Blogging as a Publishing Business: Who should try it?

People choose to blog for all sorts of reasons. Many of those reasons have nothing to do with money. Often, people just wish to share a piece of themselves with the world. For most people, blogging is much more enjoyable when money is not part of the equation. People who blog for the love of it should be careful when considering making a business out of blogging.

If you blog because you care about something or because you enjoy expressing yourself, you should realize that turning what you enjoy into a business will change the thing you love. It isn’t that you cannot still be happy blogging. Finding a way to make money doing something they love is one of the best things that can happen to a person. You need to know, however, that once the thing you love becomes a business you have to treat it like a business. That will take some of the fun out of it.

Before you decide to blog for profit, you need to evaluate what you wish to accomplish and why. The decision to treat blogging as a for-profit-business is one that you need to consider carefully. You are not going to start making loads of money the first week or the first month. It may take a year or longer to build up your audience to the point of profitability. During that time you need to be posting information daily, or even several times a day depending on the material you are covering. To do this requires a commitment, and that commitment shouldn’t be made lightly. Blogging for profit is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Blogging is a grounds-up publishing business that requires more dedication than capital.

The point of making a career out of blogging should be to find something you can happily do, without supervision, for years to come. You need to either love the concept of blogging or to love the topic you are blogging about. Preferably you should love both. At points, especially in the first year, you will question whether or not to continue. There are plenty of bumps along the road. Your advertising revenue and/or your readership can suddenly drop off. Your site can get taken down by hackers or bugs. Your readers can send you nasty letters for over the smallest of mistakes. Things can and will go wrong as you build your blogging business. Moving past these problems requires a degree of dedication and hardheadedness that many people lack.

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture for people who want to turn blogging into a business. I love what I am doing. I love having the ability to write about the things I love without anyone telling me what I can and cannot say. I love that I can make a living doing it. For me, that is worth the struggles I have been through. What I want people to understand is that blogging for profit is like starting any other business. It requires hard work, dedication and intelligent planning. I can’t provide the first two items, but I hope I can help with the third.