As a professional blogger, I enjoy the best of both worlds. I do some blogging and social media work for a few outside clients, but the bulk of my income comes from owning my own blog network.
When I first began building my blog, it was a frustrating upward climb. The traffic came slowly and there was no revenue. Almost five years later and I’m so proud of what it’s become. The thing is, I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t cut down on the blogging for other people. Granted, that’s not a solution for everyone. As noted above, I still have some clients. However, after several years of blogging I realized I wasn’t going to make a name for myself if I was spending all of my time blogging for someone else.
My options were:
- To hire people to handle all aspects of blogging and running my network while I worked for someone else. I tried that, but the numbers tanked. You can hire the best people in the business, but it’s a challenge finding bloggers who share your passion and commitment to your own blog. For most of them, it’s a job. Nothing more, nothing less.
- To give it up and blog for someone else. I’m not sure I understand why anyone would want to totally give up her own community to grow someone else’s. I understand doing both (mine and my clients’), but I don’t know about giving up my dream in favor of another brand. Giving up my blog to prop up another blogger would have been a big mistake and I’m glad I didn’t go that route.
- To devote more hours to building up my own stuff: Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. I realize now that I did the best thing I could have done – which was start my own blog all those years ago. It was hard work getting here but it allowed content to become indexed in the search engines and for my name and my blog network’s name to become a community, a brand and a chief source of income.
What’s my point?
That you absolutely can build up a profitable blog while you’re working for someone else. A year ago, my employer wanted me to give up my blog network to focus solely on his brand, and I’m so glad I didn’t. I never let what I do infringe on company time, but I didn’t give up up my dream in favor of someone else’s. Sure. I had to work a lot of late nights and early mornings but it was well worth it in the long run.
Just because your blog doesn’t hit right away, doesn’t mean it won’t at all. Give it some time. It could become the next big thing.
Deb Ng is a professional blogger and founder of the Freelance Writing Jobs network. Feel free to follow her on Twitter @debng.
