It depends on your MAIN and REAL reason behind blogging.
Is it to make money? To share your thoughts? To promote your product and services?
If you are in it just for the dough $$$$…..
Many people blog just for the money. Here are my experiences of the few years I spend running blogs part-time (most of the time it’s either I am holding a full time job or out of the country with no internet access):
Everyone is into blogging nowadays. The blogging world is seriously very competitive and there are many great blogs out there that produces great original content. So, if you are in it for just the $$$, you would soon become very discouraged because:
It takes time to see any real results….and $$$
it takes time to build up traffic…and traffic pretty much determine your earnings. The best income makers comes from organic traffic (visitors who found your site via Google)
Only the very fortunate few can make a comfortable living blogging. And seriously, these people work very hard- usually 10 hours a day or more and hardly taking any holidays. It’s a competitive world out there and the moment you failed to churn quality content, you find your traffic quickly taking a nose-dive. Millions of people doing the same thing. Too many blogs for surfers to choose from.
So for most of us, we would find that sometimes, we cannot even meet the hosting fee with blogging alone, or pay some basic bills, let alone make a full time living.
It’s just too competitive and perhaps it’s me- I’ve seriously given blogging a try to the extend of taking a paycut job so that I have enough energy to do it on my spare time. It just did not work out for me. But I must admit, all those hard work did contribute to the increase in traffic months down the time… it takes time before your hard work bears result.
And sadly, most people would have given up before they could see concrete results. Or they make too little and if there is no savings, they would not be able to make ends meet.
Choose blogging if you have the passion- because you will need it
That being said about the competitive world of blogging, I am a firm believer that you can succeed in anything if you put your heart into it or if you have passion. In the long run, what motivates you to be able to churn out article after article?
You need to ask yourself honestly this question. Because this is what that would pull you through in the initial dry months when you don’t see results.
It’s more than money. Yes, I know money is an important motivator- but it can actually cause some people to become depressed if they don’t really like what they are doing. Day and night, the words would only effortlessly flow out if you have the passion and interest in the topic.
And if you are a part time blogger like me, the time you can steal from coming back after a hard day’s of work and type another blog post….usually by having to sacrifice a bit of entertainment or sleep…. is because you are motivated by something more than money. Else, you can get burnt out pretty quickly (especially if you are like me who have a demanding day job that leaves no time to blog on the side during working hours).
