Where does blogging fit in to the hobbypreneur lifestyle?
by Joe Taylor Jr. on May 20, 2008
Certainly, I’m interested in blogging as a hobby, since I’ve been doing it for so long. Back in 1998, Jay Frank and I started spinme.com as a repository for music reviews. Had the word been around at the time, you could certainly call what we were doing a blog. And it was a hobby for both of us, with ulterior motives. For Jay, it was a calling card for his scope of music knowledge. For me, it was a portfolio piece. The site landed great jobs for both of us, so it got quiet by 2001.
Once I started writing about the music business on a regular basis, I dusted off spinme.com again and used it primarily to promote my books. From 2003 to about 2006, that site was the hub for the bulk of my income. So I backed into what Darren Rowse calls problogging. The success of spinme.com led to my coaching other entrepreneurs, many of whom used blogs to establish themselves as experts in their fields.
But, when I wound up taking a corporate gig in 2007, spinme.com withered again. I had less time to work on it. And, frankly, less passion. Probloggers are very good at pounding out new content every day to stay on top of search engine results. If you’re not motivated by ad dollars or incidental revenue, your writing style changes. You focus on longer pieces that update less frequently.
That’s a big shift for a hobbypreneur. With money coming from elsewhere, blogging can be a profitable hobby. You don’t have to grind it out to earn three dollars a day in AdSense revenue. But it’s nice to know that a simple post you wrote three years ago generates enough passive revenue to pay for your web hosting and still treat you to a latte (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) everyday.
Without the pressure to be an expert, you can go on a journey with your audience and still end up generating some revenue to make your time more productive than if you had been playing video games or chatting all day. That’s where I see blogs fitting the hobbypreneur lifestyle — great content being created by folks who don’t necessarily depend on it for the revenue.
But it’s nice to know that a simple post you wrote three years ago generates enough passive revenue to pay for your web hosting and still treat you to a latte (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) everyday. Without the pressure to be an expert, you can go on a journey with your audience and still end up generating some revenue to make your time more productive than if you had been playing video games or chatting all day.
Where does blogging fit in to the hobbypreneur lifestyle?
by Joe Taylor Jr. on May 20, 2008
Certainly, I’m interested in blogging as a hobby, since I’ve been doing it for so long. Back in 1998, Jay Frank and I started spinme.com as a repository for music reviews. Had the word been around at the time, you could certainly call what we were doing a blog. And it was a hobby for both of us, with ulterior motives. For Jay, it was a calling card for his scope of music knowledge. For me, it was a portfolio piece. The site landed great jobs for both of us, so it got quiet by 2001.
Once I started writing about the music business on a regular basis, I dusted off spinme.com again and used it primarily to promote my books. From 2003 to about 2006, that site was the hub for the bulk of my income. So I backed into what Darren Rowse calls problogging. The success of spinme.com led to my coaching other entrepreneurs, many of whom used blogs to establish themselves as experts in their fields.
But, when I wound up taking a corporate gig in 2007, spinme.com withered again. I had less time to work on it. And, frankly, less passion. Probloggers are very good at pounding out new content every day to stay on top of search engine results. If you’re not motivated by ad dollars or incidental revenue, your writing style changes. You focus on longer pieces that update less frequently.
That’s a big shift for a hobbypreneur. With money coming from elsewhere, blogging can be a profitable hobby. You don’t have to grind it out to earn three dollars a day in AdSense revenue. But it’s nice to know that a simple post you wrote three years ago generates enough passive revenue to pay for your web hosting and still treat you to a latte (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) everyday.
Without the pressure to be an expert, you can go on a journey with your audience and still end up generating some revenue to make your time more productive than if you had been playing video games or chatting all day. That’s where I see blogs fitting the hobbypreneur lifestyle — great content being created by folks who don’t necessarily depend on it for the revenue.
But it’s nice to know that a simple post you wrote three years ago generates enough passive revenue to pay for your web hosting and still treat you to a latte (or, in my case, a hot chocolate) everyday. Without the pressure to be an expert, you can go on a journey with your audience and still end up generating some revenue to make your time more productive than if you had been playing video games or chatting all day.
Tagged as: blogging, personal