[Expand for Full Series Overview] This is Part 2 of the series, Before Your Blog Launch: From Habit Building to a Sustainable Content System.
This 4-part series is to help you build a sustainable blog while helping you navigate common self-sabotaging pitfalls that come with starting, building, and maintaining it over time.
A series dedicated to helping you use blogging as a medium to sharpen your ability to articulate your career story both to others and to yourself while fine-tuning your unique value and increasing your professional visibility over time.
At the end, you will build a sustainable blog system that works with you in mind, creating the foundation for having a visible track record of your expertise and helping you stand out in the competitive marketplace. Read the full series synopsis here.
All the Posts in this Series
[Previous Post] Phase 1: Ease into Blogging – Build a Writing Habit that Blends in What You Love
[This Post] Phase 2: Before You Start Blogging – Know When to Adjust or Let Go
Phase 3: Plan, Write, and Design Your Blog Without Getting Stuck
Phase 4: The Art of Building a System for the Overwhelmed Blogger
This blog prevents new bloggers from falling into a common perfectionistic trap: search and follow advice that has worked for others but may clash with their unique rhythm, needs, and life circumstances.
This is especially true for dedicated creatives who don’t have experience with blogging because they don’t have a clear sense of what actually fits their needs.
This post is designed to give you the space, control, and flexibility to bring yourself back into the center of your goal, not as an afterthought.
Post Highlights
In this blog, you’ll learn how to:
- Use self-exploratory guiding questions to evaluate what it takes to meet your blog vision and create an actionable plan that scales from where you are now.
- Identify your blog’s purpose and assess whether blogging is the right medium for you to achieve your personal goal effectively.
- Design a deliberate exit or pause plan that prevents low-value busywork or the risk of guilt-driven quitting.
- Effectively repurpose your past work and efforts to showcase your skills and unlock your next opportunity.
This post builds on a previous post that helps new bloggers overcome hesitation by easing into a consistent, sustainable writing habit. It includes a few references to that piece, but it stands fully on its own. You don’t need to read the earlier post to get the full value.
As your writing habit becomes the new normal, it will naturally ease you into completing your first blog post, or maybe onto your third.
Truthfully, these blog posts will, without a doubt, take the longest to write, maybe even sound cringy or generic.
Just like the two major hurdles you’ve overcome in Phase 1,
- getting started and
- building a consistent writing habit,
a new set of self-doubts and challenges will start to creep in.
Habits will stop if we don’t give them enough purpose and reward.
Keep in mind that our end goal for building a writing habit is to ease into creating a sustainable blog.
This new habit, which we took so long to develop, will disappear to make time for other responsibilities that either have a clearer purpose or give us a more immediate reward.
That’s the danger when pursuing a long-term goal like building a blog.
- You might find yourself stuck in the soft launch phase, not from laziness, but because the time it takes for a new habit to take hold is individually subjective. The pseudo-goal morphs into the end-goal the more we convince ourselves that we’re not quite ready to take the next step.
- You rush into new challenges before you know what you want, afraid to lose momentum. “Just do it” is a mantra you live by. As long as you keep busy, your goal lives another day. Speed becomes your proof of progress. But when working on a long-term goal, there’s bound to be a time when the unpaid workload makes you question how many opportunities you’ve lost when chasing a mirage blindly.
- You feel trapped, not by the work, but by what it represents. You’ve invested time, energy, and maybe even social capital. You’ve told friends and family. You feel you’re at the point of no return. You stick to the goal because explaining why you would stop or take a break is more painful than pushing through, a perceived threat to your self-worth and work ethic.
To avoid stagnation and burnout, where so many dreams quietly collapse. It’s critical to tackle the existential hurdles in this Phase,
- Assess your current strengths and resources to clarify your blog’s initiatives, and
- Protect your mental health with an exit plan.
Step 2: Decide if you want to adjust, continue, or let go with a list of probing questions.
By now, you should have a preview of what writing regularly feels like.
A sweet spot where early try-outs give you just enough experience to assess if blogging is truly for you, before putting too much time or effort on the line.
