When blogging becomes more than a hobby

Blogs are everywhere – many of them are now hugely successful, in fact, you’re reading one such blog right now but most blogs have one thing in common – they all start out as a hobby, after all, not many of us can afford to give up our day job to write a blog, in the hopes that it earns us money, but it is certainly the case that many people who start a blog as a hobby have gone on to quit their job and run their blog full time!

Getting a blog set up, in itself is easy – setting up a site on the likes of WordPress.com takes a couple of minutes, setting up a self hosted copy of WordPress takes only a few minutes more, but gives you more freedom, there are of course many other alternatives, but WordPress is my favourite.

Writing your blog posts can be a bit tougher – ok, so writing your random musings is never going to give you a headache, but when you gain a following and feel that you should be putting out a new quality post every other day, it’s often hard to think of a topic – you suddenly find that you need to do more research, you need to structure your posts better, and consider things such as an SEO Consultant and whether or not what you’re writing will appeal to your target market.

If you’re doing this as a hobby, it can quickly eat up your spare time, and you’ll probably start to wonder if it’s worth the hassle, only you can answer that.

To make it worth your while, you’re going to want to see some sort of return, and for that to happen, you’re going to need a huge amount of dedication and a little bit of research.

You’ll need to research exactly how you can monetise your blog – some ideas for you to consider are;

• Advertising, such as Google Adsense
• Selling a product relevant to your blog, if you blog about health and fitness, can you sell fitness equipment, or healthy food / supplements?
• Affiliate programs – market other peoples products / recommend them and earn commission for any sales you make

The list goes on – you’ll need to take a look at exactly what fits your site, and whether you can pull it off – the sooner you get started, the sooner you could start earning!

It’s not easy to build a successful blog, it can take years of dedication before you start reaping the rewards, and entering a saturated market will make it even harder, if your blog is based around an unusual subject, or provides a solution to a problem, you’ll find it much easier.

Whilst earning a modest living from blogging alone may seem like a pipe dream, there are some seriously impressive earnings from some of the worlds most successful blogs with all of the below earning hundreds of thousands! That’s right, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars.

• TechCrunch
• Mashable
• PerezHilton
• SmashingMagazine

And there are many many more examples – take a look on your favourite search engine, and see if evolving your blog into more than a hobby is right for you!