I was in front of the laptop this morning working on some stuff for a client, and in the midst of distracting myself with unrelated thought tangents, I began to think, “Why don’t I update my site more often?” Simple question, really. I have lots to say, but I sit here and say nothing, alienating my audience in the process.
I like blogging. I mean, I REALLY like blogging. Each time I post, it’s a challenge to be creative and to come up with something that I think people will actually enjoy mulling over, and when I feel like I’ve accomplished this, I get the warm fuzzies. It’s a good thing. Problem is, it takes a while to come up with good stuff. Not only that, when I started this site, I kind of established an MO where I included commented pictures in my posts. Love the pics. Love the comments in ’em. What’s the problem? It takes a while to do it. Each day, I have to walk the line between wanting to be a big time blogger versus doing client work to pay the bills. Hell, I dunno what to do. I’d rather blog and design strictly for fun – on a full time basis.
Frankly, I think I could be successful in both arenas if I was able to devote the proper time to each. I really screwed up this whole process in the beginning because I was terribly uptight about the fact that I had no steady income. At this point, I think it would have been better to blog blog blog and try to build up this site’s prestige, but then again, if I hadn’t done all that design work, I probably wouldn’t have some of the connections that I have today. What’s worse – I wouldn’t have had an income. Something about that just freaks me out.
At this time, I’m fortunate enough to be doing some pretty solid contract work for some well-respected people in the blogosphere, and it’s nice to feel my reputation growing because people have respect for the work that I’ve done. Does this mean I’m happy with where I’m at? Not exactly.
For now, my dream scenario consists of the following:
- establishing an income that is large enough to keep me from worrying about stupid, day-to-day type expenses
- getting that income off of about two weeks worth of work per month to open up free time
- spending the rest of that free time expanding my presence as a blogger
A really hot topic that’s been bouncing around the net for months now is the idea of making a sustainable income from blogging. I have to admit – I was intoxicated by the idea just a few months ago. Now, however, the glossy sheen has all but worn off of that idea because content-specific sites simply aren’t my cup of tea. You know what? I don’t care to make $100 in ad revenue off of 30 sites a month. Sure, the money sounds ok, but let’s be honest – do YOU want to update all that crap? Is that really how you want to spend your time?
Not me. No way. I’m all about producing things that I’m really into and really happy with. I want to spend my time developing sites and content that are directly in line with my interests. If I want to haul off and go design a new WordPress template, then by god, I ought to be able to go and do that without worrying about the financial or time consequences of doing so. After all, if it’s what I want to do, I promise you – the results are going to be good, ’cause that’s how I roll.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. I want to live my life with TOTAL productive and creative freedom. I hate boundaries and constraints because they all impinge on my right to do what I do best – step out there and make things that I’m proud of. The real trick is to figure out how to monetize all that, but I’m determined to make it all work. I HAVE to make it work, or else I’ll be miserable. That’s not really an option, so we’ll have to see how all this plays out.
Oh, and I almost forgot. I spent the last week going through the process of migrating this site onto a new server, which I’d like to think is why there weren’t any new posts. If you buy that excuse, then great! If not, then I’m sorry :) I had some help from Bryan Strawser (ok, he did damn near everything), and now I’m up and running on the new dual Xeon platform. Speed is cool. Running this place on an independent domain is even cooler.