Hello readers!
Today’s post is a bit different than most. I’ve definitely been feeling the drag of blogging and have taken actually almost all of this year off. With the exception of a few weeks where I posted some guest posts.
So that leads me to the question, if I love writing so much, why do I get so burned out?
I think I’ve finally figured out why. That’s because blogging isn’t just blogging, it’s so much more!
Writing and Publishing Blog Posts
Yes, here we go. This is the fun part. Drafting the blog post and publishing it to your site. So you’ve got great content and are ready to go, right?! Wrong. You need to also create shareable images and of course, each social media site prefers different sizes. Instagram is square, Facebook is wide, Pinterest is long. Creating images for your blog post can sometimes take longer than actually writing the post.
Okay, so now you’ve got your content and your images. Done, right? Not so fast. Is your featured image set? Does your post have good readability? Is there a good keyword? Do you have your post categorized well? And are tag words created to help users find the post? Do your images have Alt-Text descriptions? Do you want have links back to your previous posts? These are just some of the questions to ask yourself when getting ready to submit a post. As you’ve guessed it, this can be quite a bit over-whelming.
Sharing your Blog Posts
Wahoo! You’ve made it your post is now live! Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but the work is actually just beginning. It’s now time to promote your post. You’ll want to share it to your Facebook page. Pin it to your Pinterest boards and all of those group boards you belong to. You’ll want to share to Bloglovin, and Stubleupon, and GooglePlus. The list goes on and on to all of the sites you can share to. But don’t stop there, why should anyone read your blog if you don’t read theirs? Go give some other blogs some love on all of the social sites and comment on their posts.
Looking for even more traffic? Use blog groups on Facebook or on any other site you prefer to help boost stats. But, don’t forget that you have to reciprocate the favor to everyone else asking for one. Don’t get me wrong, this is great! But it is very time consuming!
Revisiting your Blog Posts
Now, you finally have all of that sharing and posting done and you are onto the next post. So all of that work for one post just to move on in 3 days? If that sounds off to you, you are right. Blog posts should be shared often to help increase traffic to the site. The content is still great a week after you’ve created it, a month, a year, and so on. Readers will still love your post. So back to sharing to all of those sites. Yes, of course, many of these tasks can be automated but when you think about them all at once, they become very overwhelming and can easily take over.
Blog Design and Updates
If you want to redesign your blog, you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. That is not an easy task. Even if you are not redesigning your blog, there are still a ton of updates that you have to keep up on. Every so often, an update will cause a plugin to stop working and start a vicious cycle of trying to get the blog functioning well again. Don’t forget to be making regular back-ups.
Emails
And just in case you thought I’d forget to mention, I didn’t. Emails can literally take over your day! The longer you’ve been blogging and the more traffic your blog gets, the more emails you get.
All of these things plus many more making blogging practically a full time job and not always with a full time wage. But at the end of the day, many of us who get burned out come right back to it because there is something about it that we truly love. Probably being able to talk to all of you!
