Discussing the elephant

Spend one day on Twitter following links to people’s blogs and you’ll think that most people have reached financial nirvana. They appear financially free while living lives of opulence. Everyone appears to have a muse. Everyone is an expert at marketing and business. Everyone has been set free from the “factory” because they’ve all chose a different path and they’re all doing amazing things that no one else is doing.

The promise is that if you truly dedicate yourself to blogging, social media, email newsletters, and a host of other disciplines, then within a year or two, you’ll be making enough money to quit your job and live anywhere in the world (that you can find an internet connection). This promise is strengthened by the fact there appear to be people who HAVE done this!

A thriving community has sprung up around this promise as people look for the promised land.

But let’s talk honestly for a moment.

Most bloggers are not making a living blogging. They might be making a few bucks here and there, but not enough to quit their jobs.

Don’t get me wrong; people are dead serious about this community. They learn their craft well. They build communities and reach out to others. And unlike many communities, the blogging community is amazing about creating documentation on HOW to do what the community is all about! Nonstop documentation about how to blog allows anyone to step into the community and immediately feel like a professional amateur.

But when it comes to people making a living off of this community, the dirty little secret is that very few people could support themselves online. And the dirty BIG secret is that the people making a living off of this community aren’t doing it because they’re good bloggers or they get the best traffic, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Face it, if the blogging community were a room, the fact that the overwhelming majority aren’t making enough to live off of is the elephant that no one is talking about.

Here come the pitchforks and torches

Cover your eyes because I’m about to call blogging what it really is for most people…

A hobby.

For some of us, this stings a little bit. Sucks, huh?

While I’m sure this has the potential to draw out an angry crowd, I’m not saying this to start a fight or be sensational. But since the mob might already be assembling, let’s just go for it.

Similar to a bunch of flower children dancing in the woods, the hobbyist blogger sings the song of giving away almost everything for free creating content and hoping that they can sell their PDF files ebooks and courses to each other. People create pages on their blogs advertising their ability to rehash what they’ve read consulting services. It is a community with a large percentage of people who can’t be around others are blazing trails and have never been above an entry level position willingly left their corporate jobs in hopes of being lazy and getting rich doing things their own way.

Are you mad yet?

You should be!

You should be pissed that you’ve bought into the promise of financial freedom and then been taught to be a hobbyist! You should be pissed that amateurs are selling PDF files for multiple times what a well written textbook would cost! You should be mad as hell!

I’m not trying to incite a riot. In fact, some people don’t WANT to turn their blog into a business (e.g. Joel Runyon). I’m trying to warn others because I wish someone would have told me two years ago that blogging is mostly a hobby.

Mostly.

More than a hobby

With few exception, most people in the blogging community are just enthusiastic hobbyists. BUT, there are exceptions.

• Dan and Ian – who run a real business with tangible products and employees
• Sinclair – who is amazing all around and also makes an awesome living online teaching people how to do real business
• Abby Kerr – who uses her real world knowledge gained from owning a retail store to help entrepreneurs

All of these people are members of a much smaller percentage of the blogging community who are doing things online and making a living off of it.

The difference between what they are doing and the thousands of hobbyists who comprise the larger part of the community? Their focus. Business over blogging.

Look at the definition of the two words:

• Business: The practice of making one’s living by engaging in commerce
• Blogging: Add new material to or regularly update a blog

Notice that only one of those two definitions mentions a financial word (i.e. commerce). The other one is something to keep you busy. The aforementioned people focus on the business.

My confession

I got caught up in the hobby.

My day job (yes, I admit to having one of those…GASP!) makes me a nice chunk of change. Because of this, I didn’t feel the pressure to really push the business side of things.

However, around the beginning of the year, I noticed what I had been doing…or more precisely what I had NOT been doing. My posting frequency decreased when I realized that I had been building a hobby and not a business. I love the connections I’ve made and value them more than I can possibly convey, but that doesn’t change the fact that I had not been hard at work on a business (i.e. the practice of making one’s living by engaging in commerce).

I’ve made a significant number of changes since then and have been hard at work on an actual business. As you might imagine, such a shift requires some hard work and pulls your attention away from things you were once focused.

And THAT is why you have seen so little of me on my own site.

The time for the hobby has ended. It’s time to get down to business.

Out of curiosity, how many of YOU are stuck in the hobby phase?