I maintain a private online journal account which only friends of mine can access. The journal mostly contains personal stuff and anything cool I can find around the blogosphere. I mentioned once that I was working as a problogger and one of my friends asked something which had me thinking. All my friends blog for fun and they find joy in the sheer informality and spontaneity of blogging. Putting the word “professional” with the word “blogging” is an oxymoron for them, something they can’t imagine doing. Despite the world being exposed to the more unconventional job options, problogging is still not a widely accepted profession.

So, when one question was posted, I had to ask myself and think about it seriously. Does blogging for a professional take the fun and passion out of it? Many of you might react at once with a resounding “of course not!” But if you think about it, the person who asked the question has a point. No matter how much you love your job, there are days, especially when you don’t feel well, when you see it as an act of obligation rather than an act of leisure. And when it starts to feel like an obligation, we all know it means it’s nowhere near being fun.

The concept of “joy of blogging” aside, how about passion? The way I see it, passion for blogging could be wiped out by two things:

1. The monotony of routine.

I can’t remember the number of times I discussed the issue of blogging schedule. Since we’re just human, and we have days when our brains are nothing better than big gray mass with a rusty mechanism, it’s normal to fall into a routine when attending to our blogs. Admit it, since when have you felt that surge of passion, that strong and undeniable urge to blog? If your answer is that you can’t remember, then most probably, you’ve fallen into a routine. The beauty of a routine is that you’re ready to accomplish tasks everyday, but be careful not to let your content become worth of the slush pile.

2. Passion for money overpowers passion for blogging.

And I know that it’s for good reason. Some of us earn their full-time wage from blogging. And as much as we’d love to be artistic and all that jazz, there are bills to pay, necessities to buy, and food that needs to be at the table during meals. While it’s not good to be impractical, it’s also not ideal to get sucked into this desire to earn money that you forget how it is to write blog posts that you enjoy writing. In our effort to find and create the content readers in our niche love, there are times that we write with a particular slant even if we don’t want to, or tackle topics we don’t want to, or write linkbaits a tad too frequent than what’s advised because they tend to increase traffic. It won’t be long before you find your own blog unsavory, so pause, take a look back and decide if it’s really worth it. Find a balance between your passion to earn and your passion for blogging — it exists halfway between the two, you just have to figure it out.

As an answer the question, I must admit that the joy and passion I had felt for blogging years ago before I start problogging for a living was much greater. That doesn’t mean however, that I don’t enjoy blogging as much now — I was just able to make integrate it into my life completely.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under blogging. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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