How I Think About Blogging
When Does It Become A Business?
I have never earned a single penny as a writer in the past.
Although I have over 2K followers and Top Writer status in a couple of categories, writing doesn’t do anything for my bank-account.
Without my main hustle, I would be a starving artist.
If you’re an aspiring writer and you’re dreaming of making fat stacks of cash, you’re probably instantly demotivated by this intro.
That’s awesome!
I want to rain on your parade. Because monetizing your writing is very hard.
I want you to realize that.
Amazing Advice From A Friend
My best friend is an awesome writer.
She’s writing every day too and, like me, struggling with monetizing her writing too.
But she’s the wisest person I know. So I asked her:
‘When does blogging become a business?’
She answered me without blinking an eye:
‘When you treat it as a business.’
At first, I had to think about that answer for a bit. But then it started to make sense.
It all depends on your attitude. If you want blogging to turn into a business, you have to treat it as a business.
And you would spend as much time as possible on your business, so you have to have the same attitude for your blog.
You have to produce lots of quality content, engage with your readers and yell as loud as you can.
When does blogging become a business?
It’s up to you.
The Best Decision Of My Life
I don’t treat blogging as a business.
Writing is just a hobby.
My main gig pays the bills and then some. I talk about that gig all the time so I won’t do it here.
I basically started writing every day because bitcoin was entering a bear market and I was bored out of my mind.
That turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my life.
Writing every day allowed me to have amazing friendships, find the love of my life and explore my purpose.
Without writing I still would have been wandering around aimlessly.
My only focus would have been making money and building an investing track-record.
I’m still focused on that. But I have so much more passions in my life now.
Writing is one of them.
The Thing That Makes Money
I don’t write for the money.
That should be painfully obvious by now.
Of course, I wouldn’t be totally disgusted if writing started making me some money.
But I don’t think blogging is going to do that on its own.
Blogging is not going be the thing that makes money.
At best, blogging is going to be the thing that leads me towards making money.
I need a paying product first.
For instance, a book. And only when I have that book, can I try and sell it to my blogging audience.
So the blogging is just a small part of the business.
It’s never the business in itself.
There was a time that blogging was the latest hype.
But as Warren Buffet says:
Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.
Lately everyone and their mother-in-law is looking to monetize their writing. That tells me that monetizing is exactly the wrong thing to do now.
And my instincts have always been spot on. That’s why I don’t write for money.
I write to stay alive.
Each week, the editors of On The Rise and Struggling Forward will collaborate to create specific content related to a predetermined topic.
This week we have chosen to write about the question of ‘when does a blog become a business?’. Check out Tim Rettig’s article on the same topic by clicking the link below.
Listen here to the audio version:
