Most people who blog also have a full time job or occupation (i.e., school), not to mention other personal activities (e.g., friends and family), so balancing everything can become tricky indeed.

In fact if you don’t plan well your blog is probably the one that is going to suffer first. That is, when things get messy or overwhelming, most people just abandon their blogs.

I think this is a mistake, because a blog is a great marketing tool for anyone. It helps you improve your writing, it expands your network of contacts, it builds an audience for your ideas, it allows you to establish expertise in your field and so on.

That is why I decide to write a post with 4 tips that will help you stay focused on your blog, even if your personal life is taking most of your time.

1. Focus on the core activities

Writing blog posts, promoting blog posts, building links, creating social bookmarking profiles, promoting on Twitter, creating Facebook fan pages, experimenting with PPC ads, reading RSS feeds, creating eBooks, etc.

Trying to do everything I mentioned above would be possible, and it could help your blog, but it would also burn you out quickly.

If you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to your blog, focus on the core activities only. The main one is writing content. If you only have time for one task, use it to write content. If in one day you happen to have some extra time, use it to promote your best posts.

That is it. If you write great content and promote it slightly your blog will grow naturally, and you’ll keep your sanity.

2. Have fun with it

You need to have fun with your blog, else you’ll lose the motivation to keep it alive it very quickly.

The first step to achieve this is to choose a niche you are interested in. If you pick a niche only to make money you’ll find it painful to write the content no matter what.

Second, you need to make a compromise between what you like to write and what your readers like to read. Go too much with the former and your audience will go away. Go too much with the latter and you’ll lose motivation to write.

3. Set milestones

You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you can’t get motivated if you don’t think something is improving.

That is why milestones are important. They allow you to track the progress of your blog, and once you see things are getting better, you’ll get motivated to keep working on the blog.

Examples of milestones you could set:

* to reach 1,000 daily page views
* to reach 1,000 RSS subscribers
* to write a post that will receive 20 comments
* to reach an Alexa rank of 100,000

4. Monetize it

Like it or not, money is a very strong motivator. If you are not monetizing your blog yet, and are losing motivation to keep working at it, maybe you should put some ads or affiliate links around.

Don’t expect to get rich overnight, but I am sure that even $100 monthly would give you an extra incentive to write on your blog.

Apart from the immediate results you’ll also see potential there. You’ll realize that your blog can produce real money, and that the better the content you put there, the more money you’ll make.

It becomes a virtuous cycle, where you write more and better content to make more money, and the more money you make the more motivated you become to write more and better content.