Soooooo it’s been a while…
Just over four months since I really sat down and starting writing. So what happened?
Sick? Injured? Forget to pay internet bills?
NOPE
I sort of wish it was one of those.
In short I hit the wall. Blogger burnout.
I get it… I was only blogging for a couple months. What gives? Could it really be burnout? Am I just weak?
Ehhhhh I dont know why it happened but it did.
Some people say blogger burnout happens because you are not seeing results. But that wasnt the case for me.
Here are my stats:
August: 2816 Page Views
September: 13,651 Page Views
October: 22,178 Page Views
I was CRUSHING page views but at what cost?
Over the first 3 months I spent almost every waking hour learning a variety of strategies to grow my blog. I tried to implement EVERYTHING! I was going a 1000 miles per hour trying to grow the site. I listened to every podcast I could download to see if there was any nugget or trick that I could use.
I joined dozens of Pinterests groups because it works…
But that led to hours trying to create perfect Pins in Canva that would stand out from the crowd. There is no point to do Pinterest if your pins suck I thought. Everything needed to be perfect. I joined Tailwind to speed up my reach and again it worked!
Twitter was my main social media and I was slowly starting to pick up momentum there. I turned to automation to help kick up my exposure. I used Buffer to schedule out tweets while I was at work because the blogisphere never sleeps… and it worked! I would flip open Twitter and see a ton of notifications each day.
Facebook Groups and Daily Share Groups. I joined them. Ehhhh free page views. I know lousy views but I was chasing views not quality views… Again it worked.
What next?!?
Well there is no point to get page views if you can convert some of them into subscribers. So I spent time creating simple opt in freebies. Guess what? They work! I now have a subscriber list. Wooo hooo!
Over time I became more and more addicted to my stats. Not just my subscriber count. First it was Page Views per month. Most bloggers check those stats. But I became obsessed with the numbers. I would check how many people were on my blog per hour and then tried to figure out why and how I could improve it. Google Analytics became one of my most opened apps.
The moment I realized I had crossed the line.
I remember waking up at 3am one night to use the bathroom and opening google analytics.
‘12 people are on my site RIGHT now!’
I then spent the next 35 minutes checking how they landed on my blog, checking pinterest and sending out a couple of tweets.
Yeah…..
Thats not good. Ha!
My goal behind my site was to share family financial advice to help dads be better fathers.
Holy crap!
How did I stray so far from the mission???
Rather than focusing on solving my readers problem, I was focused on me… and Page views…
Add in work, 3 year old, life… this was a recipe for disaster.
So I “unplugged”. I uninstalled the google analytics app and walked away from my blog. Now I could have stayed unplugged but… there is just something about blogging that I enjoy.
I decided to try my hand again at this blogging thing. But this time I set up some personal boundaries and of course left google analytics in the app store…
Glad you are back to blogging and I definitely go on hiatuses from time to time. I do have to remind myself why I and blogging.
I kept thinking “hustle”. And I will admit I am sure if I kept doing it over 4 months I would of grown but at what expense? I still want to grow but this time I want to focus on building a core group of fans that grow with me.
Glad you are back and didn’t let yourself stay trapped in google analytics refreshing!
Glad you started back to blog. I stopped blogging for about the same reason couple months ago and now I back with a posting schedule and they are written for at least a month so I can take a break and come back without anyone seeing I didn’t write. They only thing is that my twitter feed will be automated.
I am making my schedule as well. I am going to try and batch some of my processes. One day create topics and pull references, one day write a bunch of articles, one day edit, etc. I am hoping once I get good at my process it will make me more efficient. For social media and comments, I am going to set aside about an hour or so every other day.
Ha, you have no idea how familiar this sounds!
A number of people have said a similar thing!
welcome back! I had literally just discovered you and added High Five Dad to my RSS reader, and then you went into radio silence. Glad to see you’re back and hopefully feeling rejuvenated.
And don’t feel too bad. I just started blogging again with a new blog a few months ago after taking the better part of 2 years off. Sometimes life gets in the way of your plans but its good when you can bounce back.
Thanks! Yeah I am setting some boundaries this time. Haha.. Lets see if I can stick to them