How to Beat Content Creation Burnout

A guide for brand builders and solopreneurs.

Deep creative work requires deep mental energy. Most brand builders and solopreneurs know this firsthand. They also know content creation burnout is a real threat.  

Last year, I was publishing two posts a week on my first Substack newsletter along with a slew of other content marketing pieces—blog entries, lead magnets, social media updates, email campaigns, book descriptions, and product narratives—for a budding hybrid book publisher in Austin, Texas. Some weeks, I was creating three, four, five pieces of 1,000-plus-word copy PLUS trying to promote, engage and nurture. No surprise, it became overwhelming and unsustainable.

I wasn’t following the strategies I crafted in 10+ years of creating content, first as a one-woman content machine for a growing online travel agency and later as a director who built and scaled in-house and freelance teams, overseeing content publication for a blog generating over a million views a month and a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers. 

Thankfully, you can learn from my mistakes. Here are the things I do to make content creation easier—without sacrificing quality. Yes, some of these are things you’ve heard, but I’ll throw in a few more unconventional suggestions that fly in the face of what many solopreneurs and brand builders do. 

Let’s get to it. 

Big Steps to Avoiding Content Creation Burnout

Understand your order of operations. 

Most of us solopreneurs are multi-hyphenates. We’re authors and speakers, podcasters and thought leaders with multiple offerings, products and services. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed if you are trying to treat all … the … things … equally. Or if you’re not sure which one is your priority. 

One of the things I help solopreneurs do is prioritize their marketing efforts based on their goals, so they allocate time more effectively. And it looks different for everyone. 

For example, one executive coach I’m working with told me her primary goal for the next year was building her brand so she could land her dream book deal. She already has the book idea and publisher interest, but she needs to get her follower count up across channels. And also, she still needs to keep booking corporate coaching gigs, so she can pay the bills. 

Another coaching friend is finalizing edits on her next book. She’s also launching a podcast … and she does speaking gigs. When I asked her what her goals were, she said it’s to get more people through her mastermind program so she can make a bigger impact on the world. The book, podcast, and speaking gigs are marketing tools to get people into her course. 

On paper, these women look similar, but their goals are quite different. Hence, the order of operation for their content marketing is too.  

Create a content marketing plan and strategy. 

In my opinion, this is the single biggest contributor to solopreneur burnout. Without clear priorities, you have no overarching plan. Without a plan, you (again) try all the things without doing any of them well and end up wasting a lot of time getting nowhere. Then you’re mentally and emotionally spent. 

When we work together, the first thing I do is create a marketing blueprint that guides the various tactics and creation process. It’s a collaborative effort based on your goals and takes into consideration where you’re already seeing success (or our best guesses, if you’re just starting), who your audience is (or who we think your audience is), and what channels would best reach them. 

Set realistic expectations about what you can commit to. 

This is the … hardest … thing. The internet is overrun with people selling their overnight success. And it has created this expectation that our results should be easy. Just create the content, and they will come. Go viral, and your marketing work is done. It’s rarely this easy. For most of us, it’s about showing up and doing the work consistently, so commit to a minimum schedule that will insure your growth and that you can maintain. Overcommitting is a sure path to burnout, because you constantly feel like you’re not living up to your own expectations. 

Check the metrics. 

It’s crazy how many people post two, three, four times a week on multiple social channels in the name of growing their business but have no idea how well their content is performing. Seriously. It’s fine if you simply need to have a presence on social media. But if you are relying on social media for lead generation, you best be checking your metrics. And it saves so much time and keeps you from spinning your wheels when you know what is and what isn’t working. I like to do monthly check-ins, because you don’t get too in the weeds, and you can often see patterns of what’s working and what’s not. 

Pick 1-2 platforms max.

As I mentioned in my post last week, more isn’t always better when it comes to marketing. Don’t try to be on every platform. Don’t just create content, schedule it across all the channels, and call it done. This is no recipe for growth; it’s the recipe for seeing mediocre results across all your channels and then wondering where you went wrong. Pick one or two platforms and do those well.

Batch content creation and schedule it.

In my opinion, creating content under the gun day in and day out is the fastest path to burnout. And it’s easily avoided with batch creation. Spend a day a month creating social content, using the analytics from your previous month as a guide. What worked well? Do more of those kinds of posts. Even better, make a tweak or two, and use the same one again. It’s highly unlikely the same folks will see it again, and if they do, so what? Schedule it all and relax.

Follow what you like. 

I followed a garbage truck once so I could snap a pic of its snappy tagline. I am forever stashing away posts, slogans, taglines I think are golden. Even if it’s not about my particular topic, I can adapt it into something that might work for me later. I keep a file on my laptop with ideas of other people’s genius. When I’m not feeling creative, I go to the file for inspiration

Use AI … wisely.

There are things AI does well and things it doesn’t … at least not yet. AI is great for topic ideation, outlining, creating templates and even grading your copy. It’s not that good yet at writing like a human, although it’s getting there. I’m showing my inner nerd right now, but my favorite thing to use chat GPT for is generating lists of synonyms, especially lists of synonyms starting with a particular letter. AI can save you a lot of time.

Invest in tools to make your life easier. 

Yes, it’s easy to just spend, spend, spend, and some tools are more valuable than others. But it pays to use tools that make your life easier. I’ve been a Photoshop nerd most of my life, so I was a late Canva adopter, but these days, I’ve set up templates, so that image creation is way easier. Publishing tools like Later or Publer make it easy to do that batch uploading of content I talked about earlier. They save time by allowing you to preview and tweak your content. They also provide quick analytics that make it easy to decide which content to republish. Have a tool that’s really helped your content creation? Drop me a comment—I’d love to hear about it!

Invest in training … or pay other people to do it. 

Look, you can teach yourself a lot of things, but piecing advice together from the Internet takes time. Is this the best use of your time? I’ve been in journalism and marketing for 20+ years, and I am still learning, paying for training, and hiring people to help me. Marketing is not a stagnant industry. Things change rapidly. I connected with a woman yesterday who does copywriting for copywriters, and my first thought was genius and then I need this.  

Final Thoughts on Preventing Content Marketing Burnout

The life of the solopreneur is such that the work is never done. And you can’t do it all, even when you’re paying other people. This is why it’s so important to set boundaries around this work, and sometimes even scale back or let things go. The smartest solopreneurs understand what they’re good at and what they have time for; they focus on that and outsource the rest of it.

Content creation is rarely easy, even when you’re in flow. But with clear priorities, structured strategies and a focus on sustainable practices, you can avoid major burnout.

I know there are a million other tricks to avoiding burnout, and I’d really love to hear what’s worked for you. Share your thoughts in comments.