During my career building online businesses I established an attitude of avoiding self employment, seeking to remove myself as a key cog in the business system.
This principle has been hammered home by teachers like Michael Gerber and his E-Myth book and applied directly to Internet business by my mentor, Rich Schefren. Rich teaches how to create online enterprises that run off systems, not your hard work (try his Internet Business Manifesto for a great read on this topic).
Consequently, as I began to consider my blog as a money-making tool, I focused on creating stability and generating income sources that were not solely dependent on me.
If your first goal is to create enough income from blogging so you can quit your job, then you aim for stability through consistency. You want to know that when you make $2,000 in a month, in all likelihood you will make a similar amount (or more) next month. By establishing a dependable income source you finally "allow" yourself to quit your job and break through that mental fear barrier.
If your blog income is $300 one month, then $1,000 the next, then back to $500 you probably don’t feel secure in your decision to drop the monthly pay check from your job. You need to know that blogging is a real long-term income source. That’s your first goal.
However, and here’s a key point that most professional bloggers don’t consider, even if your income is stable, if you must post a certain amount of blog posts every single day in order to maintain your income consistency, you have just created another job for yourself. This is not business freedom, it is self employment.
Don’t get me wrong, blogging as a job is a good one. I’m sure many people would gladly quit their day job to work from home writing blog posts for a living. That’s not a bad situation, but for me it’s not good enough.
I like blogging. I love that people benefit from my writing and I have an avenue to communicate ideas with other people who share my interests. I want to blog and I choose to blog on a regular basis. What I do not want is to be forced to blog when I don’t feel like it just to keep the money coming in.
Professional blogging is not a passive income source. You can build a blog that is a passive income source by leveraging other people to help with content creation, but that is not the topic of this report. If you want to do that, read my series on building a sustainable business model using blogs starting here
What we are talking about is creating an asset (your blog) that makes you money AND grants you an enjoyable lifestyle. To me, that means blogging regularly because I want to and earning a good income as a side effect. More importantly, I have the freedom to not blog when appropriate – for holidays, for time with friends and family, for going swimming in the middle of the day if I choose to.
Stable income not dependent on article volume was a consideration for me from day one of blogging simply because I did not want to blog from 9-5 like an employee. It’s okay if you do want to work that hard and you will earn great rewards if you do, but what you don’t want is a financial obligation to keep up that pace, or you are heading for disaster.
- What if you get sick and can’t blog for a while?
- What if you grow tired of your blog topic?
- What if you just don’t like hard work?
These are all considerations worth thinking about from day one. If you want to build a lifestyle and a good source of income around a successful blog, you have to make some conscious decisions about how you will make money blogging.
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