Battling Blogxiety: Stories & Tips From Shelley Marmor, Jessie Festa, and Millie Austin

Constantly traveling, posting pictures reminiscent of glossy magazine spreads, and crafting beautifully worded narratives about one’s adventures – from the outside, the world of travel blogging seems perfect. Many people believe that travel bloggers write their posts while sipping a pina colada on a beach, and getting paid for it.

However, few people realize that the reality of travel blogging is often far from the glossy facade that many bloggers present. In fact, it involves sleepless nights devoid of inspiration, constant efforts to optimize SEO, stress preceding every Google update, and the burnout that comes with dwindling web traffic. Then, there’s the tedious task of setting up affiliate tools to monetize content, navigating through various ad networks, managing social media, and much more—all while in transit or during layovers between flights, which can be exhausting.

Doesn’t sound as glamorous now, does it?

As May unfolds, Mental Health Awareness Month provides an opportunity to shed light on an issue that affects countless travel bloggers: burnout. Or as we call it, blogxiety (burnout and stress from blogging, caused by difficulties beyond the process of content creation itself).

Seasoned travel bloggers, Shelley Marmor, Jessie Festa, and Millie Austin, candidly shared their experiences battling blogging burnout and, more importantly, how they overcame it. Here are 3 non-trivial tips on how to prevent and overcome blogxiety.

Tip 1: Look For Growth Points During Dark Times

Running a travel blog that you’ve built from the ground up after years of learning, making mistakes, and growth, while watching the passive income roll in each day, is one of the most rewarding feelings.

However, as every website owner knows, when one technical aspect slips out of place, it can all come crumbling down in seconds, and it’s gut wrenching to watch.

That’s exactly what happened to me when my website got hacked.

Yep, it got hacked—every website owner’s worst nightmare…

After many sleepless nights and hours on end trying to figure out how it happened and what I needed to do to bring my site back to life, I almost threw in the towel.

When something you’ve spent years building gets taken away from you so fast and you have no idea how to fix it, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees, and you quickly become overwhelmed and disheartened.

But, in a way, I am glad it happened. This experience taught me to lean into my strengths and away from my weaknesses. I knew the technical aspects of building a travel blog would never be my area of expertise and would only ever suck my time away from tasks I was good at—and most importantly—enjoyed.

I quickly hired a technical expert to fix the issue, and within a few hours, the stress and anxiety that had been flooding my mind had completely disappeared.

So, the message here is, when something isn’t easy, you shouldn’t quit.

Tip 2: Organize Your Blogging Work

Luckily, over the years of experiencing my own burnout struggles, I’ve come up with a few key strategies to help combat these overwhelming feelings:

1. Create a repeatable schedule. Look at all of your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks, and see which ones you can cut or combine to save time. From there, create a repeatable and sustainable schedule for yourself.

If you find you don’t have enough time to get everything done, prioritize what is most important (as in, what will actually lead to traffic and income) or outsource if possible.

2. Keep a piece of paper near you as you work. This way, when shiny object syndrome creeps in or you get a new idea that you don’t have time to work on, but don’t want to forget, you can jot it down.

Then, at the end of the day, you can schedule the idea into your planner or save it to a “future ideas” list. Personally, I keep one of these in Asana, where I can always refer to it.

3. Remember that you are your own boss. This means you have the power to rework your schedule as you see fit. While consistency is important, I also find value in knowing that, even if I skip a day of posting on Instagram or need to move a task to the following week, everything will be okay.

Tip 3: Know Your Why

There is a common saying in the positive mindset community: “Know Your Why.” Knowing your “Why” (with a capital W) is basically synonymous with knowing your purpose, or attaching your goal to a larger purpose. In this case, I’m talking about the “Why you started your blog” purpose.

Of course, that won’t work on other days, when you simply need a break. On those days, it might be best to just take that break, so the burnout doesn’t get any worse.

Just as many people take weekends. You might need to give yourself a long weekend to not think about your blog, or even a two-week vacation, which is totally normal to do once in a while—as long as you return to your blog work after your vacation ends, of course.

Let’s Reiterate the Most Important Point

• When something isn’t easy, you shouldn’t quit. Remember that you can’t be the best at everything. Challenges in travel blogging are inevitable, but they can expose your weaknesses.
• It’s okay to lean on others for support, as this will ultimately help you grow.
• To prevent blogxiety create a repeatable schedule, prioritize tasks, consider outsourcing, and keep a future ideas list.
• Always remember your “Why”, as knowing your purpose helps power through burnout.
• Sometimes, taking a break is necessary to prevent burnout from worsening.

Share your story in the comments. Have you ever experienced blogging burnout? If so, how did you recognize it, and how did you fight it? What helped you persist in blogging instead of quitting?

Let’s support other travel bloggers by helping them recognize blogxiety as early as possible and learn effective strategies to overcome it!