Are You Experiencing Blogging Fatigue?

As we all know by now, running a blog is far from easy. In order to find and sustain a dedicated audience, you need to regularly create great content and promote your blog through various means – and that takes a whole lot of work. Blog long enough and you’ll start going through blogging fatigue, one of the worst things that can happen to popular and prolific bloggers. Surprisingly, there are some people out there who don’t realize that they’re going through this sort of fatigue. This is especially true for folks who blog for business.

So how do you know if you’re going through blogging fatigue? And what can you do to address or avoid it?

When this happens, it’s time to step AWAY from the computer

The signs of fatigue among bloggers often vary from person to person, but it is generally agreed that experiencing ANY of this in your blogging career is a sign that you should take a break:

• You don’t know if you can write anything new – When you stare at a blank page on your word processor with no ideas coming in or looking at your recent posts and realizing that you’ve written that same topic for the last week or so, you should take some time off.

• You’ve stopped sleeping properly – When you regularly forego sleep in your efforts to find new topics for the blog or chase down leads to a topic you want to write about, thus affecting the quality of your actual work, you should stop blogging for a bit.

Whether you’re blogging for personal pleasure or for the sake of a business, it’s never good to overextend yourself. You need to recognize these symptoms and use them as signals to step away from your blogging responsibilities for at least a few days.

But won’t the blog suffer while I’m out there sunbathing?

Taking a break from blogging may sound like a terrifying prospect if you’re used to always doing something with the blog you’re running – whether it’s writing posts, keeping track of the stats, or monitoring the comments. But the thing is that your short vacation isn’t likely to kill you or the blog. As long as you take the necessary precautions, you’ll be able to keep your blog running smoothly even if you’re not there to watch it 24/7. Among other things, you can:

• Have a TEAM of bloggers – If you’re running a business blog, it’s actually better if you have a team of bloggers working on the site instead of just having a sole contributor. Take a look at blogs run by businesses like RingCentral; they have different people posting on different things, and none of them seem burnt out.

• Accept guest posts – If you don’t think you can afford to have an actual team of people writing for your blog on a regular basis, you can just encourage other people (long-time readers, industry experts, and the like) to send you guest post articles. Successful blog sites like “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” allows for guest posting.

• Schedule some posts, and have regular readers moderate – One of the misconceptions some bloggers have is that they have to post their pieces immediately. They don’t have to. WordPress, in particular, lets you write now and post later. And if you’re worried about not being able to monitor comments, do what John Scalzi does and get a regular reader to do it.

At the end of the day, you’re not the only one who needs a break from the blog. The blog needs a break from you too. And after spending some time apart, you’ll remember just how good your relationship is.