ELENA PETERS | MIDLIFE BLOGGER

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What if you could grow your blog with only a one hour commitment everyday? 

We all know how easy it is to get sucked in to working on our blogs day and night. It took me years to break the cycle of over-working and burning out before I developed good habits. I now produce more content, get results faster and have a real life outside blogging!

The good news? It’s not that hard to be laser focused and more productive. Once you identify, acknowledge and eliminate your self-sabotaging habits, you will see your blog grow consistently with a lot less stress and overwhelm.

In 2016, I had a total of three blogs. Yes, three. I was tossing spaghetti everywhere trying to make something stick. It is not an exaggeration to say that there were weeks that I worked sun up to well past sundown. It is no surprise that I eventually burnt out and wanted to quit everything. I was stressed, over-whelmed and I felt stupid.

Why can’t I figure this blogging thing out?

I literally did nothing for weeks. Unwilling to let all my perceived hard work go down the tubes, I eventually started working on my blogs again.

But instead of going all in like before, I did the minimum. And guess what? My blogs grew exponentially and in a few short months, I was able to quit my job and work on my blogs full-time.

The most common problem I see bloggers making is that they are busy being busy.

They think that if they keep working, keep consuming courses and endlessly stalking successful bloggers, they will find the secret to success.

But the real secret is working smarter and not harder. 

The secret is knowing where you should put your focus, and what things you should out and out ignore. 

The secret is to stop labelling tasks that keep you merely busy, as working on your blog. 

Seriously, I dare you to keep a log of all your blogging activities for one week. I bet you will be surprised to find that you wasted a lot of time on unimportant things.

The unimportant things have a sneaky way of taking over and consuming all your time. They become bad blogging habits. They are what keep you from growing your blog. 

See if you suffer from any of these:

3 Bad Blogging Habits You Need To Break Right Now

1. Watching what everyone else is doing

This is so much more than getting sucked into the comparison pit. We all know comparing ourselves to others that are ahead of us is bad for our self-esteem and mindset. But a far greater risk exists.

All of a sudden you are writing posts that don’t fit your avatar, you start to mimic others and you totally lose sight of who you are and what you have to offer.

You begin to work from a place of fear, instead of drawing from a place of creativity, joy and a love of sharing all that you are.

Sound familiar?

You need to go cold turkey and stop scrolling through your social media profiles and checking out what other bloggers are doing. It is a time and mental drain suck.

Keep your head down and ignore what everyone else is doing.

2. Over-consuming information

• Have you bought courses you haven’t finished? 
• Do you binge watch videos about how to blog or how to do a specific strategy?
• Are you in a ton of blogging groups and get overwhelmed with threads about how to beat algorithm changes?

Enough is enough.

You don’t need to learn anymore.

Riddle me this. Have you ever noticed that a lot of the big, successful bloggers making oodles of money, never took a single course in the beginning?

Some of them started so long ago that there weren’t any courses available. 

They made it because they figured it out on their own.

Learning happens in the doing, not the reading.

And they allowed themselves grace to make mistakes and look stupid.

Start before you’re ready needs to be your new mantra. The goal is progress and not perfection.

No matter where you are in your blogging journey, you have the knowledge to move forward.

3. Daily tasks not aligned with goals

Bloggers are obsessed with checklists. I guess they feel like if they can check everything off of a list, they are making progress.

But are you?

The most important thing about a check or a to do list is whether or not it includes tasks that get you closer to your goals. If it doesn’t, you are wasting your time.

I know. I know. Blogging has a lot of crappy tasks like maintenance and updates that need to be done. But they honestly don’t take up that much time.

The biggest time suck for bloggers is social media. It is important to be visible and building a community. The question you must ask yourself is, is what you are posting and sharing supporting your goals as well.

Posting for the sake of posting does nothing for you without a strategy. 

So get clear on your blogging goals, then create your to do list with focus. Cut out the fluff and you will grow your blog with inspired action.

I know it is hard to face the fact that the reason you are not making progress with your blog is because you get in your own way. Blogging is as much your controlling your own mindset as it is dealing with any other external influences beyond your control.

Be it algorithm changes or how busy your real life is, it is you and the harmful habits you have that keep you stuck. And the sooner you acknowledge that, the sooner you will be on your way to making your blog a success.

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