I had the foresight to start a travel blog in case I was ever laid off from my full time job for the millionth time. I had been on the horrible receiving end of corporate re-structurings and failed start ups several times so I thought hey let me start a blog in order to generate some additional revenue in case this keeps happening.
I started the blog. It cost me money. It generated no revenue. And then I was laid off again.
Creating a Travel Blog
I had been working full time at a travel website for a few years but wasn’t feeling fully fulfilled creatively. I wanted to write travel stories, that I wanted to write, and I wanted to make money doing it. I saw other travel bloggers claiming to be fully funded by their blogs so I thought, how hard could it be?
Ummmm, really freaking hard!
Creating the actual backend of a blog I quickly discovered was difficult for someone with no tech background, and a slight need for perfection. I knew the tech basics and muscled through but with the amount of time I spent looking puzzled at repeated google searches, I probably could have traveled the world, twice.
Eventually, I hired someone. It was the best decision I made in order to launch my blog. Once I had the tech figured out (by someone who I paid to figure it out for me), I was set! I wrote a few posts, launched the blog by the deadline I had set for myself and boom, I was a travel blogger.
Three Years Later
I had not looked at my own blog, nor had I written or posted anything to it in about two years. I still paid the tech guy every month because if I wasn’t keeping an eye on my little place on the internet, I felt like someone should be! So the blog was costing me money and generating pennies of revenue.
Soon after launching the blog, I realized that I didn’t enjoy doing my full time travel job twice. I wrote and edited travel stories for a travel website all day at work. So why did I think I would want to come home at night and repeat those same actions? I did want a more creative outlet so I tried to focus more on the visuals with photography and video, which I was good at and enjoyed doing. But again it took time, even more time than writing.
So I ignored my blog for years. It cost me money each month but it was fine, I had a full time job that could finance that expense. My career was advancing at my full time travel job. I was making more money than I ever had. It was highly unlikely I would ever leave the company, and we were seeing excellent revenue growth (best ever!) in all aspects of the company. There was zero chance of a layoff from this job so my paranoia of needing another revenue stream was just that, paranoia.
Related: Layoffs Lead to Impact and Income
Paranoia Becomes Reality
HA!, said 2020, you should have stayed paranoid, very, very paranoid!
When the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, the career anxiety definitely started to resurface for me but this time I was working for a huge, successful-for-many-years, knew-how-to-pivot-in-disaster corporation. I figured there would be changes, furloughs maybe, pay cuts? But no, they pivoted in disaster alright. They dissolved my entire division, 6 websites closed forever and more than 900 people globally, laid off. PIVV-OTT!
I don’t blame them. The pandemic gutted the travel industry. They didn’t have much of a choice. But after sobbing over my loss, yet another lay off and blow to my career. I turned to my travel blog. It needed to start generating revenue asap.
Related: It All Started with Puzzle Time: How a Puzzle Led Me to Starting My Own Coaching Business
The Business of Blogging
Turns out attempting to grow an audience and revenue for a travel blog during a pandemic when traveling is highly discouraged, isn’t exactly easy. But I was committing to the blog, I added every affiliate link I could. I finally got ads on my pages. I shared on social media and tried to get anyone and everyone to subscribe to my newsletter. My revenue was now at the dollars mark (like, single digit dollars) so things were on the upswing. I’d be making at least hundreds of dollars soon, right?!
I also took every free or low-cost course, class and workshop I could find about how to generate revenue from a blog and how to build a business online. I got a few ounces of knowledge out of each of these courses but yet became obsessed with taking them. One of these courses was going to have the answers I needed. One of these instructors was going to tell me the secret lesson that I had been missing and once I knew it, the revenue would start flowing. Mind you, I had helped to generate tens of thousands of dollars for the travel website I had just been laid off from. I already knew the secret lessons and knew how to generate revenue for a website. I had the knowledge, I was the expert already and I knew the steps, but there had to be a larger reason why my blog wasn’t generating a large revenue.
There was.
A Blog is Not a Business
I took a 7-day live masterclass on how to build a business online. It wasn’t a great class, the instructor was long-winded and annoyed me. I rolled my eyes a lot at what he had to say, and by day six of the class I had begun to write it off as a complete waste of time, and was happy I had only spent a few bucks on the class.
BUT
The instructor did provide me with two tidbits of information and those two tidbits have proven to be invaluable. As much as I’ve hated to admit it.
First, he gave me the mantra, “F Perfection.” It was the first time (followed by many, many more times) that I heard someone essentially say, just do the thing. It does not need to be perfect. It needs to be good enough. Stop allowing perfection to hold you back and just do it. F Perfection! I still say this phrase to myself when I can feel myself going down a “perfect” rabbit hole, and it’s something I want to always instill in my coaching clients.
Secondly, he gave me (aka everyone in the virtual class) the hard truth I needed to hear, but did not want to hear. He emphasized in a big way that…..a blog is not a business.
Now, he provided this tidbit on day six of the class, which was annoying AF. It would have been nice if he mentioned it on day one. Because in my mind my “business” was absolutely my blog. I was selling my words, my words about travel things. That was the business, how dare he say it wasn’t!
The instructor went on to explain that a blog can absolutely benefit a business (agree!), it is an excellent marketing tool (agree!), and a blog can generate revenue but generating revenue and an income are vastly different (sadly, agree). There are always exceptions to the rule of course (I know this so don’t @ me if your blog is indeed your business, just consider yourself one of the lucky ones!). But for most, a blog is not a business.
As annoyed as I was about this news that a blog is not a business, I knew he was right, which is what made me more annoyed. If my blog was not my business, what was my business? I was not selling a product. I was not selling a service. Reading is a free activity so how I was expecting to generate a salary from it?
So now what? What is my business?
