How To Stay Motivated Blogging, Podcasting, Or Growing Your YouTube Channel

How To Stay Motivated Blogging, Podcasting, Or Growing Your YouTube Channel

In order to stay motivated blogging or growing your online platform, I want to share with you a cycle that I have noticed in my own journey. It is made up of these four main phases:

1. Start-Up Phase
2. “Was This A Good Idea?” Phase
3. “Things Got Hard” Phase
4. Push-Though Phase

The Start-Up Phase

When you are starting a blog or online platform, you will go through several phases. The first four to six weeks you will be pumped. You began with much excitement picking up a theme for your new blog, buying a new camera and objects to decorate your new home TV studio if you are doing a YouTube channel, or are playing around with your new podcast microphone.

Life is good! You have taken the first step, starting up, and you feel already like a winner. But as you start developing your content, you realize that this stuff is a lot more time consuming than you thought. Little by little, as the weeks go by, and nobody seems to be reading your blog, listening to your podcast or watching your YouTube videos, you start to lose enthusiasm.

The “Was This A Good Idea?” Phase

The first two months are crucial for any new content creator. First of all, you are building the foundation for marketing your business online. And second, this is also the period where most people realize that creating content and seeing results is like training for a marathon, a long term game. And because most of us lack the discipline and patience to stay the course, many will be very quick to give up on their dreams.

So, when the fourth blog post you publish has not shown much activity, you start wondering if this is worth doing. After all, you have read plenty of stories of bloggers and content creators who go viral. But in your case, it seems like only your family is reading your blog.

You start doubting yourself, wondering if you are cut for this or have what it takes to be successful. After refreshing your Google Analytics and seeing no activity, you find the confirmation that you needed to determine that this blogging, YouTube, or podcasting thing was, after all, a bad idea.

Don’t do that please!

The “Things Got Hard” Phase

Then, if you didn’t already give up, you enter the phase where you justify putting your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel on hold because things got hard. Maybe you got busy at work and have to work extra hours. Perhaps it is summertime, your kids are home, and you have no free time for creating content. Maybe you are frustrated about learning how to use WordPress to post your blogs, Adobe Premier Pro to edit your videos, or social media to distribute your content.

You feel overwhelmed and decide that right now, things are hard, and you will put your content creation aside “temporarily.” You don’t set a deadline to pick it back up because, deep inside, you have not committed to making the sacrifices to invest in your online platform. 

The Push-Though Phase

All of those feelings and phases are normal. Online marketing takes a long time to see results, but when the ball starts rolling, if you did things right from the beginning as I teach, you will reap the benefits for many years to come.

I committed to staying consistent. Consistency is huge in growing your online platform.

I never missed a posting date. Every Tuesday at two in the morning, I dropped a new podcast episode and a blog post. I don’t know why I picked that time, but I am sure it was because I noticed some prominent blogger or pod-caster dropping his new content at that time. Sometimes when you don’t know the answer, you copy what others do and move along.

The One Question You Need To Answer To Stay Motivated.

I will not apologize for taking so long to get to the core of this post. I think it is important that you see the trajectory of the growth of that blog to prove my point that you need to ride the emotional rollercoaster and stay the course.

Growing your blog and online platform takes a long time, but if you refuse to give up, you will see results. Even though I know that building this new blog takes time, I also experience doubt every day.

When things get hard, when you feel like you want to quit, when there seems to be no time to work on your blog, there is one thing that will keep you motivated. To find out what it is, you need to answer the following question.

Why are you building a blog or online platform?

I want you to dig deep before you decide the answer.

We do it to connect with potential customers, to grow our business, to have a bigger brand, to make more money, to be top of mind for our prospective clients, to be able to quit our full-time jobs, to pursue your dream of owning your own business, etc.

All of those are valid answers. But I want to challenge you because I think that they are superficial reasons. Look deep inside and find the real answer and with that you will find it easier to figure out how to stay motivated blogging.

What is worth the time and sacrifice you are putting into building your platform? Is it to be in control of your destiny, to spend more time with your family, to do work that truly matters to you, or to leave a legacy behind?

All of those answers are a whole lot more meaningful than making more money. Make sure that you can answer that question in one single word. For me, this is my one-word answer:

Freedom

My huge motivator behind spending all this time working on building my online platform to market my business is freedom — the ability to be my own boss, to work from wherever I want whenever I want.

Freedom o be able to publish articles, videos, images, etc., of whatever I want without having to deal with a gatekeeper. Freedom to impress all the ideas that keep me up at night in a medium where they can live and help others.

And ultimately, the main reason that keeps me going every day is to have the freedom to spend more time around my family.

Money isn’t the primary motivator for me. Of course, making money is the primary goal of having my business. But the freedom of owning my destiny and deciding how to spend my most precious asset, my time, is what pushes me to go forward every day.

Conclusion:

I hope that this article offers you some insight into how growing your online platform is a game of patience.

I didn’t spend money paying to drive traffic to my site, mainly because I still don’t understand very well how all of that works, but also because I want to have a sustainable website that does not require an endless input of money to drive traffic to it.

So, no matter how long have you been trying to grow your online platform to market your business. Whether you are just getting started, have hit a plateau, or are thinking about quitting, know that as long as you can’t name your why with one single word, you will feel lost.

If you are struggling to get started or keep going, do this work. Dig dip. Find your Why, your unique motivator. If you don’t, you will likely give up on your dream too soon.

Comment, share, & connect!

I hope you find this progress report and pep talk useful. The goal is to build my business online presence from 0 to 100,000 monthly views by August of 2020.

And please, tell me in the comments section below how are you planning to implement these tips.