You wake up one morning with a brilliant idea. You decide that you can start a journal about some thought that crossed your mind. Better yet, you can do it online and perhaps even monetize the idea!
You gather your thoughts and learn how to start a blog. You are filled with ideas that you pump out day after day. You spend hours researching your topics. You find out how to monetize your blog. You learn the basics of SEO. And you write and write.
In the beginning there was silence, but then slowly over the course of a few weeks you hear a few voices. The quiet murmur of a few commenters. You see from your stats that visitors are slowly discovering your blog.
You visit other blogs daily, you continue to write at a fast pace. But then over the next few weeks, you look at your blog stats and your bank accounts. You see maybe a couple hundred visitors a day and a few dollars in your affiliate accounts. Your blog doesn’t seem to be growing as quickly as you envisioned. A quiet voice starts nagging in the back of your mind. Where’s the thousands of visitors I’m supposed to have? Where’s the wealth and riches of the blogging lifestyle?
In the beginning, that voice may start as a whisper for some it dies away as they learn the path of blogging. For others that voice may grow stronger. And it get’s harder to write your content. You start to run out of ideas. When you sit down to the blank page, you start to hear that voice. You get that feeling that you might be getting burned out.
Blogging is hard work. If you have to also hold a job, support a family and have other responsibilities outside of your blog, you may start to hear the voice of this blogging naysayer. However, there are techniques to quiet that voice and relieve the stress on yourself to bring back the passion for blogging.
Take a Second Look at Your Mission Statement
If you started your blog with the purpose in mind to make money online, you’ve tied the success of your blog directly to the income you generate. The reality is that it will take time and effort before you will generate money, and during those slow months you will feel like your blog is a failure. If your primary purpose is to generate money with your blog, you limit the value that your blog gives to others. Rather than giving value, your first goal has become to take value from others. Your visitors will quickly spot this and stop coming to your blog. It becomes doomed for failure.
First and foremost, you need to take a look at the primary purpose of your blog.
The question to ask is what do I give to my visitors?
On this blog, the question I keep foremost in my mind is how do I help you make money?
- I focus my efforts on giving you helpful information to help you save time and be more efficient in running your blog.
- I promote my job board which gives job seekers a fast and free method to find a work at home project from reputable companies right from this blog.
- I make this blog do-follow.
- I try to be responsive to my commenters.
- I put making money for myself secondary to helping you make money.
In this way, we all benefit together.
Focusing on my mission statement in this way keeps me from feeling burned out because my reward comes when someone tells me that they appreciated my tips or enjoyed reading one of my posts.
Secondly, focusing on a mission statement makes it easier to create focused content. So, you start your mission statement by saying “My blog will help my readers by…” Then your writing naturally flows to the subject matter that is the focus of your blog.
Good content allows you to take breaks
Are you pumping out how to and list posts every day? Do you feel burned out trying to find a topic and then working at writing several 250 word posts a day?
Think about focusing on your mission statement as I mentioned above and instead of putting out a bunch of short posts daily, put together something truly magnificent and lay out your thoughts on an idea or concept that you believe will give something truly valuable to your readers.
Then take a break. Give your readers a few days or a week to absorb your idea.
You may find that the traffic still keeps coming in on your off days. You may find people making comments on your magnum opus. You can take those off days and just respond to your commentators. Give your blog the feeling of a coffeehouse chat.
You’ll find that your blog may even grow during the time between your posts. Learn to let your blog come alive on it’s own.
Those couple of extra hours spent on writing a truly magnificent post will give you an opportunity to take a few days of rest to relax and maybe come up with some fresh ideas while your blog continues to grow on its own. It’s a good way to relax from rolling out posts like a machine.
Build Some Relationships
Take some time away from your own blog to visit other blogs. In it’s most basic form, building relationships goes back to following through with your mission statement. In order to help out others, you must get out in the community.
Say hi, leave some good comments.
It will not only help you come up with ideas for content, you will also make some connections with other people. You may be surprised by how much this little gesture will help out your blog.
Other bloggers may contact you and some may even ask if you will accept a guest post. Take them up on their offers. It will take some of the pressure off of you. And you may find that your overall traffic will increase with guest posts.
It’s a change of pace, this is always a good thing when dealing with stress.
Silence the Negative Voice
In the end, when the voice starts to creep up. It’s asking a very fundamental question in different ways. The underlying theme is going to come back to one question: “Why am I doing this?” It’s when you can’t answer that question that you begin to give in to the voice.
Take a step back, give yourself a break from the blog and re-focus. Find the answer to that question and make it your mission to fulfill that goal. When you answer that simple question, you will re-kindle that passion that you had when you first started your blog.
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Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
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Thanks for Sharing these methods. I will try and response you.
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