Do you have blogger problems? If you’re a blogger, chances are good that at one time or another you’ll have come up against it. Writers block, choosing a topic for your blog and making money out of blogging are all potential problems you’ll face as a blogger. If blogging is your strategy to build an income from the internet, it can take some time and this in itself is a problem. You can doubt whether it will work, this can lead to inactivity and procrastination. You might even ask yourself “Is blogging worth it?” If your belief is low, you’ll find yourself procrastinating and not creating the content you need to build.
By making a daily habit out of creating content, you can let a strategy work in your favour rather than worrying and overthinking about whether your strategy works or not. This kind of thinking won’t help you build an income from blogging! If you doubt whether a particular course of action will work for you, take steps to try another strategy out. But don’t let your scepticism stop you from moving forwards. Far better to take a small positive step forwards every day than spend weeks procrastinating over your marketing strategy.
Blogger Problems – Staying On Track With Blogging
There’s a lot of work for a blogger to do. But thinking about the size of this task is seldom helpful! Instead, break it down into small achievable chunks which you can do right now, today; not the long winding road ahead. I’ve wasted countless days procrastinating over my marketing strategy and whether or not blogging can actually work. I’ve agonised over it! But blogging can and does work over the longer term and if you enjoy writing then it’s well worth keeping up with your blogging.
Once you have a habit of blogging, let your habit work for you. Habits are hard to break, especially if you’ve been in them for a while. Procrastination is also a habit if you keep it up long enough. Take imperfect action and consider it a stepping stone to building a long term habit. Even though a single blog post won’t make your online business boom, it’s a first step to a long term strategy. Concentrate on building habits which move you forwards and let your content do the heavy lifting over the longer term.
Blogger Problems – Staying On Track With Blogging
Mini habits by Stephen Guise is a great book particularly for bloggers. Make a mini habit out of blogging and it will serve you well. A mini habit is something you can sustain even on your worst days. If you’re crawling out of bed, miserable and depressed, you should still be able to do that one tiny action which becomes your mini habit. On better days you can do more, but a mini habit should be so ridiculously easy that you can do it every day, without fail.
Make a mini habit out of blogging and over the longer term, it will feel wrong not to be writing your blog post every day! Once you build this strategy into your life, blogging will become a part of your life. This is what’s required to get traction from blogging.
It’s easy to quit your blogging when you’re feeling like it’s not working out! Perhaps your blogs aren’t attracting enough visitors, and you’re not making any sales? Write another blog post – use your struggles to identify those of your readers! You can simultaneously solve your own problems and those of others too by taking this approach!
Blogger Problems – Atomic Habits
Another great book for bloggers is James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Similar to Mini Habits, James Clear talks about small wins over time, overcoming old habits and creating new ones which serve you. Most people have built up a library of habits which aren’t serving them and they stick to them like clockwork.
Creating small changes is what is needed when you think you need to change everything about your life in one go. Most times when we try to make big changes we fail. Think about the New Year’s Resolutions made by those who join a gym in January. Most have dropped out by March, and fallen back to their old habits. If they only used mini habits and made their commitments tiny, they could build a bedrock from which to build sustainable actions over longer periods – atomic habits!
Disappointment When Blogging
Take a look at the image above which is from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. This is a great diagram for bloggers because it shows the “valley of disappointment” which bloggers will face when they don’t get the views/traction they expect. It’s at this point when you think about quitting!
You’ve laboured over your blogging for months and nothing is happening. So you lose momentum and a few months pass without you doing anything. If you only had kept up the habit, you’d have a few more months of content! You look again and still no traction – “why bother” you wonder – so you quit!
A blog can take off exponentially, as you see in the graph. But this might happen a lot later than you might hope. But once you start seeing this potential it gives you more hope and this can encourage you to keep going. Before this point it can feel like a long slog which is heading nowhere! That’s when you’re tempted to quit!
The Chinese Bamboo
The Chinese Bamboo tree is a perfect analogy for blogging. The tree has a gestation period of 3-5 years in which nothing breaks the surface of the soil. It needs water and fertiliser to grow and establish itself. After the gestation period it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks. Blogging is a similar thing in that much of the work you do will be largely unseen.
As you become more established, older posts get traction as you write newer content. Once you break through and get more visitors, leads and sales, growth can speed up quite quickly. But there’s a huge time period before this can happen and many bloggers will quit during this “gestation” period.
Summary
Blogging is a great way to make an income online but it does take time to break through. If you choose a topic you love to write about, you can more easily sustain the necessary effort required to make blogging work for you. Habits are either your friends or your enemy!
Make a habit out of creating content for your blog and it can serve you much better than trying to do something huge all in one go. Let your habits become the path to successful blogging. Once you have some ingrained habits around blogging, you can build on them. But don’t let procrastination and indecision burden you and stop you from writing. Focus on the small little actions you can do today, not the huge mountain ahead!
See also topics for blogging for beginners, Niche Blogging For Profit and affiliate marketing vs blogging.