How do you avoid blogging burnout and work smartly?

Creating content in and content out is no joke right? If you are running an online business, having a blog is SO important.

I can go on talking about the benefits of starting a blog. A blog helps you to reach out to your customers.

You can build your brand. Serve your customers by giving them useful information in areas related to your business!

And it also helps improve your search engine presence. The more content you have on your blog, the higher the chances for you to appear in search results!

When your target customers are looking for information relevant to your business, your blog posts will come up in search results and they can be helpful to them.

This way, your blog helps build connection between you and your target customers.

Depending upon the quality of the content you share, you can easily impress your audience and make them your customers!

Having said that, running a blog is not an easy thing. You have to be creating content on a regular basis.

Right from coming up with content ideas to finalising the content and publishing it – there is a lot of things to be taken care of.

If you don’t have a right system in place it is highly likely that you will be easily burned out.

A burned out blogger is no good for running and maintaining a blog that will in turn serve as a marketing tool for your business.

So let’s find out how you can avoid blogging burnout, and yet create content consistently for your blog!

Have a smart system in place!

Yes you heard me. This is one of the most crucial pieces of advice I can give you if you want to avoid burnout.

Doing things in a random manner will yield you no useful results. It will only make you work harder for very little ROI.

This will in turn make you feel burned out quite easily.

Blogging involves a lot of repetitive tasks.

Say for instance, idea generation for blog posts, researching for content creation, outlining your blog posts, creating the actual content, finalising your blog post, promoting the same after publishing and so on.

These are the most common stuff involved in blog content creation and they are quite repetitive.

Having a system in place will make things a lot easier for you to carry out these repetitive tasks in an efficient and easy manner – hence avoiding burnout.

So how can you have a system for this? You can have a template for outlining your blog posts.

You can have a system in place for idea generation – refer to this video where I talk about the system that I use to generate content consistently for my blogs

How to create content for your blog(s) consistently? Here’s the system I use!

This suits for almost all tasks involved in blogging.

Without a system, you will be working on random stuff at random timings.

And you will most probably be reinventing the wheel with most of the tasks if you don’t have a system in place.

Result? Burnout!

Batch process

Batch processing is grouping similar kind of tasks into a batch and getting them done in bulk (or as a batch) by carving out a reasonably big chunk of time!

This is a very efficient way of handling blogging tasks – as I already said, blogging mostly involves similar tasks done in repetition.

With batch processing you will see how efficiently you are able to complete big chunks of work just like that.

It gives you a feeling of accomplishing a lot in one go.

I’ve talked a lot about batch processing in my earlier blog posts. I truly understand its effectiveness for me as a blogger.

With batch processing you don’t have to switch frequently between different kinds of tasks which results in energy drain in the brain.

Rather when you batch process a big chunk of your work, you focus on one kind of task for a longer period of time and get a lot of it done!

This is so refreshing, motivating and it works without making you feel burned out!

Work smart

Well this is a very generic piece of advice that you would have heard over and over again. And it works in various contexts.

The context I am talking about working smart here is that you need to put in effort and time only on stuff that helps move the needle!

When you face a day, you get to see a lot of tasks – tasks that seem highly important. But in reality, are all tasks important to attend?

The honest answer is NO!

You don’t have to attend to all the tasks when and as they come in.

Certain tasks require you to attend to them right away.

And there are certain tasks that you can snooze for a later time when you are really working on something important right now.

As I said earlier, if you switch back and forth between tasks, your brain will easily get burned out.

It takes a lot of energy to unhook the attention from the previous task and engage yourself in the new task.

And when you have to come back to the original task again, it takes quite a few minutes for you to re-engage from where you left off!

This results in a lot of energy drain making you feel exhausted quite soon. In a word, burnout!

So only attend to tasks that help you directly move the needle in your business with utmost urgency. The rest can wait!

Learn to say NO

As a blogger you already have a pretty full plate.

And it is very likely that you will receive more and more requests everyday from your audience, peers and random bloggers, advertisers etc.

It is very important that you only choose to accept what you can handle and boldly say NO to the rest of the requests.

You cannot of course please everyone and you need not actually. So be wise and choose only what you can handle and leave the rest.

To conclude…

All it takes is a smart working blogger to avoid burnout. You might be inclined to work hard on your business.

But working hard will only make you tired.

Working smart, on the other hand, will not only help you work without losing your cool, but also will help you enjoy your work.

In addition, only by working smart you can actually make a lot of progress in your blogging career (in any career, to be honest) rather than working hard.