I woke up today with plans to post a full nude on my main OnlyFans page. A not uncommon occurrence, all things told! What I didn’t expect was to completely revise my “full nudes on the wall” policy by the end of the day. So what changed between when I first hit that Post button, and when I went back to delete it?

Honestly, nothing.

Nothing changed that hadn’t already been on my mind. But something said, you know what, just do it. Today’s the day. Who’s going to stop you? If you don’t say anything about the change, is anyone going to notice? Probably not so just do it! Make the change because it’s what you want to do, it’s where you’re at right now and, if you’ve been thinking about it this much, you’re reasoning is probably not wrong.

This year has been my lowest performing year on my OnlyFans page since I started it in 2020. And yes, as much as the economy and world politics are factors in why things have slowed down, I also know–I know–that I myself am a big part of why my revenue from the site has dipped. I hit burnout hard in 2023, not once, but twice, at least. Is it possible to have a burnout that lasts for months and months and maybe most of the year? Because… that. Oh damn, I was down bad, and there was absolutely nothing that could pull me up by those proverbial bootstraps.

Trying to celebrate my OnlyFans page’s anniversary amidst burnout

I knew I was burnt out last year, but there wasn’t much I could realistically do about it without maxing out my credit cards and sleeping it off. So I tried to kickstart my enthusiasm again, or really just to maintain my life; I went out to bars and movie nights and coffee meetups, I kept posting on my social media, I did all the “normal” things one does. I also wanted do something big for my OnlyFans page’s 3rd anniversary so we celebrated with my first wheel spin game that included spin videos, scorecards, and tons of bonuses. Wee!

In reality, I had over-designed my anniversary event in an attempt to break myself out of what I thought was a creative rut (it wasn’t). Everything looked normal on the outside but behind the scenes I was coasting, scrambling, not paying attention to much and not fulfilling my obligations to my subscribers.

Consistency is one factor of success, but so is showing up in the ways you say you will. So is doing the work people pay you to do. And I’d do the work… sort of. I’d get started on it and just… kind of… peter out, losing interest or momentum on each project just a few hours’ work shy of the finish line. “There’s always tomorrow,” I told myself. Reader, when I tell you how embarrassed I am that it’s a year later and I still haven’t sent out a couple of those prizes… oh boy.

Somehow, I always found a way to justify the delays. Something always happened “tomorrow” that interfered with the completion of “yesterday”. Construction outside, an unplanned internet outage, dead batteries, camera malfunction, THE NEWS, et cetera. Piled together like that, it was all too much to process let alone work around, and none of it was my fault.

I started to shut down. I turned away from the things that were bringing me down, saying it was “for my mental health”. Except ignoring all my social media channels is dangerous when I use those channels to promote my work. Staying offline for the day isn’t ideal when your fans are waiting on replies; hyper-fixing on optimizing the editing process isn’t great when your customers are waiting for you to actually edit and deliver their custom videos. Oops.

Eventually, I realized I hadn’t been paying attention. To any of it.

I looked back on recent months and didn’t recognize the content I’d posted. Didn’t remember shooting some of those photos. Was embarrassed over my lacklustre captions. And it was scary to realize how out of touch I was, with both myself and my work. What had I been doing with my time? I truly had no idea.

When you’re a business owner, a freelancer, or a contract worker, you have to be paying attention all the time–and let’s be honest, that’s half of where the burnout comes from. If you aren’t paying attention… you probably aren’t making any money. Your subscribers will fall off because you’re not fulfilling your promises; your engagement on social media dwindles even when you do post because you’re no longer relevant to the algorithm, and you slowly chip away at your safety net month by month, telling yourself “it’s happening to everyone; tough times all around…” Again, none of it was “my fault”.

New year, new me (and a new approach to managing both my burnout and my OnlyFans page)

I started mixing stuff up on my main OnlyFans page at the beginning of this year, baby steps when compared to my all-in anniversary celebration. I began trying new approaches to how I distribute content and how I engage with my fans. To a degree, I was grasping at straws to try to ignite that creator spark, but it was also valuable experimentation to gauge what would be engaging for my fanbase.

