As the monetizing of web content becomes easier and its tentacles spread globally, anyone who has a blog will sooner or later have this thought pop inside their head; “Wow, imagine if I were to do this full time!”.
Some not only entertain this evil voices in their heads, but actually follows what it tells them to do!
I’m not saying that being a problogger is bad. I blog myself but I will never even considerbeing a problogger. Blogging is not a useful skill that you could use in life. It’s a hobby; something you do in your pastime. For me, it’s a marriage of my two main hobbies; writing and web technologies.
Earning your living by blogging is what I don’t recommend others to do; and here are four reasons why.
No Useful Work Experience
If you’re young and just graduated, being a problogger is one of the worst thing you could be. Now is a time where you’re expected to gain useful work experience. Contrary to what the Web 2.0 sheeps say, useful job experience doesn’t include RSS subscription, trackback and pingback proficiency, linkbaiting and meme participation.
Anybody can start a blog, there are tens of millions around already. Just because you’re making money from yours doesn’t mean that you should be blogging full time. Contrary to popular thinking, money is not why you should be working. It’s the experience that matters.
Getting a real job is part of of one’s self development. To be brutally honest, the janitor or maintenance guy in the office building will have a better insight to life compared to any problogger. A major reason is that they see the world with their own eyes, and not via some 22-inch monitor they bought from their AdSense income.
The probloggers in you didn’t like to know that, but deep down, you know it is absolutely true.
No Company Perks
Sure, you will “run your own business” if you choose to call your blog a business. Hey, whatever floats your boat mate ?
Believe it or not, there are lots of goodies that good companies provide for their staff. Company trips, annual dinners, training and self development are some that comes to mind quite easily. Then there are the “little things” such as unlimited coffee and tea, paid season parking and petrol allowances.
I guess probloggers won’t need those too much since most of them are still leaching off mommy ?
Lack of Life Beyond Cyberspace
Take away the thousands of feed subscribers, you’ll soon see that most probloggers are just a lonely person with no life outside of his network of blogrolls.
Somehow, someway, during their journey into problogging, money becomes everything. It starts of as a benchmark of sorts on how the wannabe problogger stacks up against real probloggers. When it reaches a certain point, the first thing that comes to this person’s mind is “It’s time to go pro!”.
I pity such people. Being a problogger means that your interaction with human beings outside the Internet would be close to zero. This is especially worse if you’re a nerd or geek of some genre or another. You’ll be inundated with worshippers who think that you’re the best thing since sliced bread.
Egos will expand and it will get to your head. The bad thing is, you’ll forget how to interact with a real life person. At least the garbage collector has real friends he has lunch with. He also gets the occasional “Hello!” from friendly housewives.
The problogger? Emails and IMs. I guess it’ll do for a desktop potato. Do you really want this for yourself?
Lose The Ability To Communicate Beyond Blog Commenting, Emails and IM
You know you’ve spent way too much time online when your parting words are something like:
- Email me, OK!
- Catch you on Y!M later tonight!
- Skype you later!
- I’ll comment on your post soon
In those rare moments where you’ll actually need to write a proper letter, you find yourself typing or writing IANAL, TTFN and ROFL more often than you should.
And God forbid should you actually need to talk to someone! You’re lucky if you could even look at the person’s eyes and actually say something intelligent without referring to something that has dot com in it.