Yes

by Lucius Byron

Created on: May 04, 2010

If blogging is something you want to do for money, you should consider quitting your day job. However, your success in blogging will not suddenly skyrocket because you're unemployed. If you want to pursue blogging, it's worth considering it as a hobby until you're confident that you will succeed. Blogging typically involves acquiring gradual publicity until your followers eventually promote you faster than you can promote yourself. The beginning of your blog will involve advertising yourself all over the web, making connections, writing content, and a variety of other tasks. There is no guarantee you will enjoy all of it. You can be a great writer, but it's still unlikely your blog will succeed. It just doesn't work that way unless you're offering something significant to draw people to your content.

The objections to quitting your day job are everywhere. When it comes to writing, blogging, painting and a variety of other careers, there are plenty of people ready to discourage you. In all likelihood, you will be your biggest critic. These markets attract people for a variety of reasons. They provide entertainment, the prospect of fame, money, self-employment and the list goes on forever. The problem is that blogging requires writing talent. Most people are average, and being average usually works against you when it comes to writing. Most people aren't willing to put in the work. Blogging takes a lot of boring grunt work and can be incredibly frustrating. Furthermore, there are additional requirements for blogging that include being somewhat tech-savvy through internet marketing.

People are notorious for both overestimating and underestimating their abilities. The failing blogger will claim it's an impossible goal to live through blogging. The arrogant person doesn't want other people to succeed because it makes them feel insecure. The people who succeed just got lucky, they'll say. Then others try and fail. Hopefully they can move on, but they often provide an unfairly pessimistic view about the situation.

Blogging is something friends, family, and society might discourage you from pursuing. It's something people claim is an unrealistic goal, and you won't succeed at it. People cite statistics about success and failure rates among bloggers and writers, but this is meaningless. You are a person with control over your life - not a statistic. Life isn't a wheel where you say "Oh, I only have a 1/1000 chance at that so I won't do it." Imagine if all potential doctors avoided the career because, "statistically speaking," it's not realistic. This is a bad way of looking at things.

Of course, questions like this are subjective. If you're keeping yourself from starving by working your day job, you probably shouldn't keep it. If you have a family to look after, things are more complicated. The point is, however, that you shouldn't resign yourself to a life where you're dissatisfied with your career. If you want a change, work towards it. If you want to blog, start making plans. Nobody said you had to quit your day job right away.

Ultimately, you have to consider your own scenario and weigh the evidence. Do you have impartial reasons to believe you are a good writer? Are you good at technology? Can you work twelve hour days five days a week if necessary? There is a long list of questions you should ask yourself. It's a complicated decision. The point is that statistics shouldn't weigh too much into your decision making. Blogging involves taking an easily accessible medium and presenting it to as many people as possible as frequently as possible. There is no shortage of people. It's up to you to decide whether it's worth pursuing.

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