In one of my weekly blog-style recaps, I vulnerably shared that my sub count was the lowest it’s ever been… but I also confidently shared that this also meant it was a great opportunity to play around with how I was managing my page, and would be relying on those stalwart fans to help guide me. And I meant it!

For me, mixing up how I run my page has two goals. One, it keeps things new and interesting for me, and two, it allows me to test out new things to see how my paid subscribers respond. I’ve been running polls, asking for feedback, trying different themes, adjusting my posting schedule and post structures, and creating new methods to make the sale. So while I haven’t been active on social media throughout this year, I have been active on my pages… if not consistently then at least transparently. This meant that the people who stayed were 100% fans of me and had a personal interest in supporting me/my work.

During the lead-up to my OnlyFans page’s 3-year anniversary, I had been strongly considering raising the monthly subscription fee to match the extensive catalog of content I’d created, but my gut was telling me that doing so would ostracize a lot of those loyal fans. Yet this year, as I’ve played around with restructuring my page, a new thought has been creeping in: what if I lowered the monthly subscription price?

Initially, I bristled at the premise. If I know my page is worth more than $7 so why would I go lower?! But I’ve been digging deep on my imposter syndrome and reconnecting with one of my favourite parts of myself: my entrepreneurialism. Shifting my mindset back into business management has been planting all sorts of delicious ideas in my head about who I am as a brand, an entertainer, an artist, et cetera. This is difficult work in many ways, but I realized I’ve never had a plan when it came to my OnlyFans. Like many of us, I kind of just threw the proverbial spaghetti at the wall when I launched in 2020, but I never had a plan.

So that brings us back to today, when I randomly decided to start taking steps toward that thing I’ve been thinking about. Part of that was to acknowledge that yeah, some of the stuff I’ve posted on my page gives more access to me than I’m comfortable with for a mere $7. Looking back, that is a big part of what led to my burnout: feeling like I was not being adequately compensated for what I was publishing.

It took two hours for me to go through four years of posts and archive a bunch of stuff. I didn’t warn anyone that I was going to do that, but I did let my subscribers know that I was changing my approach, and how it would effect them. Moving forward, any nudes I do post will expire after a month or less (be real, how many people scroll back to content older than a month? They really don’t!) but hey, they’ll always be available over on that VIP page… you get me?

And that’s that. I don’t know precisely when I’ll be ready to drop the price on my OnlyFans page. But now that I do know it’s something I want to do, I’m one step closer to doing it in a way that works for me and my mental health. I can continue to strategize about how and when I want to make that bigger change of lowering my subscription fee, and what chain of events needs to occur for me to get there.

This blog post, too, is a step forward out of burnout

When was the last time I blogged, in earnest? I’ve been telling people for at least 5 years, “I think blogging is going to come back in style.” Not the fulll-force influencer Pinterest mommy blogger with the Amazon affiliate store and an MLM side hustle that I think the term “blogging” has become synonymous with… but, that older kind; the kind of blogging we did when Blogger and LiveJournal were two of the biggest platforms and none of us had any idea how perfect Google Reader was.

And, in my business education dabblings over these recent months, one thing has become clear: I am not alone in thinking blogging is poised to make a comeback. Most people are referencing it as “long-form content”. I don’t think blogging was ever specifically about the length of the post, but moreso about the intimacy of writing online, the transparency of sharing for whomever may read it. I think that in truth, that is what we are all missing from the current state of the Internet and social media.

Perhaps hypocritically, I was touting blogs as being an amazing form of content but I wasn’t ready to start blogging again myself. Not yet. When? I didn’t know. There was always a hurdle, a roadblock, something that I “needed” to do first before I could justify writing; there’s that pesky “tomorrow” again. But one thing that’s been drilled into my brain by all the webinars and business podcasts I’ve been enjoying: there’s never going to be a perfect time. So start. Start now. Start yesterday (you already did, when you started thinking about starting). But don’t wait to start tomorrow; start today.

I sat down at my desk this morning and decided to remove all my full nudes from my OnlyFans page. It sounds like a scary move but, trust the process! Now I’m ending the day by hitting publish on my first full public blog in well over a decade. And I didn’t wake up today planning to do either, but, here we are, blogging like there’s no tomorrow.

Welcome back.