While blogging for other people, I realized that it isn’t as easy to blog for yourself and because of that difference in difficulty many bloggers don’t succeed.

People always assume that I have great freedom thanks to my writing on various sites saying things like “it must be nice to get paid to write about what you love” and while it can sometimes be amazing, there are other times when you are pushing out content that is just to satisfy your need for a pay check, and it is at that point where you feel the heavy chains of blogging holding you down.

Recently, while on Freelance Writing Jobs Radio, I realized how I haven’t really made it to that transitionary point that most of the other well known bloggers I know have been able to do. The point where they have been running their own blog for so long, as well as other sites, that they are able to leverage that brand and go out on their own and be successful.

I don’t know if this is laziness on my part, or fear, but I still constantly and consistently work for others, and so I had to defend network/company backed blogging as a career option on the show. The others played it off as something bloggers at the start of their career do, but I have been employed to blog full time by one company or another for the last three years, and it doesn’t look like that will change much any time soon.

For me, there has always been some entity above me that I had to serve, and in having to serve, there are sacrifices I have had to made. Understand this when you get into blogging: you will either find a way to transition and work for yourself, or you will always work for someone else. Doing the former can be much more difficult than the latter but from talking to others, taking your life into your own hands when blogging can be much more rewarding and so if you start blogging as a career, start thinking to yourself very early on: how can I do this for me?

Originally posted on February 28, 2011 @ 10:48 am