Blogging is for everyone, it doesn’t matter if you just want to share you thoughts, write a weekly journal online, blog about your business or anything else. But it definitely can be daunting to take the first step or more importantly stay consistent. So here are some actionable steps to stop procrastinating on your blog and getting back to writing.
How to start
Before you start your blogging journey, you have to set a good foundation by asking yourself some key questions :
Why do you want to write?
People may have different reasons for wanting to write. For some its a form of release; a place to pour your heart out and untangle all your thoughts, or for others its a way to improve their writing, talk about their business or its a combination of all of these. Whatever it might be, asking yourself why you want to blog and understanding your reason is key.
What do you want to write about?
If you can answer the first question, this one might be easier. If its a personal blog you might talk about your thoughts, opinion and maybe a bit about your personal life. If you want to become good at writing, you might share your writing from poems to short stories. Otherwise if its a brand or business, you’ll post whatever is happening in your respective field.
How much do you want to write?
This may vary wildly form person to person, depending on how much time they keep for blogging and what the blog means to them. Someone starting a blog for a brand will probably want to be consistent, but if its a personal blog or any of the others you might only post once a week or even once a month. I’ll talk more about consistency below, but figuring out were you can integrate time for blogging will help you greatly, because frequency doesn’t matter, consistency does.
How to not stop
So you figured out why, what and how you’re going to blog and might have even started blogging. Congratulations! You’ve made the first step, now comes the process of actually sticking with it.
Make blogging a hobby and not a interest
This is the first and most important filter that most people don’t pass through. Everyone has a lot of interest that sounds interesting in theory and fun to talk about. And there’s hobbies that actually take most of your time. For you to become consistent, you have to make blogging a hobby and not an interest. That involves replacing or minimizing some of your current hobbies for making time for blogging. That is, you have to make a conscious effort to make time for blogging no matter how little that may be.
Keep yourself accountable
We are always more dedicated when we know people are watching. So you have to put yourself out there and ask people to read your stuff, it may be your friends, family or your peers. Let them read it, and always ask for feedback because it helps a lot. I know that can be scary at first but putting a bit of pressure will hopefully prevent you from slacking off.
Set a goal
Setting a goal ahead of time and sharing that goal with others or just posting online can be a great way of making you consistent. Again, it makes you accountable to yourself and others. For me, posting a blog post every 2 weeks was one of my new years resolution this year, and I’m happy to confirm that is still going strong. But remember It’s easy to set a goal, it’s if we stick with it or not that actually matters.
Keep Writing
You might feel like you have nothing to write about, but that’s untrue. Remember whatever you write initially isn’t the final draft. I had this trouble initially, where I was hesitant to type anything, thinking that’s what people will read. But try to think the post page as a rough piece of paper and not an esteemed notebook. It is okay if you write an entire article and not use it at all. Its part of the writing process. Whatever comes to mind as a vague idea, write it down, make up a fake tile and scribble your thoughts. Come back to it later and keep on refining and drafting until you get your thoughts properly across. Keep at it and you’ll find the peaks in the valleys, believe me.
