Real Words

I have been working as a professional blogger for a whole lot of other people for the past two years. Working full-time as a blogger for others, I have found that blogging can be a highly lucrative job. Let’s just say that there was more than one month this year that I cleared a five-figure income for the month.

That said, I have quit a large percentage of my blogging jobs and am taking a two-month-maybe-more sabbatical from the rest of them in order to pursue some projects of my own. At least one of these projects is a blogging project - www.sanfranciscoissexy.com, my new blog about everything that is sexy in San Francisco.

I have an idea in mind for another blog project - a micronetwork of blogs for which I would be the sole writer. But I’ve been debating back and forth about whether or not I want to do that project. The fact of the matter is that there are only so many hours in a day and the more that I look into blogging for myself, the less sure I am that it can be a really lucrative endeavor.

Two recent articles from a couple of my favorite bloggers seem to confirm that there are drawbacks to trying to make good money as a blogger. Fabian over at Small Fish Big Money wrote last month about the shrotcomings of the blog as a business model. And Violet Blue of Tiny Nibbles wrote a really personal post about how she gets a lot of perks and freebies from blogging and freelancing but money hasn’t been one of the perks lately.

These posts didn’t discourage me from blogging for myself. But they were a couple of the things in a whole series of things that have me thinking that blogging isn’t really what I want to do for a living. That said, I do want to do it for fun. I like writing about writing here at Real Words and I’m really excited about the fun writing I’m doing over at SanFranciscoIsSexy.

I do know enough about the business of blogging to make some pocket change from the work, I think, but I also think that this can’t be the point of blogging for me. I’m not sure if I’ll return to blogging for other people in the near future or not. I’m poised on the edge of this really exciting precipice and I’m not really sure what’s going to happen when I leap from it.

For now, I’m wrapping up the work that I’ve got outstanding for my clients, taking some time to just be and breathe and working on blogs like this one because it makes me happy to do so. Sometimes money isn’t everything, important though it may be.