Hi webmasters, I know most of this forum is technical, but I thought giving this a shot during 2022.
Do you ever get blocked? tired? bored? or loose interest on creating content? My first personal website appeared during 1998, and since then I created a few others born from passion/hobby. These websites feature my articles, original photographs, drawings, original video, and original video production, along with VERY FEW collaborations where the articles are examined, filtered, then posted. I'll say 99.5% of the content is all mine. This came with understandable hard work, and thus, feeling the weight of creating content. At some point I closed some websites and decided to stay with the strongest ones enjoying higher traffic and ROI, also to reduce workload because multiple websites can become a huge challenge. Return Of Investment in terms of money was never the goal, but eventually the websites produced money, and I understood/accepted creating content must bring something in return (purely for mental health considerations, it's not ok to just produce).
I've experienced content-creation-lazyness before, also writer's blockage, and it's all been temporary. Also faced fractal challenges like, creating one article implying writing something related, and then creating a set of 3, 5, 10 articles within the same topic creating the nightmare of "oh, look at the huge list of articles I must write!". During chapters I wrote on a weekly basis, at times daily (one article per day... felt a bit exhausting but was driven by passion), for some chapters I just kept writing and scheduling for posting, this mean taking advantage of lots of content, set to post automatically, and just rest during a whole year. I tried working with friends, "professionals" in their field, or hiring people... but it's just too hard o get quality content, price can be an issue, but commitment is the real challenge, besides an expert can be terrible at explaining. Anyway, when you have spent enough time creating content you kinda move to a different league, so, training people to deliver can be a wasted effort, I'm not interested on training people.
If this sounds like a rant on how difficult it is to create content, no way it is. Lazy? consider from 1998 to 2022 = that's about 24 years, so the whole problem seems quite understandable to me. I came across posts on other forums but most people are lazy, create low quality content, or just steal (I'm not on that boat), so those discussions seem like a waste of time to me. Stephen King is the one that I found most helpful regarding writing: in short, you just do it, force yourself to do it daily, create the habit, keep doing it, etc.
- My websites rank decently
- Two websites are constantly used as reference (for research) by local university students
- Due to it's quality, some are used in academic papers as there is no serious info about the topics elsewhere
- A LOT of my content has been stolen, copied, altered, and posted again (including "respectful" credits and links) by other websites because they can't match the research or original pictures I post. Yes I have proceeded with DMCA's to solve stolen content with good results.
- Some do the above because they are lazy
- I feel... the easiest articles have already been posted, and the potential ahead is on more complex content, one that demands even MORE research and time, and thus becoming a challenge.
- While I have done this due to personal passion for years, such efforts feel "weird" regarding how easily my content is copied or used to create other articles, also, the monetization is not as high as in the past, so it feels like doing work for free or for pennies.
At some point considered selling one or two of my strongest websites, then abandoned the idea, I'm pretty sure nobody would feed/keep the sites for years and would end up lost. Anyone would like to share some thoughts?
