I saw an article at Daily Blog Tips today that made me laugh. It was all about how to keep motivated to post to your blog.

To build a successful blog, you need motivation.

Motivation comes easy when you're making lots of money from your blog.

When you're making very little or no money however, you still need to work hard over a sustained period of time to get to the point where you're making good money.

Here are five methods you can use to boost your motivation to be consistently productive even if your blog isn't rewarding you with any money yet.

The ideas that followed may very well be good motivation boosters. But what a depressing thought! "I hate to break it to you, but you're going to need multiple methods to keep yourself going if you ever want your blog to succeed."

It might not be so bad if the quote above were entirely true. But in fact, there's no guarantee that making money from your blog is going to keep you motivated. It probably would for a while, but eventually, anything but the intrinsic desire to blog is going to lose the power to light a fire in your belly.

What you need is less motivation, not more!

Okay, that's not exactly true the way I said it. But let me explain with a few hypothetical examples.

How many bloggers would there be in a "stone age" internet?

Imagine an internet with nothing but one Twitter-like website where all you could do was publish the titles of your blog posts and a link to request them by email. And imagine you couldn't save documents on your computer or copy and paste.

So each time somebody wanted to read your blog post, they'd send you the request, and you'd retype it and email it to them.

Okay, this example is a little out there -- downright absurd even. But how many people in the entirety of such a world do you think would be able to muster enough motivation to be bloggers? You could probably count them on the fingers of one hand.

How many bloggers would there be in a world without blogging tools?

Now, think back to the days before WordPress, Blogger, etc. To publish a blog, you had to create a new page for each post, FTP it to your site, update your homepage to link to it, update your RSS feed, etc.

Yes, there were people who did that. But do you think we'd have even a fraction as many blogs today if we still didn't have blogging tools that make publishing easy? Not a chance. Even if everyone had the necessary skills, far fewer people would have enough motivation.

Doing more with less motivation is better than having more motivation.

My point is that with the right tools, you don't need nearly as much motivation to keep blogging. If it's easy enough that you'll do it with just the amount of motivation you've already got, you'll do it.

And you won't have to keep finding new ways to motivate yourself when the old motivations wear off.

Just having a good CMS isn't enough.

Millions of people have a copy of WordPress or some other CMS on their webserver, and still haven't mustered the motivation to blog regularly. And I used to be one of them. I used to average just 2 posts a month.

The problem is that posting your content is only half the battle. The other half is coming up with ideas and writing it.

If you've followed this blog at all lately, you know that the secrets that took me from twice-a-month blogger to five-times-a-week blogger are:

  1. Blog Riffing: grabbing a quote from somebody else's blog, and using it as the seed for a post of my own...just like this post (see that quote up there?)
  2. SEO Content Factory: a combination RSS feed reader and publishing tool that makes Blog Riffing easy.

It still takes motivation to blog every day. But I've only missed a handful of days since last September (mostly around the holidays), even though I have pretty much the same amount of motivation as I had before.

I'm a few days away from releasing an update to SEO Content Factory (free to current owners) that'll make it even easier to use. Details to come.