Content Burnout: what NOT to do

Here’s a secret that a lot of content marketers deal with, but won’t admit to: burnout.

Yes, of course you need to produce at least one high-quality blog post a week, ideally more than that. And high-quality posts on social. And email. And video. And graphics.

And after a few months or years of producing all this content, you kinda… run out of things to say (this is coming from a woman who once wrote more than 21,000 words about penis enlargement. I fought burnout as long as I could, squeezing my creative brain for everything I could get out of it.). It happens.

When (not if) it happens, people tend to look for the same old solutions. Good solutions are coming up in another post, but here’s what NOT to do when burnout strikes you:

Don’t outsource your blog writing.

There are dozens of marketplaces online where you can outsource your blog writing, and I’ve written for most of them. The problem is, if YOU are out of ideas for content, you can’t commission good, high-quality posts from random freelancers. If you request a weekly post about “social media news” or “content marketing”, you will get weekly posts, and many of them will be well-written. But they will all say the exact same things, in different ways. Each individual writer will google the topic and write about what they find in the top 2-3 results, so at best you’ll be getting a reworded post that was written better in Forbes or AdWeek. It reinforces the content marketing echo chamber, where every individual blog just spouts the same stuff over and over again. It’s not high-quality content; it can’t be.

If you MUST outsource, here’s how to get the best results:

Task your freelance writers with researching and synthesizing content. Outsource blog posts that are factual and interesting. You can get good results by tasking freelance writers with “The History/Origin of ___” and “How ___ has changed in the past decade” and “How [historic fact] still influences us today”. Profile a significant person or place. Freelance writers will do original research for you, and these kinds of posts are interesting, engaging content that you don’t see on every single blog.

Don’t summarize news and trends.

I know, we all love data-driven content, and it’s easy to set up some alerts and write about whatever latest study has been published, but don’t do it. Conventional wisdom is that it supports authority positioning, by indicating that you’re attentive to the latest news in your industry, but EVERYONE is doing it, and chances are they are doing it faster and better than you are. Don’t re-write what other people have already written about.

If you MUST cover news and trends, here’s how to do it:

Make it unique and personal. Write about how this data influences your brand, your company, your decisions. Write about trends you’re watching and how they impact your clients, your industry. “How we are using x technology” “Why we recommend x strategy”. Write about why you AREN’T adopting a trend or technology: that’s genuinely interesting content. Making data relevant and personal is truly unique content that drives deeper engagement.

Don’t stop posting.

It may be tempting, particularly when you have a large content library, to respond to burnout by taking a break. The rationale that it’s better to have high-quality content when you have something authentic to say, than it is to churn out consistent low-quality content makes sense, but don’t do it. Remember that content marketing is entertainment; if you’ve been at all successful, you’ve built an audience, and now the show must go on.

Hopefully there is a little inspiration in this post that might get a content marketer rebooted after burnout, but stay tuned for more in-depth tips and resources to avoid burnout altogether.

Edit: followup with ideas for solving burnout is here!