Muscle failure. On the ski team in college, it was our coach’s favorite phrase. We didn’t do sets, laps, runs — we trained until we had muscle failure, the point at which our bodies literally collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
It’s been a while since I’ve had muscle failure, but I have since encountered another kind of exhaustion, familiar to all bloggers, that is equally crippling: content exhaustion.
Bloggers will know what I mean. That point at which you feel that you have complete exhausted all your mental faculties and are completely incapable of producing even one more keyword, much less another paragraph of quality content.
To call it a grind would be an understatement.
Especially after long periods of productivity, blogging can be creatively draining, even if you’re just writing mediocre posts. Writing great posts seems to take still more effort and energy, depleting your resources faster than an Olympic bobsled race. (You’ll have to pardon the winter sports analogies.)
What, then, is a pro blogger to do? What happens after content exhaustion?
Your blogging brain and your muscles have this in common - both recover far more quickly than you probably give them credit for. And the thing about muscle exhaustion is that you never fatigue all your muscles at once.
You work one muscle group one day and another group the next.
The point here is that it is more your unchanging approach to writing blog posts that is killing your creativity than it is writing the posts in the first place.
Of course you’re going to feel exhausted writing the same thing over and over again without ever letting those muscles recover, as it were.
What you need are some new content generation strategies, new ways to develop content, and new directions to take your posts in. So, sharpen your skis and get ready to tackle the slopes (while giving your brain a break) with these new tactics:
Poll Your Audience
When is the last time you sent an email to your followers that wasn’t a ploy to get them to read your newest post? There’s nothing wrong with email marketing, but you’re missing out on a great opportunity to build new content, while also employing some deeply undercover promotion tactics.
The idea is that people want to share great content, right? And if you can get highly visible bloggers to share it, even better.
Your audience knows best what they want to read, what will be interesting to them, so ask them before you write your next post what they’d like to see from you.
Send out an email to some key followers of yours and give them a list of five different topics, asking which they think would be the best. Then write the article and shoot them another email. This gives your audience something to look forward to, especially since they “helped” with the content, and it makes writing the article easier on your tired brain.
Transform Some Data
One of the great things about the internet is that there is more information out there than could ever possibly be consumed by everyone. You can use this to your advantage when you are suffering from content exhaustion.
Browse the internet for some great data - it could be a study, a PDF, a survey, anything so long as it is visually boring. That’s right, I said boring.
Your goal with this strategy is to transform the boring data into something that captivates people. Contact the authors of the data and present your take on their work, asking if you can publish the flashier version for your mutual benefit.
Chances are whoever produced the data will say yes, and this is good news for both you. They get more coverage, and you get more followers, and you didn’t even have to generate any new ideas.
Join the Conversation
Another great thing about the internet is the way that important and controversial conversations are always being shared and continued in almost every field.
With just a little research you can get an ear to the ground and find out what the important conversations in your field are - then you can join in.
Putting your two cents into an ongoing conversation relives the pressure of developing brand-new content, and also automatically gives you an impassioned audience who will want to engage with your argument.
And these are just three ways. Believe me when I say that there are more. Take half an hour and, instead of brainstorming new post ideas, try brainstorming new ways to generate post ideas.
It might be kind of “meta” but it will also save you from the dreaded content exhaustion that so many bloggers hit all too frequently.
This is a guest post by Jane Smith from background check. She is a Houston based freelance writer and blogger. Questions and comments can be sent to: janesmth161 @ gmail.com
