There are many of us who have that entrepreneurial fire in our belly.
I started off as a blogger. This wasn’t initially as a business for me but purely as a hobby. In time I advanced to building an online business and my mindset had to change.
What astounds me is the number of bloggers, who have the hopes and inspiration of making money, but they hang on to the attitude of blogging as a hobby.
I want to tell them, if they want to make descent money than they have to consider blogging as a career and their blog as a business. I now love helping others to break through from being hobby bloggers to actually making money from doing it.
The first decision you need to make: is your blog a business or a hobby?
You don’t have to completely change your philosophy. You can build your business around something that you are truly passionate about and believe in 100%, but never forget you are building a business.
Doesn’t it make sense to turn all your hard work and labor into a thriving business still doing the thing you love.
I admit I have the best of both worlds. My main blog is still my platform for doing what I love , and that is giving genuine advice on healthy lifestyles living, and offering inspirational articles on personal development and self-improvement striving to give the very best I have to offer. I have built a blog that I believe not only offers a good resource of information but also motivation when people need it. I love writing this blog, it’s my passion, almost as much as helping others do the same!
It does benefit me in a business sense by showcasing my philosophies and attitude and has therefore been a great way to promote my personal development life coaching business. But I have never needed to let this take centre stage. I’ve been able to continue with the blog being central to who I am and what I do, not needing to short change my readers by pursuing sales and marketing tactics in order to build a business.
I leave that to other parts of my online model. All the Missing Pieces is definitely my place to mentor others to how to build a business online and doesn’t purport to be anything else. Slim Express on the other hand has always been what it is, a Wellness Store offering the fantastic Proto-col range of products, supported by a blog.
It is essential you determine what your blog is for. Are you a hobby blogger or a blogger wanting to build a business? If you are, are you using your blog to build awareness and drive traffic to a website for an existing business or is your blog your business? Or do you simply blog as a hobby? What fascinates me lately is the number of people who start blogging in hopes of making a living solely through blogging. How do they intend on doing this? Is their blog designed to promote a product or service? Is the product or service their own or someone else’s? Is the plan to make money through Google AdSense, affiliate programs or multi-level marketing? So my question is … “Is your blog your business or do you blog to promote your business?”
When you want to create a business from your blogging efforts, you need to have a specific purpose in mind.
Although it is extremely important to be passionate and to love what you do, it is so important to find a way to make a proper business model from what you’re doing. Otherwise, you are just blogging with no definite purpose, no real intentions, so how could you expect to make money?
You know an incredibly important key to the blogging model is to find a niche and provide value to your readers, but then you have to step up from just being a hobby blogger and find the best way for you to generate profit by making sales.
So stop seeing yourself as a blogger. It is absolutely essential you think and act like a business owner. By all means show passion and enthusiasm, your clients and customers need to see and “feel” your enthusiasm for what you do.
Whether you’re working on your blog full time or whether you work on it as an aside to your regular 9-5, it’s still important to treat it like a job. If you want to earn money from your blog it them means that your blog is your business – and, it’s important that you treat it as such.
Many—perhaps most—blogs start life as hobby blogs. We have a special interest, and we want to share our passion with others, so we start a blog. But then somewhere along the line, a large proportion of bloggers decide they’d really like to make some money from their blogs. You really can turn your blog into a business.
A productive blogger that knows the importance of seeing the blog as a business know this, capitalizes on this and uses it to help stay focused and inspired.
Are you building a hobby blog or a business? Or have you turned a hobby blog into a business?
