Pros and Cons of Blogging in Favorite Niche for Part-Time Income

One of my friends who is totally new to the concept of blogging raised me the question, “Why do you blog?” A pretty good question! Why do I blog?

Well, I dived into blogging one fine day in May 2007 fully inspired by the revelation of Steve Pavlina making $1000 a day from his blog way back in 2006 itself and John Chow‘s monthly blog income reports of making tens of thousands of dollars a month from his personal blog and the FeedBurner chiclet reader count that kept creeping up on John’s blog. Both Steve Pavlina and John Chow are fulltime bloggers, with Steve blogging about personality development and John on his daily activities plus occasionally on making money online.

I learned the basics of HTML, all the groundwork of publishing a post and search engine optimization on Blogspot and then later migrated to this individual domain run on WordPress software in June 2007, as building a blog on Blogger was like building a home on someone else’s plot.

Initially, I thought of blogging only on medical transcription as only a few blogs on medical transcription were there but often I veered off to health and earning money online or blogged on whatever information I thought to share with the world.

The reality of making quick fat bucks was far from the dreams and expectations. This blog started making a few hundred dollars a month only a few months ago but the blogging experience was terrific that now I’m unable to shed the practice of blogging despite lack of time.

Before we go into the advantages and disadvantages of blogging let me put you this question, “What is a blog?”

A blog is a contraction of the term weblog, which itself is a coining of the terms web and log, essentially meaning an online diary or a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a web page. Nowadays blogs have actually become a social interaction tool other than their stated purpose of producing content online. Apart from those journal and corporate blogs, there is an interesting personality or face behind each blog. So if you need to show up your face to the public, you need to constantly update your blog to interact and to keep in constant touch with your readers. That is why I say a dead blog (unupdated blog) is like a dead man’s face. So despite how busy you are, if you jump into blogging, you need to find some time to come with a new post preferably a day or at least once or twice a week. However, the major drawback that I notice with anybody who jumps into blogging is that they start with over enthusiasm after reading somewhere on the web that bloggers are minting money and that they too can share the pie by jumping into blogging. Couple of weeks down the line, they realize that the reality is far from their expectations.

Traffic is the secret to successful blogging and without gaining traffic they lose that initial enthusiasm and temptation, and wither out in the due course. Gaining traffic is not a rocket science, all you need to know is some basic blogging lessons and do some groundwork of search engine optimization and other such small things which I covered under the category blogosphere and a FeedBurner account with a well visible chiclet encouraging your onetime visitors from search engines and social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to subscribe and visit repeatedly. After that you need to pour in content at regular intervals for months or even years without getting demotivated by looking at the traffic statistics. If you lack patience and time to write contents for your blog, then blogging is not for you. I’ve been watching the evolution of blogosphere right from 2004 or 2005 and I’ve seen many blogs come and go. Search engines like to index fresh contents and if you can attract search engine spiders constantly by updating your blog with unique, fresh and quality content, search engines will start referring visitors and increase blog traffic. Once you have the ample traffic of above thousand unique visits a day, your blog will start producing revenues to the extent of even sustaining yourself. Until that time the blog starts churning out revenue, it will cost you a few dollars, say $7 or so a month if you are on a self hosted domain and it will cost you nothing if you’re on free hosting services like BlogSpot or WordPress hosting.

Here are the pros and cons of blogging in your favorite niche for a part-time income:

Pros

• It gives you a few hundred dollars to pay your broadband bill apart from the hosting charges if at all it doesn’t give you a full-time income.
• It allows to build an online community around you and to socialize. I got more online friends of different fields than I had at school or college after I started blogging. It fetched me friendship with veteran stalwarts in the medical transcription industry.
• You have to research to the core and become a master on the topic before you write on anything. Hence it teaches you and expands your knowledgebase.
• A blog helps you convey your expertise in your niche, same as Twitter helping you find a job. It’s a self promotion tool to depict your knowledge, skills and capabilities to your potential clients.
• You bound to write better, your language skills increase.

Cons

• As I said earlier, writing coherently is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks. Blogs are easy to start but hard to maintain. You need to come up with at least a post a week (preferably once a day). For that you need to do some research on the net if you are not confident on your points, hence time consuming.
• Opinions differ always from person to person. What is right from my point of view may be wrong from your point of view! Sometimes you may receive brickbats too!
• At some point in time, there may be a feeling as if you got exhausted on the niche you’re blogging. You can overcome this by deviating off the topic whenever you feel so.

Once your blog starts attracting traffic, it’s like an auto-piloted asset; it brings income on its own with your need of spending only an hour a day or even 3-4 hours a week. So until you become a full-time blogger making full-time income, you need to find this time to sustain the enthusiasm with which you jumped into blogging.

So, did you get the point why I blog?