You'll Never Be a Full-Time Blogger, and That's Okay
This ballad is for anyone who started a blog and wanted to make it big time but couldn't.
You were churning out 50 hours a week at a tedious job and pined to write online for a living. Perhaps you're someone who made the both-feet jump into the full-time writer role and couldn't sustain the pace. Maybe you got burned out. Maybe you weren't making enough money. Maybe you didn't have all that much to say after all. Or maybe you weren't that good. Some days were better than others, but most nights you'd end up crying into your SiteMeter account.
More or less, all of those situations described me for about a year. (Except for the "being good" deficiency. Pssh.) Who doesn't dream of working from home, writing what you think, and letting that be the main source of your income? Of course, in this dream I also bench 500 pounds, have an indoor swimming pool, and my dog can talk.
The reality is that unemployment was getting on the nerves of me (and my mortgage, the ornery bastard), so back to the real world I went. It felt good ... and bad. And it's odd, because for the longest time I was content with the "double life" of corporate foot soldier by day, smartass writer by night. Everything's back to normal, except that now I can add "failed full-time writer" to the resume. My pageview-to-word ratio? TERRIBLE!
We're getting to this point in the blogging life-cycle that some of us have to cope with the truism that this will always be a part-time endeavor. The money's not there. Neither is the demand. But it doesn't mean you can't bring a neat little following on the side.
But chin up, eternal dreamer. There are some major upsides to working all day and blogging all night:
You Don't Have To Write Every Day
Who was the yutz that first suggested that it's necessary for a blogger to write daily? I believed them. I now want to discredit them as a blogging expert. But by now they've probably moved onto being a "social media expert," which I think is simply a guy who never forgets his LinkedIn password.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati