Blogger posted this earlier in the week and it made me a little sad. I don't write to try and make money. I do it because I enjoy writing. If my brain is good for anything, it's for this. I get these thoughts floating around up there and put them on this virtual paper. That is how I stay sane. But to read this post from Blogger I thought who needs to do this?
If you need to put some little app on your blog to try and get some change from people, you need to re-evaluate your life and profession. There are successful professional bloggers out there, but they are professionals first. They become a professional blogger because people know them because these professional bloggers are journalists, comedians, politicians. They aren't some thirty year old sitting in the local coffee shop hoping to break through on the internet. I would never put 'professional blogger' on a resume. How would you explain that in an interview?
'So, I see you have been self employed as a professional blogger the past five years, explain that.'
'Well, I got fired from my last job because I couldn't make it in on time so I wanted to take my life in a different direction. I started a blog and wanted to make money off of it so I started doing that professionally for the past half decade.'
'What's that like?'
'I live in a cardboard box right now in a back alley behind a Starbucks but I still have my laptop and can get free wi-fi. I'm close to breaking through though. I made thirty dollars the past two weeks from donations. I can feel it gaining momentum, I just would really like to have this job as a fall back in case the blogging doesn't work out.'
This thing that Blogger has put up is not for their users to make the big bucks, it's just to get a couple of dollars in the back pockets. It's cool if you want to do, I guess, but you'll never see anything like that here. I always thought that blogs were started as a way for people to get their thoughts out there on the internet for people to read, but that's just me.
I hear ya. Earlier this year I took all advertisements off spacefem.com... it made me feel free. Will I miss the $100 every 4-6 months? Not really. I decided it wasn't worth it, to get that much I was subjecting my visitors, EVERY visitor, to More Ads On The Internet. I just got sick of everything being about money, I got sick of the balance sheet, and like you said I hated the panhandling.
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