How To Endure Suffering To Build A Better Blog

Building a blog is a lot like training for an endurance sport. Very early mornings, commitment and consistency, training when you don’t feel like it, training alone, sacrificing time, enduring a lot of pain.

It’s enough to make one second guess their decision to build a blog. It always turns out to be a longer, harder and more arduous path than initially thought, it’s like thinking running a marathon is moderately easy because so many people do it successfully but once you attempt the run yourself you realize just how much suffering 26.2 miles is.

The Pain Of Consistent Creation Is The Engine Behind All Great Blogs

Pain is the engine behind all great blogs. Like a marathon, you can’t just show up on race day and expect success. Most first-timers train for a marathon an entire year, adhering to a disciplined diet and training routine. Meanwhile, amazingly, many bloggers whine after just a few months of inconsistent effort that blogging doesn’t work. That’s because this group of bloggers is avoiding the pain of discipline and the pain of consistent creation. They are inconsistent in their effort because they only blog when they feel like it. That is a recipe for failure. Only enduring the pain and suffering of consistent creation for multiple years is going to lead to blogging success. It’s a sacrifice most aren’t willing to make, not just in blogging but in all areas of life. “But it’s hard!” they say. Yes, and the only way to build a great blog is to endure voluntary and involuntary suffering.

• Voluntary Suffering is self-imposed pain in order to achieve a goal. This is setting a 5:00 AM alarm in order to blog for three hours before leaving for work. Listening to mind-numbing internet marketing podcasts during the commute. Blogging through lunch. Blogging more after work. Reading books on copywriting, SEO, marketing, and writing while falling asleep and then doing it all again the next day, for months, even years if necessary.
• Involuntary Suffering is pain life inflicts upon you without your input. Illness, car problems, family emergencies, financial stress, algorithm changes. The only thing you can do is decide how you are going to respond to the challenges of life, either with the courage to actively confront this suffering or by hiding. To either keep on writing when times are tough or throw in the towel.

Life is pain. Might as well choose the type of pain that leads to a positive outcome. You need to take your blogging shot even if you might fail.

Focus On Your Vision Through The Suffering While Building Your Blog

You must always maintain your vision. Maintain the vision of living free because you made a commitment to build your blog: live wherever you like, work wherever and whenever you like, travel wherever you like, with whoever you like. Hold onto that vision and overcome self-imposed suffering. Hold a clear picture of what you want your life to look like and what the plan is to get there is how to overcome blogging hopelessness when success seems impossible.

Without vision, your dream will perish. You will be aimless and feel lost. You will have no direction and go nowhere. You will eat too much junk food and watch too much Netflix. You will lie awake at night and agonize over the things you should have done differently and yet will have no plan for what you will do differently in the morning. That is the fruit of no vision.

Pointless suffering is what destroys a person. Vision, however, cuts through suffering. It gives meaning to suffering. Suffering with purpose doesn’t destroy a person, it makes the person stronger.

Perhaps all this talk sounds at first overly dramatic when applied to blogging, but is it? What is blogging, after all? Is it merely the craft of writing words? Is it merely a fun little hobby, just the same as playing with model trains? No, of course it isn’t.

Blogging Is A Tool

Blogging is a tool, a chisel that will allow you to tunnel out of Shawshank Prison and into the light of freedom. It is the tool we are using to stop living life on our knees and to start living life in abundance and of our own volition.

There are many other tools available to chisel your way out and each person must choose the tool that leads to the best probable outcome. For us, that tool is blogging. We are writers, readers, and dreamers. Blogging is our way out, it is the tool that gives us guaranteed success as long as we persist. So, no, we aren’t merely “blogging.” We are creating a new life for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for those we help through our writings. That why it’s important to hold onto your vision and proceed forward with a relentless plan for achieving it. This isn’t just daydreaming!

Find Meaning In Your Blogging Suffering, Turn It Into An Opportunity

It’s hardly fair to draw from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, yet it is a book I find myself going back to again and again to remind myself that no matter the situation I am in I can still make choices for how I will respond, and blogging is no different. Turn zero meaning into meaning.

• No Traffic →More Time To Write Great Articles For My Future Readers
• Not Ranking In Search Engines → Great Opportunity to Learn How To Optimize For SEO
• No Comments → More Opportunity To Learn What Writing Moves People Enough To Leave Behind A Comment
• I’m Burned Out → I’m Still Alive Which Means I Can Still Fight For My Better Future
• This Sucks → Great Content For Blog Posts In The Future When I Am Successful

There is an opportunity to turn any negative into, at the very least, an opportunity for learning, an opportunity to get better. This is a required mindset if you are going to achieve blogging success.

