Dr Tanya has provided a quotation about blogging to discuss this week for Blogging Insights.
As Dr Tanya said in her own post you could look at this quote in several different ways. I’m a hobby blogger so unlike the bloggers who write for money I do have the freedom to write about what I want to write about, or to not write at all if I’ve got nothing to say. However, as many of us have said in the past if we didn’t want to be read we could just keep a private journal.
Just the same I do have to be true to myself. I won’t write about things that I don’t believe in or that don’t interest me. That’s actually why I decided that I would not blog for money. I was doing an online course about blogging for profit and the idea was to create numerous blogs and build them up to the point where you could make money with them. However, I didn’t like some of the methods that were suggested. One was to follow and comment on blogs and leave a link to your own. I’d already been blogging long enough to know that’s terrible blogging etiquette. I wasn’t going to do that. Nor did I like the idea of picking subjects to write about based on SEO, keywords and what would sell. It probably didn’t help that the example in the course was concrete. Eventually I got too bored to even read about it. But seriously, it did make me realise that I have to be interested in a subject in order to write about it. Or at least it has to be something I find intriguing enough to want to learn more. So in that sense I guess that it is better for me to write for myself than write for the public if it means writing about things that mean nothing to me.
Our Other Blog: Two Sisters and Two Points of View 
It’s funny isn’t it, how a negative experience can spur you into doing something positive?
That seems to have been the case with your blogging course.
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I think that it confirmed something I knew all along. I love blogging so it seemed it might be a good way to make a little extra cash but it’s not for me.
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I would love to make extra cash from blogging, but I don’t know how.
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I let WordPress put their ads on my sites but it only makes me about $4-5 a month, enough to pay for my subscription every year if I’m lucky. People with more followers than I probably do much better.
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I know someone who tried this in my country but it didn’t pay much.
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It doesn’t and many people, including me, use an ad blocker. I’d be happy to get enough to pay for my blog renewal every year.
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I would, too.
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Fortunately, most of the professional writing I did was stuff that I found interesting — technology, but also stuff for NASA about the stars and satellites. While not every moment of it was inspirational, none of it was ugly either. The quote seems to be of the opinion that if you aren’t purely expressing yourself, your writing is in some way soul-destroying. Which would make every journalist, every tech writer, everyone who has written a textbook into what? People without a soul? That’s ridiculous since most of what we do write about EVEN as bloggers isn’t fiction. Very few of us write mostly fiction, even when we have a choice. Non-fiction is the real ruler of the writing world. Fiction somehow manages to win all the prizes probably because they don’t give prizes for most non-fiction other than journalism.
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