It’s time to open up the can of worms on the sustainability of your blogging goal, so you can
- Define a purpose that feels honest, one that quiets self-doubt and can evolve into an About Me page with honest reasons that doesn’t make you feel like an impostor.
- Have logical reasons to back up your decision to pivot into other creative mediums if blogging is not the right fit, with no remorse.
The questions are raw, but they will help you be intentional with whatever decision you make.
Please use the guiding questions as a starting point. As you move along, you will have overarching questions of your own to dig deeper into. Make sure you have enough time to be honest with yourself.
Take a deep breath, sip water, and let’s go!
Soft Launch Reflection:
- How do you feel about the soft launch? Does the urge to write feel natural or forced?
- How many of your emotions/actions are simply human nature, in general, not because it’s a you problem?
- How well do you think you can maintain this writing habit? How do your motivation, energy levels, and discipline fluctuate?
- Does developing this writing habit interfere with your performance on other responsibilities?
Rigidity of Expression:
- Are you serious about blogging, or just like the idea of blogging?
- Out of the other creative mediums, why do you want to express your thoughts in the form of a blog?
- Would you be satisfied with just writing in your diary, on Reddit, or on Medium?
Ability to Actualize with Patience:
- Do you have a plan for how to make this goal happen when you have other responsibilities?
- Are you willing to devote time to plan and establish systems that may override your own freedom to do other things?
- Do you have the patience to write quality blogs without an audience for a long time?
Courage to Face Societal Expectations:
- Are you ready to face family pressures? How would you respond?
- Are you ready to face societal pressures? How would you respond?
- Are you ready to face the high standards of your scrutiny? How would you respond?
- Are you comfortable updating your progress to people you know?
Willingness to Sacrifice:
Opportunity cost
- If you manage to start a blog, are you willing to learn how to upkeep your blog, such as web management, design, copywriting, SEO, audience research, even if you don’t like to do them for the sake of writing?
- Would you be able to have the time to do it solo? Do you have the financial means to hire someone to shoulder the responsibilities?
Do what you don’t like:
- Are you disciplined enough to start a blog? Are you willing to develop habits for the sake of this long-term goal?
Self-discipline
- Are you willing to sacrifice immediate paid opportunities to devote time to blogging, even if it doesn’t pay the bills in the beginning?
- What would you do if blogging doesn’t generate revenue or attention?
- Would you still choose to blog? Why?
Keep these questions in the back of your mind as you build your writing habit because that’s when you’ll get the most honest feedback in real-time.
You could even hit two birds with one stone by exploring these questions directly while completing your writing habit quota.
Step 3: Protect Your Mental Health with an Exit Plan
| The Law of Reversed Effort: This principle shares the belief that the harder a person tries to control or force a result, the less likely he or she will succeed. Proficiency often comes from effortless action and combining action with strategic breaks. |
After you’ve done an honest self-evaluation in the previous step, we can entertain the idea of “taking a break” or “knowing when to quit” strategically and intentionally without using it as an excuse.
Having an exit plan helps us to “let go” of the emotional weights, expectations, growing pains, and fear.
As a long-time perfectionist, I used to struggle to quit because it meant that I couldn’t deliver on my promises. I can’t grow, or I’ve hit a plateau.
But it gives us the breathing room to think about what we want and how we can get there realistically.
I was limiting myself by not being able to reframe an event as a sign for adjustment, redirection, and the beginning of my next iteration of growth.
This reframe requires the subtle art of letting go, allowing us to create a safe space to preview the idea of “pausing” or “exiting”, allowing productivity to flow naturally rather than forcing it under pressure.
Here are some ways to make “taking a break” and “quitting” feel normal.
Taking a break
- Set time away while you write to relax your eyes, stretch, drink water, go out for a walk, or take a quick nap.
- Take a mental note on how it helps you write, such as writer’s block, productivity, and increased focus.
Taking a short vacation
- After you finish a piece of writing, give yourself room to appreciate what you’ve accomplished.
- Take note of why you feel like you need a break.
- Give yourself a simple note on where you left off so you can pick it up without having to trace back.
