What To Do When – You Hate Your Blog!
We all go through phases or moments when we hate our blogs. Sometimes blogging just sucks and and it’s hard to stay motivated.
This is normal.
If you found this post, you may well be going through one of those moments when you are sick and tired of your blog.
If you haven’t had one of those moments yet, I assure you, that fateful day will come!
Blog Hate: Why Does It Happen?
Everyone hates the things they HAVE to do day in and day out.
You may be in your dream job, you may be doing what you’ve always wanted.
But sooner or later you’ll have one of those days, where you wonder why you ever started it in the first place.
Having negative feelings about your work or your job, can start to have a detrimental effect if it goes on for too long…
…and never more so than when you work for yourself.
If you’re a writer or a blogger and this is your full time job, you need to connect to people, you’re meant to make them give a crap about what you’re saying.
But how can you achieve that when you don’t even give a crap?
When you’re churning out posts on a conveyor belt of apathy?
It’s not going to work for long is it.
So, if your “I hate my blog” days are starting to out number your positive ones, you’ll need to find some coping strategies.
Ultimately, you need a way to combat these feeling and move on… into brighter days of blogging enthusiasm!
Why do you hate your Blog? Find your trigger!
It’s helpful to figure out the route cause here.
If you can discover the reason behind your feelings, maybe you can solve the problem.
- A big one for me is if I suddenly run out of content ideas.
I tend to write out a whole bunch weeks in advance, but after doing the ones that appeal to me, gradually I’m left with the ones I feel less excited about.
Scraping around with the leftover options, that I know I really need to get done, is not very appealing.
Once the content ideas have dried up, it’s time to create a whole bunch more and this can be a daunting task, as well as time consuming.
This can be a point where I start to drag my heels.
Something that helps for me is setting out a casual time to research content ideas.
Such as, in the evening where I’ve finished my main tasks for the day.
- Another trigger may be – you can’t get enough done. There don’t feel like enough hours in the day.
Certainly if you have a bad week, where lack of time has played a major factor and you haven’t got much done, this can have a snowball effect.
For example, maybe you only got a quarter of your to-do list done and tasks are mounting up.
Time seems to evaporate rapidly and everything becomes overwhelming.
Something that could help is to create shorter term plans and goals.
I used to have a weekly plan, but while I now have a rough time table, I adjust my goals daily.
That way you can set out what is achievable and create new goals each day depending on what you accomplished the day previously.
So, now I will have key long term goals, (that can be adjusted) and then daily goals that I’ll write out in the morning.
These goals should be completely achievable for that day.
This makes it easier to set realistic tasks, that you can check off and feel that you have achieved something.
If you don’t set out key goals and tasks for the day, you’ll just end up procrastinating all over the place and achieving very little.
- When you don’t see results – this can send you on a long term downer.
If this is your full time job, or even a part time occupation, making money from your blog can become vital.
So, if you’re not seeing the results you want and need, understandably this is going to cause you to become frustrated.
But you need to bear in mind that all bloggers go through very similar trials and frustrations.
Sometimes you won’t get the results you were hoping for – you need to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, see where you’re going wrong and learn from it.
A good way to do this is to reach out to other bloggers in your niche, maybe get their own opinion – plenty of bloggers are more than happy to do this.
This is where being part of an online blogging community can really help, because you can get feedback on your efforts and pin point where you’ve gone wrong and how to improve.
- You may blame your blog – for whatever else is in your life.
Maybe the trigger isn’t really your blog at all. Maybe you have other external stuff going on in your life and you’re transferring those feelings on to your blog.
For example, you may feel disconnected from your family having spent so many hours on your blog.
You may be in debt, or having problems in your personal life.
Whatever it is, it can sometimes be easy to blame something else for our problems, rather than acknowledging what’s really going on and work out how to change that.
- Burn out! You’ve been working too hard
Maybe you’ve been working ridiculously hard on your blog, putting in every spare hour you have into it, having late nights and you just plain burn out!
This has happened to me on a number of occasions.
There can be a point where you just push yourself too far and you need a proper rest.
If you’re dealing with this, you’re best off just taking a full break away from it for a couple of days and regaining some energy!
Then, it would be a good idea to create a schedule and ensure that you’re taking enough breaks.
- You have the traffic blues….
Traffic is one of the biggest problems that bloggers can struggle with.
Maybe you’ve been slaving away at your blog for months and you only have a trickle of visitors each day.
The first thing to acknowledge is that it takes time to generate traffic and it’s something that will build up month on month.
That said, if you think you’re doing everything right SEO wise, doing the correct keyword research, sharing via social media – and you still feel that your traffic is not progressing, you may want to try some different tactics.
For example, you could look into guest blogging, connecting to other bloggers in your niche, answer relevant questions on forums or sites such as Quora or consider paid traffic methods, such as targeted Facebook Ads.
There are also cool tools you can use, such as ninja outreach, where you can find and connect with other bloggers in your niche and contact whole lists at a time.
- Negative feedback, can get under your skin…
Another thing can may turn you off of your blog is negative comments and feedback.
All bloggers at some time or another will receive bad comments. That’s just the nature of it.
You have an opinion and not everyone is going to agree with you, sometimes they may even feel personally offended by something you have said.
While you can get used to this over time, the first few times it happens you may end up feeling negatively effected by it.
But negative feedback can be a good thing that you can use to your advantage.
hey, maybe they even had a point?
Consider whether anything they said is correct and adjust your post or site accordingly.
Maybe they helped you see something that you’d missed before.
Sometimes a comment will hold no value and in this case, you just need to learn to click the DELETE button and act as though you never even read it.
Brush yourself off and move on.
Things that may help – when you hate your Blog.
- Organise your time. Make sure your goals are attainable, don’t work too much, nor too little. Find a balance that’s right for you.
- Get inspired again by reading other blogs. What are they writing about? What do you find interesting? What can you learn from them?
- Take your foot off the pedal and take a BREAK! Your blog is not going anywhere! If you really can’t bare to be posting less content to your blog for a couple of days, you could always outsource, or get someone to do a guest post.
- Move your office! One of the great things about blogging, is you can do it anywhere! If you normally work at home, maybe take your laptop to a coffee shop or library.
If you’re not tied down by family commitments, you could even go away on a little break and stay somewhere new. A change of scenery can really help.
- Ask for help! Are you a member of any blogging forums or communities? Personally, I’m a member of Wealthy Affiliate and there is a large community of people that can help at any time.
- Stop the blog envy! Sometimes looking relentlessly at other blogs can have a detrimental effect too.
It’s good to learn from others, but if you start to get freaked out that you can never be as good as them it’s time to take a step back!
Every blogger started in the same location – square one.
You will progress at your own pace.
Plus, if there is something specific you see on a blog and you’d really like to know how to do that thing similarly, ASK them about it.
The worst that can happen is… they don’t reply. No problem.
Ultimately, we’re all going to have off days. But in order to keep going and not give up, you need to have coping strategies in place so that you can deal with those feelings.
So, tell me, what do YOU do when you hate your blog?
Leave me a comment below!
All the best…
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