We All Slip Up With Posting Consistently To Our Blogs. But What Really Happens When You Do?
You probably already know content is king. After all, you can’t escape the non-stop assault you get from everyone else online telling as much. Reminding you that in order for you to succeed with your blog, you must crank out content at a seemingly unsustainable pace.
But what happens when your content production limps along to the point even you don’t know when your next piece of writing will be published?
Well, it isn’t good.
Why Did You Stop Blogging?
Your content creation may come to a screeching halt for any number of reasons, some may not even be your fault. For instance, you may have a child or some other life event that simply consumes your time (as it should).
Or your day job may require additional attention that pulls you away from your blog. You may be sent on business travel and the pleasures of personal writing on your blog fall to the wayside as responsibilities for work consume you.
Or it may simply be laziness.
It happens.
The unfortunate reality is it happens to nearly all of us at some point.
What You Can Expect As a Result
Here are 7 things you can expect when your content creation engine comes to a sputtering halt.
1. You Lose Traffic
This one is a no-brainer. If you don’t post new and refreshing content, people won’t visit your blog. It’s really quite simple.
Posting content regularly not only feeds your existing audience but it also provides better opportunity to start to rank in Google search.
Having a website rich with content, published on a regular basis, is your best shot and driving traffic to your blog.
2. You Lose Your Long Term Audience
All of those folks you were lucky enough to connect with over the months slowly start to fade.
You have already lost the new traffic but now you start to lose even your most faithful followers.
Why wouldn’t you? You aren’t giving them anything new. Why should they continue to click on your website if it’s the same thing they’ve already read?
3. The progress you made starts to decline
Even though you know it’s not going to be pretty, you still check your Google Analytics on a daily basis.
You start to see a trend where your visitors are going down. Your page views have plummeted and your bounce rate is higher than ever.
Even worse, you see what you used to pull in with your blog and realize that everything is starting to trend in the wrong direction.
It’s hard to build an audience, but even harder to deal with the consequences when you start to lose them.
4. Your motivation fades
Seeing your traffic go off a cliff and realizing you are trending in the entirely wrong direction turns your motivation into stagnation.
You tell yourself you are going to create a blog post tonight! But, you don’t.
You even have the audacity to fill in reminders and schedule blog posts on your Google calendar, only to see the days come and go with nothing to show.
5. Your creativity declines
Suddenly you realize that even if you had the motivation and the time to blog, you have no idea what you would write about.
This is perhaps the scariest part. All of the sudden you have lost all ability to be creative.
You sit frustrated over your keyboard waiting for inspiration to strike but nothing happens. The longer you go between blog posts, the harder it gets to create something remarkable. It’s a brutal reality.
6. Your attitude sours
Dealing with this downward spiral really starts to impact your general outlook and attitude.
You start to feel inadequate and frustrated that you can’t generate content like you want to. You start to feel disgruntled and disillusioned at why you even started this whole damn online business thing anyway.
7. It gets harder to start again
Just like exercise, the longer you go without blogging the harder it is to start back up.
Each day that passes where you are not thinking about creative content pushes you further from sitting down and writing again.
You’ve seen all of the damage you’ve created by stepping away and starting up just feels like it will be a fruitless waste of effort.
How to Turn it Around
Here’s the good news.
No matter what happens, you can always start anew.
Your blog, and entire online platform, can quickly be resurrected with a bit of effort. The best part is the fact that a little bit of work starts to snowball and before you know it you are back on track.
Use those around you to spark your motivation. Read blogs in your niche, listen to relevant podcasts, start to become a participant again and the blues will suddenly start to fade.
Reach out to those in your audience that you truly formed a relationship and ask them how they are doing and what they are up to. Engaging with your community should provide a spark and remind you why you posted all that great content in the first place.
And those that truly enjoyed the value you provided will come back. Anyone that doesn’t probably wasn’t someone you wanted in your circle anyway.
So, don’t be too hard on yourself. Even if you haven’t published something new in the last 6 months, there is never a better time to start again than the current day.
