They say that when people first start blogging they sometimes hit a wall. Often new bloggers blog about blogging. If that wall stays up too long sometimes that’s all they blog about.
Well I’m certainly not a new blogger, but I am going to blog about blogging.
I’ve been thinking about how blogging has changed my life in so many ways since I started my first blog 14 months ago. I started blogging as an outlet, something to take up my time since I was starting to get bored with being stuck at home. Remember I’m only home because I have Crohn’s and haven’t improved enough yet to return to work.
Well, regular visitors to my sites know the rest of the story. One blog expanded into another, and then another and so on. At this point I probably have too many blogs! Oh well, it’s fun and it keeps me busy. It’s also turned out to be a great way to earn a living since I can’t earn a living any other way right now.
I’m not making as much each month as I did at my nursing job. Not yet anyway, but I can see it coming, probably within the next month.
I often wonder what would have happened if I’d started my first blog and then gone back to work a month or two later. Would I have kept blogging? Yes I think I would have.
Would I write seven blogs? No, probably not.
As a nurse I was working four 12 hour shifts in a row – two day shifts, one 11:30 to 11:30 and then a night shift. I’d have five days off but the first one I’d spend sleeping since I’d have just gotten off my night shift. So that left me four days to recover go from being a night owl to an early riser, get house work and other things done, maintain the garden, socialize, and do all my internet work – maintaining at least two large websites, moderating a reptile related forum, and running four mailing lists.
It’s possible that the gardening and photography blogs might have been in the picture by now had I gone back to work. I mean gardening, and the photography that goes hand in hand with it, has become a big part of my life in the last 6 years. I’m sure those sites would have arrived on the scene by now. Perhaps one of the tech blogs that I write as well since I do so much tech and design work.
I’m certain that I wouldn’t have had enough time in a day to have created the other blogs that I now write.
I guess now that I think about it, once I started blogging it just became something that I do. It would have evolved to some degree even if I had gone back to work before now.
How about you? How did you start blogging? Now that you have at least one blog do you think you’d ever stop blogging? Has it changed your life in anyway?
Obviously blogging has become a major source of income for me. It saved us! If I hadn’t found a way to earn a decent income from my blogs we could have been facing losing our house by now.