What Motivates You?

Motivation is a funny thing.  What motivates some people just won’t work for others.  Take quitting smoking for example.  For some people, just the idea of being healthy is enough to make them quit smoking.  For others it’s the fear of death.  Some people quit smoking due to financial reasons.  Others – hell, they can be told “if you have one more cigarette you’ll get lung cancer” and continue to smoke regardless.

When it comes to internet marketing and the work I do, I’ve never been motivated by money.  I mean – I’d LIKE to make money on every website I run of course, and the whole concept of money and being financially secure is a motivation – but it’s not really about the almighty dollar for me.

A lot of different things motivate me.  For example, I love to write – absolutely love it.  I’ve been writing on the web since at least 1996, and for the majority of those years I never made a dime, mainly because it just doesn’t interest me.  That’s why I run sites like Poker Affiliate Bible – I make money from that site for sure, but that’s secondary to the passion and enjoyment I get out of writing articles.

Then there’s my latest site like Casino Answers.  When I write for that website and work on that website, the motivation I get from that is making it the biggest casino informational resource online.  I want people to say “Hey, you have a question about casinos?  This is the website you should check”.  Kind of like how Wikipedia is a reference for practically everything these days.  I do think that site will make me a lot of money, but again that’s a secondary reason to making it the best damn site possible.

As I think about it, there are websites that I HAVE created purely for financial reasons, and they have suffered because of that.  The websites I create due to passion are the ones that I make the most money from, mainly because I think you see it in the end results more, that those are the best websites.

The whole point of this post though is to talk about how different things can motivate you.  Since being back from London, I’ve found it hard to do work mainly because my wife has been sick, and she’s been home with my daughter every day since I’ve been back.  It’s very easy to get distracted with people around, with noise in the background, with the TV on etc.

Yet today I’ve become incredibly motivated, and despite both kids being home have managed to get a shitload of work done.  The reason?  Because I haven’t played XBox 360 a lot lately, and as most of you know I have a $3000 achievement challenge going on, and I want to get back to work on it.  Yet I can’t because of all the work I have to do.  So I’ve been working my ass off since early this morning to get everything I need to done, purely so I can play Xbox.

Anyway one of the things I finally did was get Scotsmanality back online.  No there is no articles there – it’s purely for search engine purposes.  I still get a ton of hits for that phrase, so I thought I’d get a site online explaining WTF happened to Scotsmanality, and get some search engine love in the process.