It can be difficult to stay motivated when just getting started in making money online. It can take some time to start getting earnings and seeing any results from your efforts which can easily be discouraging. I have found myself getting excited and inspired one day and depressed and despondent the next. It can be amazing how one little 20-cent ad click can get you motivated enough to write several more articles. I am not quite at the point where I am earning something everyday, but I am getting closer. Here are several tips and ideas that I use to stay motivated while I wait for the internet earnings to come in.

The first, and in my opinion most important, thing to remember is to set goals for your online money making adventure that you can control. I have no direct control over how much money I can make online each day, although I can certainly influence it. However, what I can control is the number of articles I produce or the amount of time I spend on my online money making activities. Currently, I am writing for HubPages and eHow on a part time basis in the evenings after work, mornings before work, and on the weekends. When I set goals for my money making activities, I try to first focus on articles produced. This is a goal that only depends on me and my effort. Next, I focus on traffic. I can’t make people click but I can interact on forums, pick good keywords, produce backlinks, and use social bookmarking to increase my traffic. You can set a goal to produce so many backlinks and make so many forum posts each week. Finally, I try to translate those efforts to an expected number of earnings and hope that it all pans out. It is important to try and not be discouraged by lack of earnings but to keep working on producing quality content and driving traffic. If you focus on these things, the online earnings will eventually follow.

It is important to set and record your goals, but you need to make them reasonable.  Failing to meet your goals is one guaranteed way to become discouraged and give up.  When I am setting my article goals, I have to look at my individual writing style and speed and my free time.  I determine the number of articles I will produce a month at a time and figure out how many articles I want to have by the end of the month.  My current goal is to have 70 Hubs by the end of August 2009 and to have 30 eHow articles by the end of the month.  I have recorded this goal online at my online income blog and so I feel a certain amount of accountability.  The goal will require some effort but is not impossible given my life circumstances.  It would be impossible for me to do 100 articles in any format over a month’s time with a full time job and 6 kids.  Then I could easily become discouraged and quit.  Make sure the goals that you set are reasonable and that you are somehow accountable for them.

It is easy to get burned out doing anything, and we all need a break sometimes.  For me, things can get busy during the week, and it can be difficult to get anything done.  I had been getting up one hour earlier to write and work on some of my online money making activities.  After several weeks, I was starting to feel the effects.  So, this past week I did not get up to write at all.  I didn’t publish a single hub for several days in a row.  I got some extra sleep and worked around the house allowing my mind a break from the mental activities of writing online.  It seems to have worked out well since this is my third hub in less than 24 hours, and I have another one virtually written in my head.  I have also published 2 eHow articles and sign up and submitted an ezine article during that time as well.  Because of the mental break during the week, I have had a very productive weekend and this will likely continue over the next few days.

I am sure that you get tired of writing and researching like I do.  It sometimes can get difficult to come up with ideas, the writing and researching becomes tedious, and the words just stop flowing.  During those times, it may be worthwhile to just spend some time on the forums or maybe working on revamping a few of your articles.  These things will ultimately be useful for improving your earnings but aren’t as mentally taxing as writing and producing content.  The other thing that I like to do when I am getting discouraged at HubPages is to work on my eHow articles.  This gives me a chance to mix it up a bit and not work on the same thing all the time.  Furthermore, it gives me the added benefit of some diversification of income streams via a different site in case anything happens to one site or the other.

One of the blogs that I like to check out periodically is livingoffdividends.com. Just this July, the owner made $3200 online. Now that seems absolutely insane when here I am excited about getting one 20-cent click. But what I look at is the archive section where in December 2007, he made $568 by comparison. So, in a little over 18 months, the online income is up 6-fold! That keeps me motivated. I also look at HubPages at users like Janet21 who is now averaging $100/day in online income but took 2 ½ years to get there. Her first month on HubPages she got 33-cents and her second got 21-cents! To me, that is motivation. It reminds me that we all have to start somewhere and now is where I am getting my start. If I give it about 2 or 3 years and can keep going through all the down times, I will be glad that I persevered.

In summary, it can be difficult to keep working on your online money making skills and activities when it seems like the earnings are slow to materialize. But using these 5 techniques help keep me going and can help you, too.