Blogging as a career option- Is it wise to do blogging for a living?
It is encouraging to see experienced bloggers earning huge from their blogs. Newbies try to copy them and unfortunately many of them fail miserably. This post explores blogging as a career option and whether it is wise to do blogging for a living?
If you check various internet forums, you will find a number of success stories related to blogging. There are articles having lists of top 10 bloggers or with monthly income as thousands of dollars. This might appear quite motivational to people but there are various failures as well which are never published. At such, leaving own job for blogging does not seem to a wise decision. This post revolves around the question whether it is wise to do blogging for a living or not.How have things changed in previous few years
A lot of things have changed in the internet space which is worth considering:
1. Earlier there was very less competition in almost any niche. Thus, it was easy to rank the websites and little uncertainty was involved. However, now there are thousands of bloggers trying to come with blogs with repetitive ideas.
2. Even the ranking parameters keep fluctuating and thus blogging is not that much reliable income source. For instance, your rankings (and thus earnings) can vanish all of sudden with single Google update thus resulting in waste of time and effort. There are various other offline businesses that are more predictable.
3. A lot of spammers have also entered this field. Thus whether it is about buying articles for your website, hiring a SEO expert or investing on themes or hosting, there are chances of getting cheated.
4. People have also become familiar to the concept of advertising. In other words, the visitors have become smart and thus they do not click on advertisements. Any Adsense publisher can confirm this fact that CTR has declined dramatically over the years.
Tips: How to increase AdSense CPC
How to Go with Blogging in this Scenario
The initial content of this post might appear discouraging to new bloggers but it just brings some practical aspects in light. If you are thinking to start blogging after quitting current job, then it might not be good idea. Here is why:
1. If you observe the current leaders in the blogging industry, most of them started blogging with their job only. Later when they started earning decent money with the blog, they quit the job. This appears much more practical in today's scenario as well.
2. Initial phase in blogging is quite tough. You have to work at building audience for your blog and this takes some time. You can expect to see some income only after 6 months and thus it is advised to continue with your job.
3. Another good approach is to do blogging along with some other online works as well. For instance, you can provide services to other clients. Unlike blogging, you get paid immediately for the services and this will help you to sustain during initial days.
Read this experience from Tony John, one of the top bloggers from India: Blogging as a fulltime career. In this article, he has covered his own experience of switching from part time blogging to fulltime blogging and how it affected his life.
The author has put forward some useful points related to blogging as a full-time career option. I completely agree with him regarding the point about immense competition in the blogging space these days and many new bloggers coming up with blogs on repetitive topics.
With my own experience, I can tell that it is difficult to continue with part-time blogging, especially with the hectic working life that we are used to in India. This made me leave my job and start out as a freelance content-writer on my own. It has just been 2 months and I am writing more on sites like ISC, Techulator, iwriter, odesk, etc. to get paid instantly and slowly working on my own websites. As mentioned by the author, this is required to make sure some incoming money during the period when your own blogs are not generating any income.