Avoid Blog Burnout: Unplug. Regularly.

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Yes, this is yet another voice chiming in on the NY Times story about bloggers dropping dead from stress… but with a twist.

See, I don’t understand the whole “blog ’til you drop” thing. True, five years ago when I first began blogging on ElectricVenom.com, I’d blog 30 or so times per day.

But no matter how often I updated my traffic remained steadily low. And I resented it. I resented that I spent hours of my life looking for new things to link, things that others hadn’t written about, things that I knew readers would find interesting if they’d only visit. Which they didn’t.

That kind of burnout is something so many of us experience: we feel like our readers “demand” something out of us so we try to deliver it, working harder and harder at it each day.

If you’re a blogger who writes with any regularity, there’s the sense that if you’re not publishing you are letting down your readers (or letting down your colleagues, who fear you’re “getting soft”). And this applies to bloggers big and small.

Not long ago I exchanged emails with a fellow blogger (whom I’m not identifying here because I don’t want to add to her stress levels). She writes a weight loss blog and had actually put on a couple of temporary pounds the previous week due to family events. She didn’t want to write about that, though, because her readers might feel disappointed with her. A couple of paragraphs later, she casually mentioned that she’d also lost the joy in blogging and was working at getting it back.

These things aren’t unrelated to each other, I’m convinced. They are also part of what leads to blog-induced stress like that mentioned in the NY Times story. A blogger begins to see signs of success via traffic or monetization and then goes on to convince themselves that their readers expect them to write better and better entries, that each one will be a bit more insightful or creative, that every entry must outdo the ones that came before.

And there are entire blogs that will tell you this is so: that if you aren’t constantly trying to outdo yourself, constantly trying to double your RSS subscriptions while you sleep or quadruple your readership overnight well, then, you’re a crappy blogger.

What bull.

Readers come to our blogs for all sorts of reasons, but usually they wind up there purely by chance. A search engine led them to our site, or perhaps they clicked on a link elsewhere. If they like what they see, they come again. If they keep liking it, they keep coming back.

Where on earth does that formula indicate that each entry has to be better than its predecessor? Or that, if our stats don’t increase in geometric proportion daily then somehow we’ve failed?

Blogging for money is fun. But the money is just icing on top of icing on the cake. Blogging should be pursued for the fun of it to begin with, and when it’s not fun there’s no reason to keep doing it. Take a break! I did with EV — for almost a month, as a matter of fact — and my traffic didn’t drop down much. When I’d rested up and returned to blogging simply because I missed it, the traffic rebounded almost immediately… even though I stopped updating nearly as often as I had before.

Why so little change? Because readers aren’t looking for bloggers to always be getting better, to always be outdoing themselves. They’re there to find out what someone’s written, and they’ll come back when they know there’s new stuff to read… without even knowing in advance if it’s any good.

Take the pressure off yourselves. Blog when you want, if you want to, and if you don’t, well, don’t. Unplug more often. It’ll give you a chance to enjoy the life that blogging was supposed to improve, not consume.

Your readers won’t be disappointed. They won’t feel let down. They’ll be there, waiting for when you return. Instead of feeling resentful that they’re demanding better content, you just might realize they already believe you write good content — that’s why they’re there — but they were waiting for you to enjoy it as much as they do.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Blog Better (Blogging 401). Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Tagged in: blog | blogger | blogs | burnout

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