this is not my day job
Let's have a little chat about this space and maybe even the blogging world in general. As I mentioned before, I didn't start blogging to earn an income or make it my job. I was simply interested in sharing bits and pieces of my world, especially recipes. Then I started reading more blogs and realized that many of the "famous" bloggers considered their blogs their full-time job. In fact, they were making enough money to have totally respectable salaries, all coming from their blog.
After a few years at this, I'm pretty sure I told C I wanted to be a "professional blogger". I was miserable in my day job and spent a lot of "work time" working on this space. I figured if I really dedicated time to it, got a bunch of ads, started working with brands, I could actually make a living.
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Clearly, that dream was short-lived. News flash, I am NOT a professional blogger. I don't really have ads, except Google AdSense and I sometimes use Amazon Affiliate links when I post about products I love. I have probably made all of $5 through this blog over the last 4 years.
There is nothing wrong with professional bloggers. In fact, I read a ton of blogs written by lovely people who do this full time. I'm totally inspired and encouraged by them...and I mean, who doesn't want free stuff in exchange for writing a blog post!
However, I do think the professional blog space is somewhat out of control. I've read posts about $3,000 purses and the blogger who owns them is living in a 400 sq ft apartment in NYC and has never worked a "real" job. So I take a lot of it with a grain of salt. Blogs are informative, entertaining, and really interesting. But they often do not portray real life - many bloggers have admitted this themselves on their blogs.
If you were to scroll through my instagram feed, you'd see a perfectly curated slice of my life - beautiful, positive, organized. The same is true for my blog. I'm not going to take pictures of my messy kitchen or rant about something that went wrong - who wants to read about that! So instead, each post is carefully crafted to reflect something that is me, but the organized, put together, all my ducks in a row me.
For what it's worth, I love blogging and I love reading blogs. As soon as a blog becomes too un-relatable though, I delete it from my feed. If I want to read about a fake life, I'll pick up a Shopaholic novel.
I'm really excited to participating in my first NaBloPoMo month! From what I understand, this is a spin off of National Novel Writing Month for November - but the blog version! I'm make a commitment to post every day and I'm using the BlogHer prompts to help me out. Here's a list of bloggers who are also participating! I hope you enjoy this little writing challenge!
Feel free to leave comments about what you'd like to see my write about this month.
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