When I talked about picking a blogging niche, one of the tips was to write an article a day about your niche before you even started your blog. This was to make sure you were interested enough in the topic to sustain daily articles.
Fast forward, your blog is now three or four months old. You have some readers, and if you’ve been keeping to a daily posting schedule you have over a hundred posts in your blog.
Is it still fun? Are you still excited about writing that daily post?
It’s easy to get burned out on the routine, especially after the initial glow has faded. Not only writing the posts, but networking on other blogs to keep yourself a part of the community. Here are some tips that have worked for me for keeping everything exciting and interesting in the long-term.
Join MyBlogLog.com
It’s a small thing, but having that widget in your sidebar that shows the MyBlogLog members who recently visited your blog is a great motivator. I like seeing the avatars people have chosen, and love it when a new one shows up. I immediately go out to their blog to take a look, and I leave a message in their MyBlogLog area thanking them for visiting.
While I use MyBlogLog.com, any social website that has a recent visitors widget would work.
Hold Contests
Contests help to break the routine for blog owners, and provide a great excuse to interact with readers in a different way than just writing posts. This latest comment contest has been great for all of that.
Remember Why You’re Blogging
Hopefully you have a reason why you’re blogging. When you start to feel your motivation dwindling, remember why you started blogging in the first place. For me, it was to help newcomers to Internet marketing avoid the typical traps and scams by providing honest reviews. While I’ve branched out into more than just reviews, it’s still the idea that the posts help people that keeps me motivated.
Keep a To Do List
This might sound odd, but I come up with ideas for posts all the time when I’m driving, when I’m in the shower, pretty much anytime I’m away from the computer. Then sometimes I sit down at the computer to write a post, and my mind is blank. So out comes the scrap of paper I’ve written the ideas on, and they go into an unpublished page in my blog that contains all my to do list ideas.
Any time I’m stuck for a post idea, I pull up that to do list page and write about one of the items on the list. The size of the list grows and shrinks, but there are always a good eight to ten items on the list.
Get Away from the Computer
I tend to spend late nights writing posts for the blog, and tweaking this and that. There comes a time when I’m much better off just going to bed and not trying to get that last bit done. When I stay beyond that point, I find myself staring at the screen for minutes at a time.
It’s far better to leave the computer and get some sleep, or relax, or have fun. Then come back to your blog re-energized.
Those are some of the things that work for me. How do you avoid blogging burnout?
[quote]Get Away from the Computer[/quote]
I’m a couple of weeks from the three months mark, and I’m still full of enthusiasm and ideas. I’ve stopped tweaking the template.
My problem is that there is just so much to do! Getting all those post ideas written is one thing. Responding to the comments and links is another.
The really time consuming part of it all, is trying to keep up with the feed reader! I try to read the blogs of my most frequent visitors/commenter. Reading them all leads me to other blogs to read, and so on, and so on, (just like the Breck commercial…)
Real life needs to fit in between all this. I never expected this to absorb so much of my attention.
When I blog (or comment) late at night, I sometimes ramble on incoherently. (Like, maybe now?) I agree with you. It would be better to go to sleep, instead. (Unless there’s a commenting contest going on, of course…)
[quote post=”285″]It would be better to go to sleep, instead. (Unless there’s a commenting contest going on, of course…)[/quote]
The contest is now officially over, so get some sleep! 😉 Unless you want to stay up to see the official results…
LOL! It’s too much of a habit, after this month. I can quit any time I want to. I just don’t want to….
Thanks for running the contest. Good luck to all.
I hope you get to sleep soon, too, Jay!
I was up, editing and resizing pictures for a tutorial on my blog.
It is a tedious job, so I like to do it just before bedtime. When I saw that it was 11:15, I remembered the contest deadline, and joyfully played with comments and read your blog, rather than the repetitive picture editing.
Commenting was a nice diversion from all that. The contest made it more justifiable that plain vanilla procrastination.
Another benefit of a to do list and planning your blog content is that you can do clif hangers. I did a post about this 2 weeks ago. Basically you put 1 or 2 sentences at the end of your blog post that will make your readers want to come back tomorrow to find out more.
BeachBum
Great tip! I actually did my first cliff hanger in my most recent post, the one about the July contest results. It’s a fun way to tie posts together.
First part of your above post sounds familiar to me. I’ve been keeping posting frequency of 1 post a day (except Sat/Sun) for the last 4 months and lately had felt jaded.
One of the counter-measure I took was to get away from my laptop, simply just get away! Forget about writing, tweaking, commenting, networking etc.
Blogging is a long term endevour, We gotta pace ourselves to avoid blogging burn out!
[quote post=”285″]Blogging is a long term endevour, We gotta pace ourselves to avoid blogging burn out![/quote]
That it is! That’s a good idea, taking weekends off. That gives you some time to get away from the blog.
How about setting up an old fashioned time schedule written on paper where you have everything you need to for the day and week ahead?
[quote post=”285″]How about setting up an old fashioned time schedule written on paper where you have everything you need to for the day and week ahead?[/quote]
That probably works wonders for some people, but in my home office papers get swallowed up in stacks and are found only years later when we move or the desk collapses from the weight of the stacks.