Blogging is easy until it’s not

I’ve been blogging for years, since early 2008. That’s almost eight years in which I have blogged here, on a personal blog, for clients, and even developed a training workshop to teach people how to blog. I love the format–it’s generally quick and up until recently, it’s been easy.  But lately, blogging has gotten harder and harder. It’s a struggle to come up with one good blog post a week when in my heyday, I wrote several blog posts a week.

What’s going on? I can only speak for myself, but here it is:

1. Blogging itself is easy but coming up with relevant, meaningful posts is hard. Lately, I see lots of posts that are just crap. They recycle information or they post obvious “tips.” I want to create original and creative posts, and lately, I don’t have a lot to add to the conversation.

2. There’s plenty (too much?) of competition. There’s so much to read and we have limited time. I know I scan through the headlines on my Feedly and probably only read a small percentage of articles. It feels overwhelming to try to stand out with so much out there.

3. And of course, we are being told by the “experts” how to make our blog posts better: add images, make sure to optimize for SEO, and on and on.  In other words, put more work into it. I am a fan of writing and posting quickly, while still posting something that is grammatically correct and typo-free. I don’t enjoy looking for images for a post, although I know why it’s important but to me it makes the posting so much more onerous.

4. There are real-world consequences. On a personal blog, all we are doing is sharing our thoughts. If people flock to it, then so much the better. On a business blog, we are doing “content marketing.” We are trying to help our websites and increase our business. We are establishing “thought leadership.” Whatever our business goals are, they can and should be measured, and they can and should impact our bottom line.

These aren’t excuses. I will continue blogging–it’s important. But it’s not as easy as it used to be.

What about you? Are you finding that blogging is harder to get done? If so, why? And how do you counter it?