Beware of blogging burnout.
Preparation is the key to success on a blog. Before launching a blog, one has to sit down and think about all the necessary steps to building one’s blog: niche, domain name, strategy, SEO, networking etc. With time and the growing experience on blogging and community building one can now have all the tools for launching a full-fledged successful blog from day one. Pro tips sites are now budding over the web such as Sam’s Web Guide and Icy Tips. One of the topmost tips is to be prepared and, in this field, having a well prepared number of posts even before launching a website is a win win strategy.
After the launch.
I’ve been blogging for nearly 6 years now starting from a daily nonsense life blog on Blogger back in 2004. There was no real direction to that blog and it mixed work and daily life. I must say that life blogging was easy as I chatted away on anything going from my impressions on the way people made extensive use of tramways in Grenoble to my own personal discoveries in the art of Web Designing. Things changed when I started the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius some 2 years ago.
At that time there were lots of pro-blogging websites but I was not prepared as I would have been today. I made the mistake of not planning which explains the difficulties in publishing posts during the first months of this site’s existence. Then, ideas came and I took the pace. But one thing remains difficult to me: taking enough advance on posts to be published. I do spend quality time on the job done here and am a normally well organised person but constant upriver preparation is still not perfect on this blog.
Blogging burnout!
One of the worse things that can happen is blogging burnout. It is not the common “writer’s block”. It is real burnout. This usually happens when one tackles a field that one is unacquainted to or that one doesn’t really master. It can also sprout when too much energy has been put in the launching and preparation of a new blog project and then the whole thing is burnt out because all the subjects or the best subjects have been dealt with. Then, it becomes a real ordeal to manage the whole thing.
Some mistakes I made before.
Getting over excited over the number of posts – When I was a budding blogger, I got really excited over publishing more and more. Each time I had an idea I jumped on my computer and typed my way through my post. I was happy with the job and excited about the ideas I was coming up to. The problem was that, after a while, all the ideas looked bland. Why? Because I was in a certain mood at one time and the posts would have a certain feel and that feel would be here for 5 or 6 posts then change on the following ones. This translated a lack of consistency but, hey, those were the origins of the life blogs where you showed your mood.
Publishing too fast – Publishing too fast was a by-product of my blogging excitement. When you start out writing a lot of posts, you are eager to get a readership and collect the comments on your views. The major problem in that is that you have to refrain yourself from publishing it all. Some days I would be publishing the whole 5-10 posts I would have written in one day. What a waste! It was like eating a whole week’s food on Monday and eating nothing else during the week. Then what? BURNOUT! (short lapse but still…)
This also had the drawback of not giving enough strength to each post. Large traffic websites can go about publishing several posts a day but on smaller sites, this boils down the impact of each post and idea.
Writing long posts – Writing long posts is an art in itself. I happen to be a talkative person and found out you have to master the art of long posts before actually writing them. Readers’ attention-span is short, especially over the web. It doesn’t help to beat around the bush when there’s not reason for it. So keep the posts short until you get enough stamina to run the distance.
Let’s talk about this.
Have you ever experienced this flurry of post ideas and reached the red zone? What were the reasons? Has it impacted on your blogging life?
Note: even if I no longer maintain the other blogs and have closed them down it has never been a result of burnout.
Category: Blogging
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So trueeeee! :o I don’t remember the number of years i’ve been blogging but I don’t think that one day I will have a “pro-blog”…it requires too much work.
. I like the ‘daily nonsense life blog on Blogger’ for its freestyleeeeee side (:!:).
(euh ça y est j’ai fini ma prose en anglais, je suis très contente de moi, vais déboucher le Pearona!)
A lot of people love the freestyle attitude and liberty that you get from publishing a personal daily life blog. Actually, these blogs are those having the most visitors around. “Pro-blogging” does require a lot of work as you put it.
Thanks for the mention. Coming to the question, in fact I always have some thing to talk about but writing the thing I have to talk about is another thing.. My lazyness
Point: “Publishing too fast”
Indeed this is true. As for the new blog, I am keeping it really (in fact really..) slow. Not more than 3 posts a month (for now). A tips I found that work quite well is to first have some post when launching a blog, then go and guest blog on established blogs in the niche. It is a good way to say “Hey I have a new blog” and in a professional way because your targeted and potential readers can already view a piece of your material and then decide if they want to read on further. Personally I am doing it like “I post for me, two guest posts elsewhere”. I am a bit stuck with exams right now but should escalate things as from May.
Normally on Island Crisis I push in 4 to 7 posts daily because they are not really niche content but mostly targeted to search engine readers or people seeking information. Also there is already a good faithful reader base (the subscribed ones) so even if I write 5 posts, they will read it.
for a while. Like give each post time and then add by little amount and increasing as reader base also increase.
However on a new blog there is a risk of pushing too much valuable content at one go and too fast. I don’t know if you thought about it but assume you publish a very useful post A.
The blog is really new and does not have an authority yet in the eyes of search engines (and worst if it is crawled by search engines only once in 3 to 4 days). Blog X, Y, Z copy your post. The risk that Blog A is labelled as having duplicate content is more even though it is the original owner of the content. This happen if Blog A content is not yet indexed while X, Y, Z are visited almost each hour by bots.
So I think when starting a new blog it is good to let the content “pouri”
Nice post by the way.
.-= Kurt Avish´s last blog ..Independence Of Mauritius =-.
I see that I’m not the only one having faced this problem. In any case, even if it might be better for one to publish daily, on small niche blogs it is better to keep the relative rhythm, at least from my standpoint. As a result I have a better readership, low bounce rate and great comments. It is also beneficial in terms of SEO strategies.
I am myself experiencing some sort of online burnout
surtout apres les elections. Need to refocus on the physics I guess.
It’s true that delaying posts is a good tactic
.-= Bruno recently wrote: Paul Bérenger, scientiste communal =-.
I think that everybody writing online experiences this at one point or another. The most important thing is to let things sieve through and then take things up little by little. The elections have always been hard for activists, so you need to rest and focus on other things now.
.-= Web Design Mauritius recently wrote: Google MAYDAY update is affecting long tail keyword rankings. =-.