Guest post: How to tame the blogging beast

Does your blog ever threaten to take over your life? Do you feel pressure to blog? Elaine Westwick (pictured) feels your pain.

You publish your latest blog post and feel the warm glow of accomplishment. Can you sit back and relax or are you drawn to the necessity of pushing out the next entry? Are you in control of your blog or is it, beast-like, in control of you?

As mothers, we bemoan the lack of interesting part-time work and are to drawn to blogging as a flexible way to exercise the mind, regain a sense of self and maybe earn some cash. Yet, caught up by success, and having not entirely planned to, we find we have created a ravenous monster that we are driven to feed daily. Instead of freeing us to be available for our families, blogs can end up entrapping us in their claws.

But unlike a slave master boss, our blogs are our own creation and we are free to choose how much time we spend with them. Here are two challenges for anyone wanting to cut the beast down to size:

Feed less often

Standard advice given to those wanting to create a high impact blog is to post with high frequency. In our early enthusiasm we set off at a cracking rate, but sooner or later, life intervenes and maintaining the pace starts to weigh us down. We fear reducing our posting frequency in case our hard-won readers move elsewhere.

Why not put this assumption to the test? Set aside a trial period over which you post a little less often. At the end of the period, check to see if your fears have been realised. Perhaps you will continue blogging more leisurely, but don’t feel your post frequency is then fixed at the new level – you have the power to vary your tempo to suit your other changing commitments.

There may even be advantages to a more relaxed approach. As a blog reader, I prefer high quality, original and infrequent blog posts, to daily unedited brain dumps. I don’t forget a blogger because they don’t post three times a week. The best blog audiences grow slowly based on consistent writing, they are not the fickle crowd who follow posts written for sensationalised sound bites and retweeting records.

Take a step back

There are times when we need a break from blogging – perhaps due to a holiday, or to relieve the pressure of being pulled in many opposing directions. Taking a break is a sensible response to temporary circumstances, it is not failure. Resist the temptation to stack up pre-prepared posts to cover any absences. Your readers may even realise how much they miss you when you are gone. Explaining the reason for your disappearance can show your human side, or give you the opportunity to be creative.

Last year my elder son started school, seriously injured his ankle, and suffered a medical complaint that woke him frequently in the night. At the same time my younger son dropped his day time sleep. My precious writing time vaporised in front of my eyes and supporting my eldest left me emotionally shattered. I stopped blogging and tweeting and following others for three months. And, guess what….the blogosphere continued rotating on its axis and I jumped back on when I was ready. Yes I missed some stuff and my stats dropped, but I kept my sanity.

Support your own flexible working needs and become the progressive boss you’d like to work for. Perhaps you complain about the lack of school-hours jobs available and then work through the night in the school holidays to keep the posts cranking out. Why not become a term-time only blogger? And try some Twitter-free days to give yourself space for slow reflection.

Personally, I still feel a vague, deep-seated pressure to trot out the posts, and a degree of uneasiness if I take a break. When struggling, I find it helpful to remind myself of the aims of my blog. Until my younger son starts school I am blogging to practise my writing, to keep in touch with science, to make a few connections in the science writing community and to enjoy myself. I’m not writing to earn money (I run a separate small business to do that). Bigger audiences would be great, but in themselves they won’t further my aims.

I urge you to step back from the stats, stop comparing yourself to others and put your own needs before those of your readers. Bring the beast to heel and remind yourself who is in charge.

Elaine Westwick blogs (about once a fortnight) at the science blog – Stuff of Life and tweets occasionally @elainewestwick

Calling scientist mothers!

Do you use social media to stay up to date whilst on a career break from science? Or perhaps blogging has led to a change of career direction? I am contributing a chapter “Creative careers in science – new ways of working” to the book “Surviving as a women in science” and would love to hear your experiences – elaine dot westwick at googlemail dot com.

About Jennifer Howze

Jennifer Howze is the Creative Director and co-founder of BritMums. She blogs about family travel at Jenography.net, tweets at @JHowze and Instagrams at @JHowze. Previously, she wrote the Alpha Mummy blog at The Times and as a journalist has contributed to The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Budget Travel, CNN.com, Allure, SELF and Premiere, among others. She won The Maggie Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for a health article in Seventeen magazine.

• Mail
|
• Web
|
• Twitter
|
• Facebook
|
• YouTube
|
• More Posts(343)