5 Tested Tips To Fight Blogger Burnout & Move Forward To Success
5 Ways To Move Forward When You’re Burned Out As A Blogger
Blogging takes a lot of work. It’s not something that you make money off of overnight and the learning curve to do it well can be steep. Sometimes it may feel like you are pouring in hours of work without any return and seasons of life can hit where it is extremely difficult to gather the motivation to keep working toward your goals. When some of these rough times hit, you may even think about giving up on your blog. (Honestly, I think if you were able to ask them, most successful bloggers would say that they considered giving up at one point along their journey!)
I’ve faced burnout MANY times as a blogger… That feeling when you don’t even want to open the computer. You can’t think of any new ideas. You’re tired of sitting down to work on your site and feeling like it accomplishes nothing. You don’t feel the capacity to focus on anything productive. You can’t even string together two sentences to write (let alone make the effort to open the computer and log in to do it!).
I’ve faced somewhat regular seasons of feeling depressed and unmotivated with my blog. (Some of it is just the nature of being a mother of young toddlers and feeling little energy remaining for anything else in life!) I’ve also maintained my blog through many seasons of being physically ill, including a pregnancy with severe nausea for many months. Consistently working on and maintaining a blog is HARD. Especially when fatigue in life, struggles with depression, or any type of illness affects you.
Though I’ve faced many seasons of physical/mental obstacles and burnout as a blogger, I’m here to try to give you hope! These seasons don’t mean that your site is doomed to fail! I’ve built a successful income blogging despite facing many of these seasons! Facing burnout is a big and real obstacle as a blogger, but it doesn’t have to lead to failure or mean that your goals can’t be met.
In this post, I want to equip you with some practical tips and mindset strategies to help you keep the course on your blog through seasons of burnout and/or physical or mental illness. I’ve outlined 5 items that have helped me to navigate these types of seasons and to reach and maintain success as a blogger. It’s my hope that hanging on to these 5 tips helps you through your burnout and to success as well!
Tips For Managing Blogger Burnout:
1. Don’t give up!
If you had genuine excitement when you first started your blog and you believed in the message that you had to share and the goals that you had for your site, then first and foremost – don’t allow yourself to give up in a season of burnout! That is the worst thing that you could do. Remember that feeling burned out is just a season, and if you genuinely had an excitement about your goals when you started, you will likely hit a season of feeling that excitement again. Don’t let yourself give up on your goals hastily!
(Of course, if you jumped into a blog just to make money fast and you never had a genuine excitement about your goals or mission for creating a site, then it’s possible that you are hitting burnout because blogging just isn’t your thing – but that’s a topic for another time!)
Most likely, if you are reading this, it’s because you still feel some drive to succeed – so you can start by not giving up!
2. Allow yourself to take a break.
Taking a break might feel like it will set you back on all of your progress or doom the success of your blog, but sometimes taking a break from your blog can be the best thing you can do. If you’re feeling severely burned out, taking some time to step back and focus on other things in life can actually help your perspective and excitement for your blog in the long run.
Our brains are only capable of focusing on so much. Sometimes taking a break from thinking about your blog can help your brain to recharge and come back to work on it with a renewed focus and energy.
If you’re worried that taking a break from your blog will do it in, don’t be! Taking a week or even a month or more off from your blog is not going to cause it to fail long term. You may see some short term effects but it will be worth it for the sake of your mental recharge. When I was severely sick while pregnant I could focus on nothing but survival for several months and barely touched my blog during that time. I didn’t make income progress as fast as I had hoped because of it, but that blog began generating sizeable income for me within several months of that break and is still healthy and generating good income for me today!
Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself and your blog when facing burnout is to simply take a break.
3. Prioritize your blogging tasks. (Do what HAS to get done.)
If you’re not taking a break from your blog entirely (or you feel like you can’t) my next piece of advice is to simply prioritize your blogging tasks. There can be an overwhelming amount of to-do items on your list as a blogger, but not all of them are essential to keep your blog running or even growing. When facing burnout, one of my most used and recommended pieces of advice is to stop and think, “What do I HAVE to do to maintain my blog?” You may be surprised that it’s not as many tasks as you thought.
Though I’m working on diversifying, a lot of my blog traffic comes from Pinterest. Therefore, when I am facing burnout and evaluating my “have to do” items to keep my blog running, a big one for me is pin design and scheduling. My blog can survive and maintain income for some time without creating new content, engaging on social media, doing keyword research, or creating products to sell. However, the income from my blog would be severely impacted if I suddenly stopped creating fresh pins for Pinterest and publishing them. My number one priority when I’m facing burnout is to simply use any and all energy that I might have to continue the essential task of creating pins and scheduling them – even if that’s all I do.
My essential blogging priority may not be the same as yours, but I would challenge you in a season of burnout to find what it is that your blog NEEDS to be maintained – and then focus on only that (or those things) until you get through the season of burnout.
4. Set aside specific times to force yourself to work.
When you’re facing burnout as a blogger, you are probably not going to have any motivation to pull out your computer and work. It’s going to be the last thing you FEEL like doing. (And see #2 above – it’s OK and could even be good to just take a break!) However, if you want to push through the season while still maintaining your blog or moving it forward, I highly recommend that you set aside a specific time(s) to force yourself to work!
It’s really a mind over matter strategy.
In a season of burnout, you aren’t going to FEEL like sitting down and working on your blog. However, if you can persevere and FORCE yourself to sit down and put in even a few hours of work, you can still maintain your blog well or even see some growth (especially if you use the dedicated time to focus on your priorities per #3 above!).
Force yourself to work even when nothing in you feels like doing so. Just focus on tasks that may be more mindless but are necessary to maintain your blog.
5. Listen to some podcasts or read bloggers that inspire you.
When I’ve faced burnout as a blogger in the past, A LOT of my state of burnout boiled down to simply losing motivation for my blog. It has helped me tremendously to follow and read information from or listen to podcasts put out by successful bloggers that I admire.
Tapping into resources from other bloggers can help to refuel some of your excitement for your own site and goals, remind you that you’re not alone in facing a season of burnout, and equip you with helpful knowledge to grow your blog and see it succeed – even if you don’t apply it right away!
My favorite podcast to follow is the Blogging Millionaire by Brandon Gaille and my favorite blogger to read and follow is Carly Campbell at Mommy On Purpose.
Find bloggers that inspire you, and tap into their excitement to fuel your own!
Always remember that blogging is a journey, and burnout is just one season along the way. If you hang on to a few of the tips in this post and persevere with your blogging journey, you may yet find that success is still ahead! Success as a blogger is a long game – it takes hard work and patience, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
Put your head down and keep going – and take a break if you need to!
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