How To Climb Out Of The Blogging Pit Of Doom

When you are down in the dumps with your blogging effort there is no amount of inspirational quotes that will get you going again. What you need is a game plan with incremental steps that will move you forward until you can get out of the slump. Here are some strategies that have helped me get out of the dumps.

• Lower The Suffering Threshold: Instead of writing 2,000 words per day like prolific writer Stephen King, set your sights on the minimal viable word count of 500 words. I have found 500 words is the minimum amount of words I can write in a writing session and still feel okay about my efforts, not great, but okay. 500 words a day, 7 days a week, is enough to produce three good articles a week, and three articles a week is pretty good in the blogging game. But if you can only get 200 words that’s okay, 200 is better than zero. That’s still about 2 articles a week.
• Write A Lot During The Good Times: I know this article is about being stuck in the pit of doom, but part of the blogging / writing profession is knowing there will be days, weeks, and even months of being stuck in the pit of blogging doom. Armed with this knowledge you must takes steps to produce a ton of content during the good times when words are flowing, so you are sitting on a goldmine of content for times of struggle and you can continue with your publishing cycle.
• Use The Suffering For Content: The oldest advice in the blogging / writing game is to bleed your soul upon the page, and then edit. All your favorite bands do this with their music. Their souls are bare through their music and that what makes it hit so hard. Write through the suffering to produce some of your greatest writing of all time.
• Refer Back To Your Old Articles For Content: If you are stuck coming up with content, there are several ways how to start writing a lot again, which includes referring back to your old articles. So many times when writing you want to go on tangents, but you stop yourself. Well, those tangents are new articles, friend. Look at your old articles and remind yourself, “Oh yeah, I wanted to write about that but stopped myself.” Now is the time to write that article. Let the words flow.

Suffering Builds A Stronger Blog

Hard times are the great filtering event between the blogs that make it and the blogs that don’t. Blogmasters who fight through the suffering of voluntary and involuntary challenges are the ones who come out on the other side with a stronger and more versatile blog, ready and more resistant to hardship. One of the more important things you can do is recognize when you are in a suffering state.

• Initial Excitement Wears Off Stage This usually happens between months 3-6. Excitement of a new blog wears off. Big, initial dreams don’t seem possible. No traffic. No money. No hope. Many people quit here. Recognize where you are and keep moving forward.
• Plateau Stage The blog leveled off and you can’t seem to get to the next level. $500 bucks a month is great…but not for the amount of hours that is being put into the blog, less than minimum wage when added up. Many people quit here and look for something different because they don’t realize that it’s on the plateaus real progress is made but the payoff is further down the road (and often seems to come out of nowhere Where did all this traffic suddenly come from??? I haven’t done anything different over the last 6 months!??)
• A Change In The Game Stage A ton of successfully bloggers called it quits when Google massively changed their algorithm and traffic nosedived. Instead of making the necessary adjustments, many bloggers simply walked away, which is mind-blowing to me. This is the most recent filter that opened up so many new opportunities to new bloggers because so many others foolishly quit the game.

Those are the three main filtering / suffering events bloggers face. If you can battle through them you are going to come out on the other side with a very, very strong blog. Don’t quit when you are down in the dumps! It’s an opportunity to bring your blog to the next level!

A New Blogging Call To Action

Blogging slumps do not last if you fight through. They are difficult situations disguised as roadblocks which are actually opportunities to bring your blog to the next level. See it for what it is.

• Make A List Of Current Outstanding Blogging Tasks Optimize images in old posts for SEO, publish new post, fix about page, add email opt-in form to sidebar, etc.
• Assign Them A Priority Level This is as simple as writing them in the order they need to be completed in based on importance and need.
• Execute On The List Only do one task at a time, don’t jump around. Knock out the list as quickly as you can during your work sessions. Many times the feeling of suffering is really just feeling overwhelmed, and being overwhelmed can be conquered by making a plan and taking action!
• Feel The Freedom Of Clearing The To-Do List Once the tasks that have been buzzing in your brain are accomplished you will be ready to lock back in and bust through the barrier you are facing and bring your blog to the next level.