picture of themselves or their kid or their dog or cat, they sit there and wait for someone to hit that “LIKE” button.
When they see someone “LIKING” their content, they feel good.
When they don’t, they feel like crap.
It’s the same thing with YouTube.
If you upload a video to YouTube, and you come back 24 hours later and hit refresh and you see that your video views is 0 people or 1 view (yourself), you WILL feel discouraged.
There’s a deep desire that we all have for our content to be consumed.
When that content is not consumed, we feel like failures!
The challenge with BLOGGING is that what most people THINK that they should be tracking is comments.
Meaning, they write a Blog post, and then a day later they come back and see how many comments were left on that post.
If they see a bunch of comments, they think the post is successful.
If they see zero comments, they think it’s a failure!
The truth is, however, that just because you’re not getting comments, it doesn’t meant that people are not consuming your content and it doesn’t mean that they’re not enjoying it!
Look, the reality of the situation is that 95-99% of people who will ever visit your blog and consume your content and get value from it, will NOT leave a comment!
Based on my blogging career for 8+ years I can say that my stats show that over 99% of my visitors NEVER leave a comment.
There’s NOTHING wrong with that. I’ve spoken to MANY of my readers over the years and I asked them if they liked this or that post, and they said yes they enjoyed it.
When I ask them why they didn’t leave a comment then, they said “I don’t know..I had nothing else to add” or “I’m not sure, I loved the post, but just didn’t want to leave a comment.”
This is NORMAL!
This is why it’s so important to track your blogging stats, and NOT comments as your measure of success.
I highly recommend that everyone installs Google Analytics on their Blog and track their stats on a regular basis so that they can see how many people are visiting their site.
For example, here are my analytics for the the past month or so since I started blogging daily.
As you can see, I am getting traffic on a daily basis, more on some days than others, but it’s pretty consistent.
If you look through my Blog archives, however, you’ll see that not every post has comments on it!
Some posts have many comments, and other posts don’t have any comments.
I don’t use comments as a measure of success / failure though, because I learned a long time ago that it’s not a reliable measure.
If you’re a Kalatu Brand Station user, setting up Google Analytics can be done very easily as built-in integration for Google Analytics is part of Kalatu, however if you’re using some other blogging platform then make sure you find a way to get analytics installed.
#7 – Blog About What YOU Want to Blog About
Another common trap I have seen many bloggers fall into is listening to some so-called “guru” or “expert” who tells them that they MUST pick a highly targeted NICHE for their Blog and to write NOTHING but highly targeted content on that Blog.
A lot of this stems from old search engine optimization techniques that used to work, where you would register a domain and build a website that’s very targeted to one keyword or one niche market, and if your website didn’t deviate from that single focus, then Google would reward you with more traffic.
This is an old, outdated strategy and it doesn’t work anymore.
I have seen so many people being so concerned about picking a single topic for their blog and being deathly afraid of writing a blog post on any other topic than what their site is about.
You don’t have to worry about this!
There’s nothing wrong with blogging about whatever topic you want, regardless what your main blog topic is.
I’ve tried building niche blogs where all I write about is one single topic and nothing but that, and I’ve also built a blog that has many different topics, and you know what I discovered?
People read my blog for ME, not my TOPIC…
They might originally be attracted to my blog because I write a post or a series of posts on a specific topic that they’re interested in, but if a week later I write a blog post on a totally different topic, they don’t care!
The most important thing is to just blog daily… and WHAT you blog about is NOT that important.
Most of my blog posts tend to be related to making money online, blogging, personal development and marketing, but that’s not because I specifically sit there and force myself to only write on that topic.
The reason I write about those topics more often than not is because that is what I *WANT* to write about on that day because that’s what’s interesting to me.
But if tomorrow I had the desire to write about a really cool new dog-training technique that I just discovered and tested out with my dogs, then that’s what I’ll write about.
Or I might decide to start writing about weight loss strategies, or producing music!
Don’t worry so much about what you’re blogging about, just GET BLOGGING!
Over time, as you blog more and more, you’ll develop a loyal audience that will most likely be interested in 90% of the stuff you blog about anyways, and when you do write about the 10% that they don’t really care about, they’ll just skip those posts, but other people might find THOSE posts the most valuable to them.
Blogging is about creating a connection and a relationship between two human beings – YOU as the Blogger and YOUR READERS.
YOU are not a TOPIC…you’re a human being. You have multiple interests.
When you get together with your friends or family, you talk about different things, right?
So why would it be a problem to blog about different things on a Blog?
It’s not…
Blog about what you’re passionate about blogging that day. Period. End of story.
The most important thing it to just blog. 🙂
I hope you enjoyed this article and I hope that you decide to join us in the 21 Day Blogging Challenge.
There’s a new one starting tomorrow – February 2nd, but if you’re reading this after that date, just sign-up for the challenge anyways as we have new ones starting on a regular basis.