I recently read a report that there are 500,000 people in the United States who claim to be professional bloggers and blog for a living.
I also came across many articles stating blogging is a hobby.
Is blogging a business or a hobby? The answer is both.
Blogging is both a hobby and a business, and if it’s a source of income to make a living, then it’s a business. A hobby is an activity that a person enjoys. While a business is the provision of goods and/or services to society for profit.
With blogging, you either blog for a hobby just to express yourself, or you blog for money. In either case, you provide a product called a blog or “web” log, which are online journals of articles, writings, photos, and web links that link your blog or website to the entries of other blog creators , the so-called bloggers.
If blogging is a business, can a blogger make money? Naturally! Based on my informal survey, there are many people who blog for their income, that is, by becoming an entrepreneur. Running a business requires tactical planning and making strategic decisions, and to make money from a blog you must employ business tools such as list of subscribers (like loyal customers and friends), promoting your blog to friends or a network of online friends or chat mates.
Blogging for business means monetizing your blog or website by placing advertisements on your webpages, such as Google Adsense. A blogger for money needs to know how to generate income from their blogging business in order to make a profit.
In order to make income from blogging, you need to look at your blogging as a business and think like an entrepreneur.
When you blog you spend time developing your ideas and writing your content, time that you can also use for other pursuits because time is finite and economics teaches us that time, since it is finite and finite, has alternative uses.
When you blog you also incur costs such as electricity to run your computer, internet connection, web hosting if your website is self-hosted, although there are many free blog sites now. And you have to eat to keep blogging. If you blog to express yourself, to express your thoughts and feelings, blogging alone will not pay your bills or make you generate income for a living.
As I read other bloggers’ blogs, I noticed that many of them don’t know how to think strategically about their blog business.
They think it’s all about writing quality content on their blogs and updating it frequently like daily, four times a week or weekly which is a good practice. After all, no reader wants to visit a blog that is static after the update was done 6 months ago.
While good quality content and posting frequency are important elements in blogging, they alone are not enough to achieve financial success. Content is just one side of the coin. But quality content alone doesn’t generate income.
Only when business and management principles are applied to blogging can a blogger make money from his blog and turn his blogging into his source of income and wealth. In this case, he becomes a professional blogger.
Thanks to Eli Gatanela
