I heard an interesting comment on a Clay Collins mentorship call the other day. He said that many bloggers come online with a “job” mentality. They want to know if they work X number of hours and do X amount of tasks what will they make. That’s a job.
Blogging for Yourself is a Business
Like any new business sometimes you put a LOT of work in on the front end. When I began my massage therapy business I got the education, the equipment, found a place to set up shop, spent an entire weekend cleaning, organizing and arranging. And that’s before the advertising began! Then came all the marketing efforts and actual per-hour work with clients, to learn more, see at Roofing Marketing Pro article.
Once I had a place to work (ie a website and blog), and clients began coming in (readers), I still didn’t actually KEEP every cent I brought it. Some of my income went to rent my space from the owner of the shop. Some of my income went to replenish supplies that were used. And some went in as an investment to help the business grow even more.
When you are working for yourself, the money you bring in is not 100% yours. That’s a huge difference between a job and a business.
Working Online as a Job
The benefits to this approach are clear. It’s safer. It’s easier to calculate into the family budget. I know upfront what the returns on my investment will be and there’s a lot less risk. If the website breaks – the owner of the website is the one up until 2 am trying to fix it. If a coder needs to be hired, that doesn’t come out of my paycheck – the owner of the website is the one footing that bill.
Having Said That….
I love that I have a business of my own! I love daring myself to beat my goals. I love pushing myself to do more this year than I did last year and to expand. To redesign. To tweak. Does that mean I don’t have any “jobs” in this industry? No of course not! I work at Blissfully Domestic as their Editor-in-Chief and I work at Babble in the Being Pregnant Columnist.
Those jobs support my business and are things I’m passionate about. They allowed me to outsource some things and free up time to devote to redesigning Untrained Housewife and AngEngland.com. But that’s not all I’m doing, nor will it ever be.
After all – if I can take a simple ebook about how I made money online and create an additional five figures of income for your family, why would you NOT want to be in business for yourself! It’s certainly more than I would have been paid to write that book for someone else.
Sure there are risks – but the rewards can sometimes far surpass what the job revenue would have been all by itself. You have to assess your own situation and ask yourself what your family can risk, what your personality can tolerate (the uncertainty will absolutely kill some personality types), and what you’re willing to put up with.
Can you live without the equation of X hours doing X, Y and Z = $XXX? Because in a business it isn’t always that simple.
Hello 🙂 I’m one of your followers on twitter.
Anyway, I just thought I’d drop by. I must agree with you that relying on blogging for an income is really risky and not for the risk averse.
I actually espouse the same approach as you do – that of writing or blogging for others for a pay, while using part of that to pay for your own blogging expenses.
Thank you for the good post and I look forward to hearing more about this.
I have been blog admin for businesses and my starting rate is $500 month. That’s for minimum three posts per week, handling all guest posts, finding photos, but does not include any blog posts I write myself for them – this is billed extra. Just as a benchmark and to offer a value for personal blog efforts. It’s writing and it is part of the book promotion biz.
Thanks for sharing your starting point! It sounds fairly similar to my rate for private clients. But I use my client contracted money to fund my own endeavors which are now creating as much as, or more, revenue than the “contract jobs” in some cases. It’s a huge step towards meeting our family’s financial goals even sooner than planned and I do encourage everyone to experiment with whether it’s right for them to do their own thing, or contract out to others. 🙂
Blogging for a business or a job is a lot of work! It’s so tiresome too! It takes a lot of you and at the end of the day you just feel so tired. I’ve done it for a while and I didn’t feel that it was really getting me anywhere so I quit…