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Day 27 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One thing that many bloggers experience is a hump.  When they start the site they are extremely enthusiastic.  They can keep going for weeks and month, cranking out posts, making friends, and getting links.  But sooner or later many bloggers begin to loser their enthusiasm for it.   Perhaps their site isn’t growing as fast as they had hoped.  Perhaps it is taking up too much time or the subject doesn’t seem as interesting as it once did.

If you are beginning to lose interest in your blog, i.e. you are hitting the 4-6 month hump that many blogger do, there are several things that you can do

1) Take a break from blogging

Your website doesn’t have to dominate your life.  There is nothing wrong with paring down the amount of time you spend working on it.  If you are spending an hour a day on your blog, and are starting to get sick of it, try cutting back and only spending 2 hours on 2 different days.  If you are writing a post a day and found that it is too much of a drain, aim for four a week.

One problem with running a blog like a business, is that it can quickly become a lot like work.  There are certainly good things about that.  You are motivated to get things done, you can make your business decisions dispassionately, and you can act professionally throughout.   However if your blog becomes too much of a chore, you won’t want to do it at all.   If you find that happening, it is much better to scale back, and to put your blog in perspective, than to try to push through it and find yourself quitting altogether a few months down the line

2) Get Help

Perhaps there are some aspects of the blog you still like.  Maybe you still like writing posts, and interacting with other bloggers, but the daily grind of writing posts is getting to be too much for you.   If that is the case, try getting help on your blog.  Not only can outsourcing some of your work make you more enthusiastic about keeping up with your blog, it also makes good business sense.

Don’t know where to look to find Guest Bloggers?  Try Guest Blogger  simply post your profile on there, and people looking for a guest blogging job can look you up and submit their posts.   In this case it does help you have have a decent PR for your site, or get a fair amount of traffic.   Alternatively of course, you can always just put out a post letting people know that you welcome guest posts.  Your site may not seem like much to you, but there are bound to be newbies out there who would welcome the exposure.

3) Mix it up

Maybe you are getting bored with blogging because you are doing too much of the same thing.  If all your posts are the same, of course you would get sick of them.  Try taking a break and mixing it up.  For instance, if you usually write text posts, try putting up a bunch of pictures once in a while.   It will be a nice change of pace for your blog, be interesting for your readers, and may attract new links and visitors.

Alternatively, take some time to try and spawn some user generated content.  Run a contest or put up some polls.  Both are great at getting reader interaction on your site and can serve as a nice change of pace from the usual post.

So what do you do when you are beginning to get sick of blogging?  Do you push through it, or work out an alternative?   Tomorrow I’ll go over some tricks and tips on how to get back in the blogging swing after a hiatus.