Sustaining a blog is clearly the most challenging and long-term issue for kickstarting a blog. Once the effort of planning and the satisfaction of starting a blog is complete, the work of maintaining the focus, relevance and quality of a blog is with you for the long term.
In Kickstarting a blog the biggest challenge is how to keep motivated and sustain your efforts over the long term
As I wrote in part 2 of this guide on how to get started, you should use your existing network to gain traction and momentum for your blog, and for each post along with the writing and presentation you will need to publicise repeatedly and consitently in order to drive up your traffic and levels of engagement.
Here is a very useful infographic by DivvyHQ on 12 things to do after you have written a blog post which goes through steps to take each time to make sure you are promoting your posts to its fullest potential audience.
Working these points in a standard process or checklist will help make the tasks easier, and some be simplified with help from scheduling and automation software, – but don’t underestimate the amount of time you will need to get this running smoothly.
Keeping on keeping on
You need to be passionate and interested in your subject to sustain quality content on your blog for any length of time. If you write with enthusiasm and with attentiveness that passion and interest will shine through and engage your audience.
Stay interested, be targeted, and bring value to all of your posts, and you will start to see engagement and audiences increase.
Make a publication schedule that you can meet with quality content, and allocate proper time and priority to meeting your blogging schedule. Stay alert to industry news and developments, see what subjects are engaging your peers, and you will pick up plenty of ideas for new posts.
Blogging needn’t be an isolating experience, you can connect with others in your industry or buddy up with another blogger to help keep your motivation going and to keep your direction fresh.
Look back regularly at your goals and objective and track where you are in meeting them, celebrate your successes as you go and try not to be overcome by setbacks. Learn from your analytics information and from your audience as to what is working and what isn’t, and don’t be afraid to change direction or correct your course as needed.
And for a final few words on the subject, try these three articles on how to keep on going if you do hit a wall:
- 7 Tips To Keep Your Blog Going For The Long Run by Heidi Cohen
- Six tips to keep your blog going by Rachel Strella
- Burned Out Blogger: 7 Ways to Get Your Mojo Back by Stanford Smith
That’s it from me on kickstarting a blog. Did you find this content useful? What do you think I missed out that has helped you or that you would like to see? I would love to hear your comments below.