I went through a period where I simply couldn’t blog. It wasn’t the lack of blogging ideas — I had article suggestions waiting in the wings. None of them sounded good at the time. So I went blog hopping looking for good posts worth sharing. This lasted a few weeks, so I began to wonder if I was burning out on blogging.
Last week, I started piling up on posting ideas, fleshing them out and publishing them. Maybe it was burn out and maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes a person loses desire or energy to write or blog. I survived this period by commenting on posts in other blogs. The posts were shorter than I’d like, but it was better than nothing.
Not posting at all would have been dangerous. Doing this could create a bad habit of not posting and plus, when your content isn’t fresh… people lose interest. With millions of blogs out there, plenty provide fresh content on a daily basis some do multiple posts in a single day.
No matter how many articles you read on “How to get ideas for blogging” — they won’t help you through this time. You can prepare for times when you’re not motivated to blog by taking advantage of times when you’re motivated. During this time, write as many posts as you can especially those that don’t rely on timing. For example, posting a New Year’s article in July might not go over as well as in December. Of course, the problem is finding time to do the extra blog writing.
When that “the well is dry” day arrives, check out your pre-written posts and publish one. Huge load off. What do you do when you’re stuck?
3 thoughts on “Blogging without Motivation”
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I’ve been going through a bit of a blogging plateau for a few months. I moved house and got busy with some other projects and my posting rate dropped, my enthusiasm sagged and my stats (which had been on a constant upward trend) faltered.
It’s odd how small inflections of mood and experience can, if we let them, change our behaviour significantly. I think perhaps negative ones have a bigger impact than positive ones.
I sat down over the weekend and made a plan for what I want to achieve with my blog, what I hope readers will get from it and why I am doing it. I also started to think about redesigning and reengineering aspects of it (I’m a geek at heart so techie details are very engaging for me).
It’s too early to tell whether this reappraisal and restart will work in the long run but I certainly feel more enthusiastic about my blog and I’m remembering some of the passion and excitement I felt when I first launched it 18 months ago.
More importantly, standing back from the content and doing my job – marketing, communicating and writing – on my own work has helped me focus more on what the blog is about and this, in turn, has given me a lot of ideas about what to write and an urgency about writing them.
Matthew, thanks for posting your experience in dealing with motivation (or lack thereof) when it comes to blogging. You make a great point on how mood can affect our motivation. That’s why I believe in creating habits — they help you be in the mood to do whatever it is you do first thing in the morning, right before lunch and so on.
Considering the numerous blogs out there and our limited time — it’s hard for the most wonderful blogs to see the number of readers climb. So I try to remind myself that blogging helps me practice writing and gives the Web site fresh content. It’s also about providing valuable content to readers. Even if the readers aren’t there — prospective clients might check out the blog.
Your site is well-laid out as it’s always easy to find what I’m looking for. But I do understand getting tired of seeing the some old design. Hang in there!
I wrote a post about how I Get my blogging groove back time and time again (http://jaycee.typepad.com/semantics/2007/07/how-i-get-my-bl.html) but sometimes no matter what, I just don’t feel like writing. This is usually when I’m down in the dumps emotionally and I know that if I write my emotions will show through.