Why I'll Never Make Money From My Blog
Blogging is such a huge deal now. When I first started reading blogs (almost 10 years ago) they were still quite a new thing. In fact, they were very uncool. I've had countless blogs throughout my life, and I started a fashion focused one when I was still at school. I kept it extremely secret for months, taking photos of my outfits and sharing them in my little world. I had so much doing it, and I grew a mini following.
It wasn't until a few people discovered my secret blog that I began to not want to do it anymore. I was embarrassed, because blogging meant that you were self absorbed and vain. How I WISH I'd ignore that voice in my head and carried on, because I wish I could look back and see how far I've come.
Blogs now a days are completely different. Everyone wants to be "a blogger." Everyone wants to write a blog for a living, receive free clothes and get paid to travel the world. Sure, that would be awesome... but do you know how much work that takes? I have friends who are extremely successful bloggers. They've made their entire careers out of the little place on the web that they created for themselves, and they're doing amazingly! I'm incredibly proud of them.
When I started my blog just over a year ago, I did it because I felt like I needed a place to express myself. For so long I'd focused on nothing but Atlas, and I was beginning to feel like I was losing my own voice. I think that when I first began to "blog" a lot of people assumed that I was doing it for aspirational reasons. I'll be completely honest, part of me thought that I was too. For quite a long time, I thought to myself that my blog might just be a way that I could make a living. If I worked hard, why couldn't I also be as successful as my other friends have been?
After a year of writing, I've completely changed my mind. I love my blog, I love sharing my life online (as weird as that is) and I love that I've been able to express myself again. Is that desire to make money from it still there? Not one bit. In fact, I've sort of firmly decided against it. Sure, I could plough all my energy into writing posts that will rank first on Google (and there's nothing wrong with doing that if you do), but I really don't want to. I want to keep this my personal little diary. The place where I can write when I want to, share what I'm up to, and keep expressing myself. Do I want to rely on this blog financially? Absolutely not.
Now, that doesn't mean that my blog doesn't help my business. Quite the opposite actually! As you know, I'm a photographer. And an editor. And now I teach as well (that kind of stumbled on me recently, but I'm always open to new things and I'm loving it!). Being a photographer means that I need to attract clients to me. So how does my blog help me do that? Well, my blog is my way of sharing my work with the world, telling people who I am, and in turn, attracting potential clients to me. I can't count the amount of times that I've been on a photo job and a client has said that they feel like they knew me before they'd met me because of my blog. My blog has proven to be a incredible tool for attract photo clients, and I'm being completely honest when I say that that was NOT planned. So although I don't make any money from the blog itself, my blog has lead to me booking photography jobs.
This blog is personal. It's the real me. And it's definitely not going anywhere!