- Take a mental note on how even if you’re on a break, you might still be thinking passively about writing, proving that you will come back to writing without procrastinating or being lazy, and distancing yourself from writing may allow you to think outside the box.
Quitting with Grace
Think of ways to make the journey feel complete, even if you choose to quit completely or reset your approach
Example 1: Add this experience to your portfolio to use for your other career endeavors.
Example 2: Create a small personal project that you can highlight your gained skills in your resume, or test drive a new opportunity.
Addressing Accountability
- Send a letter to your friends and family about the update and your reasons for quitting. Don’t apologize, but frame it as a valuable way to learn about yourself and thank them for their support.
- Officiate the closure with yourself with reasons why you quit, so when you feel regretful, you can remind yourself that you’ve taken an intentional approach. And if you want to restart after quitting, you can remind yourself of the reasons why you quit and adjust accordingly, building up from your previous experience.
Here’s a summary of what you have accomplished in this post.
- Clarify your root purpose for starting a blog.
- Reframe blogging as a “medium” for self-expression to give way to new possibilities that may better match your natural creative inclinations.
- Evaluate the mental, physical, financial, opportunity cost, and social pressure against your tenacity and sustainability to make blogging your goal.
- Create realistic expectations on how to proceed based on your assessment of current resources, skills, and needs.
- Create and visualize an exit plan (and a pause plan) to safeguard against future stress at work or use it as an opportunity to brace for the impact of exiting a goal.
Conclusion
It’s easy to neglect ourselves in the planning of our goals when we’re desperately trying to figure out what to do next, when we have no prior experience in blogging.
However, how well we’re able to do what we had planned is limited to our current capacity.
It’s easy to overwork ourselves trying to do everything that’s popularly advertised when we ourselves don’t know our limits and what we want.
We may simply believe that it’s just what we need to do to put our best foot forward.
It becomes all the more unfortunate when the more passionate and serious we are about starting a blog, the more we blame ourselves for not being able to progress.
I must’ve been the problem since the methods had worked for other people.
There’s never a shortage of winning solutions, but just because it does for some, it doesn’t mean it works for all. Solutions are tools that need to work for us, not the other way around.
Only when we truly understand what we need, our strengths, non-negotiables, and challenges we encounter while trying to establish a writing habit in Phase 1, can we set realistic expectations, understand the sustainability of our goal, and reassess if blogging is the best method to satisfy our underlying interest and purpose.
As a hardheaded perfectionist myself, I understand that it isn’t easy to change the self-sabotaging habit of putting ourselves down when things don’t work out with only self-introspection.
Because it’s not like we don’t know the effects of negative self-talk, we did it because we can’t help it.
The real turning point: Your mindset will start to change only when you see real evidence on how these personal “flaws” could be turned into solutions that will help you in practice (Phase 3-4).
With this in mind, we move to Phase 3 of our Pre-Launch Blog series:
“Phase 3: Plan, Write, and Design Your Blog Without Getting Stuck”
Here, we’ll turn your personal insights into powerful blog-starting deliverables: an actionable content plan, purposeful blog website copy, and brand-aligned website and logo that amplifies your voice to attract your target audience.
Kind Note: There are multiple paths to be successful, a myriad of ways to start and maintain a blog that will last as long as you want. This series offers one path, not the path. Use it as part of your solution, all of it, or none at all. While our struggles often overlap, your inclinations and circumstances are uniquely yours. This series exists not to contort you within a fixed set of instructions but to anchor you as the origin point of solutions that truly fit your life.
Feel free to control your own pace while navigating through this blog series, and fast forward to get a preview of the other blogs in this series to judge if this series truly works for you.
Expand the links below to see where this journey leads next.
🔗 Explore the full series roadmap here
[Expand to View] Before Your Blog Launch: From Habit Building to a Sustainable Content System.
All the Posts in this Series
[Previous Post] Phase 1: Ease into Blogging – Build a Writing Habit that Blends in What You Love
[This Post] Phase 2: Before You Start Blogging – Know When to Adjust or Let Go
[Next Recommended Post] Phase 3: Plan, Write, and Design Your Blog Without Getting Stuck
Phase 4: The Art of Building a System for the Overwhelmed Blogger