Blogging is a powerful way to connect with your audience and promote your website.
That is why new bloggers start with a grandiose vision of writing a new blog every day and seeing countless visitors flock to their website.
However, blogging is actually a lot of work. Writing articles and promoting them appropriately takes a lot of time and effort. Therefore, webmasters might start strong, but soon, writing might turn into yet another item on the "to-do” list, leading to the type of burnout that can quash even the most enthusiastic of blogging efforts.
If you want to prevent your new blog from becoming yet another dead dream in the internet, you should do the following to avoid blogging burning out:
1. Be Realistic About The Resources You Have
The best thing that you can do for your blog is to take an honest look at the resources that you have at your disposal for its upkeep. Specifically, you may want to consider how much time you have and the skills of your blogging team.
If you are the sole owner of the business, you may not have that much time to write because you are responsible for other business tasks. You should therefore come up with a schedule that works with the limited time that you have. Do not feel guilty if you can only write once a week.
The worst thing you can do is to overestimate the number of posts that you can post each week. If you place too much expectation on yourself, you might experience burnout and you will not be able to write even a single post a week.
2. Create a Schedule That Works For You
Once you take an accurate account of all your resources, you should create a schedule that works for your business. Your calendar should define things like how often you need to publish new posts, the topics that you will cover, and who will be responsible for what. For best results, create the content ahead of schedule to make sure that you have content to publish when you are too busy or burned out.
You can also use content scheduling tools to publish the content automatically at a future date. Social media promotion can also be automated using tools like Twitterfeed.
3. Walk Away When You Cannot Do It Anymore
Taking time off blogging and social media is a great way to rekindle your enthusiasm. If you take a weekend off or go on holiday, you will return to work energized and ready to crank up those blog posts.
Instead of waiting for burnout to settle in before you take a rest, try to schedule your free time so you can engage in other interests like reading, swimming, or simply spend time with your family.
4. Evaluate Your Goal Monthly and Create New Ones
If you think that you are not getting anywhere with your content marketing strategy, look at your schedule again to reevaluate the things you have allocated time and remove the things that do not add any value.
There are always some things that you can do to free up more time. For instance, if one of your strategy is to create sponsored content on your blog, you can turn down some offers and only write the number of articles you can manage to write each week without straining your resources.
5. Outsource Your Blogging Work
You can hire a copywriter to assist you if you feel like you are starting to become stressed out by blogging. You can also hire virtual assistants to help you with social media scheduling, web design, link promotion, email organization, and more.
If you do not want to hire a stranger, you can hire someone in your family (such as your brother, sister, mother, teen, young adult, or spouse) to help you with some of your tasks.
Hiring someone who is good at the things that you are not frees up your time and energy to do more of what we love (and what brings in income).
6. Keep Reading and Learning New Things
Whenever you feel bored, all you need is a bit of inspiration and you are good to go. So, reading your favorite blog, book, taking a new class, joining a new Facebook group, or doing something new is a great way to get the inspiration you need to start writing again.
Besides, learning is a part of being a blogger or business owner. Learning new things will not only help you get better, but it will help you grow as a person too.
7. Connect With A Like Minded Cheerleader
Having someone to support and encourage you can help you get over your burn out. Try to look for a blogger who you can talk to about your problems over a cup of coffee.
If the person is someone who has achieved more than you have, he/she will be able to share some of the ways that they overcome the problems that you are having.
8. Accept Guest Posts
Accepting guest posts on your blog is an easy way to get high quality free content that you can publish when you have nothing of your own to publish.
The major benefits of accepting guest posts include:
- Improving the engagement with your clients by posting content regularly, even when you are short on content ideas
- It gives you a brief break from writing content
- It will help you build relationships with bloggers and experts within your industry.
- It will expose your blog to a wider audience (especially when the guest bloggers share the post with their social media followers)
- Your website will get credibility and authority if the guest writer is well known within your industry,
- Gives your blog a new voice or a new point of view
Summary
The easiest way to avoid burn out is to set a realistic schedule for publishing your content. This starts by conducting a genuine analysis of the resources and skills that you have to run the business. After you know how many hours you have to create your content, you should create a schedule that works best for your business. Make sure that you set a realistic goal, even if that is one article every week.
Other ways of avoiding burning out include hiring copywriters to help you out with your content writing needs, accepting guest posts so you do not have to create all your content on your own, taking a break periodically, and creating achievable goals every week.
Do you have other tricks for avoiding burnout? Tell us about them on the comments section below.