How to Keep Motivated when Blogging

Discover 11 essential ways to keep motivated when blogging and prevent blogger burn out!

For the last two weeks, we've been talking about blogger burn out: How to Make a Comeback after a Blogging Break and How to Identify Blogger Burn Out. Today, I'd like to continue on on the topic and discuss some methods and tips for keeping the spark alive in your blogging:

How to Keep the Blogging Spark Alive

Find a group of blog friends to be involved with--they can help keep you accountable when it comes to posting regularly, but more importantly, you can support one another.
Work to a schedule--organisation really is key when it comes to blogging successfully. Being able to glance at a calendar and knowing a week or even a month in advance what posts you have coming up will help to ease stress and prevent those panicky moments of not knowing what to write about.
Be consistent--having a list of topics is one thing, but ensuring you write every day, or every other day or however frequently works for you, is another. Repetition truly is the key to blogging success.
Set goals and targets--no matter if you want to publish a certain number of posts each month or reach X amount of followers on Twitter by a certain date, set yourself achievable goals and targets to keep you on track and give you something to strive towards.
Read other blogs--you're probably thinking "How many hours in the day does she think I have?!" which is fair enough, but one of the things my writing professors always stressed at uni was how important it was to read other people's work. It helps you to form opinions about your own work, but it also helps to generate ideas.
Engage with other bloggers--this is similar to the first point, but even more important. Yes, you'll want a core group of bloggers to form a part of your blogging "tribe" but you also want to constantly engage with a range of bloggers by leaving comments on their blog or social media posts.
Reward yourself--I'm all about the Bribery School of Getting Through Life and nothing motivates me more than working toward achieving a treat. It's no different on my blog. Don't be afraid to set up a rewards system for yourself. For instance, when you reach X amount of followers, you can treat yourself to a social media scheduling subscription? Or if one of your posts reaches X amount of views in X amount of days, you can treat yourself to a new photography background or photo prop.
Embrace those freebies--everybody knows bloggers get spoilt with all the best perks and freebies! There's nothing wrong with embracing those freebies and allowing them to provide much needed inspo for getting out that next post and reaching that next follower goal. Just as your paycheck motivates you at work, so can it motivate you as a blogger.
Make a mood board--create a private Pinterest board with posts you wish you had written or posts that you find inspiring from bloggers you love. Refer to it every now and then for inspiration and motivation to keep you on the right track. Include some brands that you hope to work with one day too and opportunities you'd like to achieve as a blogger such as being a conference speaker or leading a workshop et cetera. Visualise it then achieve it!
Don't sweat the small stuff--putting yourself out there is an essential off-shoot of blogging. As a blogger, you put yourself into the public light and open yourself up to a ton of criticism, whether you're sharing tidbits from your life or things you've made. Everybody has an opinion and everyone is a critic and you will get negative comments, but don't sweat it. For every one person who doesn't like something you've posted, there'll be bucketloads of others who do. If you do find yourself the brunt of negative feedback, take it on the chin and go high.

I recently received negative feedback on a recipe I put a lot of energy and time into creating. The poster left a comment and said that it wasn't a very nice thing to look at first thing in the morning. My gut response was to quip back with "neither is your face" but instead, I decided to be the adult and simply replied, "Ha! Well you have to blame time zones for that; it's middle of the afternoon here in the UK!"
Don't be so hard on yourself--you'll make mistakes with blogging and you'll experience setbacks, but don't be so hard on yourself. It's all a part of the learning curve.