In this post I will not be trying to persuade anyone to do or not to do it, these are just pros and cons in my 4-year experience of being in the blogging world.

Pros:

• you’re free to write your thoughts, opinions and discoveries and to share them with the world
• you get to know yourself better, as blogging reqires a lot of dicipline, persistence and consistence, actually, a 100 % of the lot. This gets you insight into whether you’re capable of being your own boss
• as mentioned above – you’re your own boss and nothing can beat that
• you can work from anywhere and the world is your inspiration
• it’s as creative job as it gets, all from writing, drawing and photography to graphic design
• besides persistence, blogging also teaches you patience – sometimes you get a creativity block and mostly there’s not much you can do about it. Live your life as high quality as you can and inspiration will come, bringing along the motivation to dig into work. Sometimes this doesn’t happen on its own, in such cases just do the work. Just write and you’ll break through the blockage eventually
• you learn a lot about backend editing and the tools your blog provider enables you, sometimes, if so required, even coding. In fact, you have to become somewhat an expert in backend site management, which is a quality in its own
• by running a public blog you put yourself out there, which can be a little scarry, but this belongs under pros nevertheless, because even if you can potentially become a target for negative comments and spam, you also learn so much about the world and yourself, as already mentioned. Sometimes some thoughts occur you didn’t even imagine existed until the point you opened up to the world. It can be pretty amazing.

Cons:

• expectations are, at least in the beginnig, higher than reality – in numbers that means: traffic, followers, comments, likes, affiliate funds, ad funds, etc.
• some posts take A LOT of time to perfect and make presentable (not just hours and days, but months)
• it’s very hard nowadays to become financially independent solely via blogging
• it’s an expensive »hobby«, you must pay for: owning a domain, security, hosting, etc. Costs sum up to 100-150 € per year
• spam. Once you’re out there, it’s a part of it. WordPress, for example, has a good way of removing these before you’re even aware of them, but they’re there still
• there can be days when your site, for one reason or another, doesn’t work. And it also may take days for the provider to fix it. This can be very stressful as you are losing your prescious readers and also, you pay good money for your site to be working properly (I wrote about my doubts and problems here). WordPress and Bluehost have 24h support and they try to fix the problems right away or as soon as possible. But when reaching out to their chat help, make sure you have some hours to spare as it may take them a while to figure out the problem. What I find the most disappointing and repulsive with their help is, they never explain what the original problem was and how they actually fixed it once they have. I ALWAYS aks them and never get an answer. So a big dislike to Bluehost on this point.
• if you go into blogging for the money, better replace the idea immediately. Though there are those masters who managed to break through and though there are still pretty much endless possibilities to make it, unles you are a master and a good presenter of your craft in one, then just do it for your own fun. After that you just might succeed. Only the best can win.

If you want to live off blogging, it is a full time job. It requires hours and days, 4-8 hours on average per day. Depends on how often you publish and how extensive your posts are. But! The hours are yours to deploy however you choose. You can block you schedule and take a few effective days and then some days completely off. Or just take a few hours per day most of the days. Whichever works best for you. I find that I alternate between both of these options, depends on the time of the year, my energy and motivation. This does not fall under pro or con, it’s just neutral information about managing our most precious values – our time and energy.

Being a blogger means you must love writing and when you have so much to say and to share with the world, blogging is the best possible way to do so. You are resposible to support your art, not the other way around. If you want to make it, you’re the only one who can enable it for yourself. I’m just listing what it requires.

To find motivation for creating I recommend the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

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