Blogging as a Second Job

For many folks, the world is very black and white – you are either wrong or right, things are good or bad, and when it comes to blogging you’re either making money at it or you’re not. For those folks, blogging has to be your single source of income or you’ve failed to make blogging work for you. For the rest of us in the real world, that simply isn’t true – blogging, like any other career, is not a “one size fits all” kind of endeavor.

Case in point: If you’re in need of extra income instead of a career change, don’t overlook the possibility that blogging can be the best second job you have. Why take on a second job that keeps you away from home, requires an extra commute, and saps your energy when you could build your own second job writing about something that interests you?

Moving the Goal Posts

When people write about and talk about making a living by blogging, they always concentrate on “all in” scenarios where you quit your day job and spend twenty hours a day working on your blog and monetising your thoughts.

While this is certainly possible and it’s difficult to argue with a steady income solely from your blog, for some folks this doesn’t make any sense. You might like your day job, after all, and be reluctant to quit.

Maybe you just need a little extra income that doesn’t require you to travel or work late nights. Maybe you have responsibilities at home that make a part time job in addition to your full-time career impossible.

SEE ALSO: 5 Benefits of Blogging for Students

In such scenarios, people have a tendency to write off blogging as a possibility, because of the pervasive attitude that blogging requires constant and sustained effort in order to be successful.

That’s true if you’re looking to make blogging your sole source of income. But to generate a nice second income, blogging can be a much more casual affair.

Scheduling

The secret to making blogging work for you as a second job is in the scheduling. Many people are convinced that you can only write at certain times of the day and you must post your articles from a certain location – but this is the Internet we’re talking about. Writing can be an all-day process:

Thinking of ideas and jotting notes on the commute into your day job, working up a quick first draft on your lunch break, then polishing on the way home and posting after dinner. Following that sort of schedule, you’re posting once a day, keeping your content fresh and staying on top of the newest trends and news without adding a single hour to your workday.

You can also work ahead on the weekends, banking several posts and scheduling them to publish on your site later in the week. This way you can take control of your schedule and work when you want to, not on some imaginary schedule handed down by Internet gods.

There’s more to running a successful blog than simply writing, but content generation is the first step. You can experiment with different strategies at any time, but the first step is to get into the habit of creating good quality content on a regular basis.

The content will get you page views, which will sell ads, and before you know it you’ll have a good second income stream, all without changing careers or even breaking a sweat.

If you have any comments and questions just leave it in the comments below.