Business Sphere

Recently, two readers sent me similar e-mails, asking me, as a management consultant, if blogging is a business, and if they can make a living by blogging. Since I am not a professional blogger, I conducted an informal survey by asking five professional bloggers, also by e-mail, on the topic. I read a report that in the United States there are 500,000 people who claim that they are professional bloggers and make a living by blogging.

So, my answer to the question is Yes and No. For blogging is both a hobby and a business. A hobby is an activity that a person enjoy doing. While a business is the provision of goods and/or services to society for a profit.  And in blogging, either you blog for a hobby, just for self expression, or you blog for money.  In either case, you provide a product called a blog or “Web” log, which is online diaries with articles, writings, photos, Web links, linking your blog or website to the entries made by the other creators of blogs, called bloggers.

If your blog is about providing advice or tips, then you also perform a service to others, to the readers of your blog who may need your advice to help them solve their problems or guide them in their everyday concerns. For example, advice on how to dispute credit card charges, how to save money in times of recession, how to balance the budget, how to grow organic vegetables, and on just anything under the sun, from fitness, beauty, to photography.

In genereal, blogging as an activity may be classified as a business or as a hobby, or  both:

1. Blogging As A Business (Or Blogging For Money)

If  blogging is a business, can a blogger make money? Of course! Based on my informal poll, there are many people who blog for income, that is, by becoming entrepreneurs. A business requires tactical and strategic decisions, and to earn from a blog you must apply  business tools, like marketing your blog or website to Google to make it known to your target audience or readers, joining on-line communities, making a mailing list of subscribers (like loyal customers), promoting your blog to friends or network of on-line friends or chatmates. It means monetizing your blog or website by putting advertisements in your web pages, like Google adsense or Adgitize.  A blogger for money must know how to generate income from his blogging business to make a profit.

2. Blogging As A Hobby (Or Blogging For Self-Expression)

The activity of blogging as a hobby is not income-generating; hence, a blog is not a business. If you just blog for self-expression, to practice writing, or to post anything that you like, to share your thoughts, feelings and activities to others – from bathing your pet dog to beautifying your garden, from swimming in a beach to trekking to the mountain, or going for a vacation, complete with pictures, then your blogging won’t generate money. In order to generate income from blogging, you have to consider your blogging as a business, and you have to think like an entrepreneur.

When you blog, you spend time to develop your ideas and write your content, time which you can also use for other equally productive pursuits, because time is limited and economics teaches us that being in fixed and limited supply, time has alternative uses. When you choose to blog,  then you forgo doing other things, things and activities which could also be profitable. In addition, when you blog, you also incur expenses, like electricity to run your computer, internet connection, web hosting, in case your site is self-hosted, although there are many free blog sites now. And you need to eat to continue blogging. If you blog for self-expression, to express your thoughts and feelings, your blogging by itself won’t pay your bills or make you generate income for livelihood.

Reading the blogs of other bloggers, I noticed that most of them don’t know how to think strategically about their businesses. They think it’s all about writing high quality content in their blogs and updating their blogs posts  frequently, like daily, three times a week, or weekly, which is important to generate web traffic.  After all, no readers would like to visit a blog which is static, with the latest post  done 6 months ago. However, while a good quality content and frequency of posting are important elements in blogging, they are not enough.  Content is only one side to a coin.  But good quality content alone cannot bring income. It is only when business and management principles are applied  to blogging, like business planning, financial analysis,  marketing and promotion, that a blogger can make money from his blog, making his blogging his source of income and wealth. In this case, he becomes a professional blogger.