A friend who knows I blog for a living called my attention and pointed me to a column which called blogging a “slacker job.” While I would love to link to the article to show you its entirety, I’d rather not link to the web site as that would give them traffic. Anyhow, I won’t be discussing the whole article, but the point that blogging is seen by some as a “slacker job.” Hmmm…if you’ve been following my posts here, what do you think is my opinion of problogging? Even just reading through what I’ve written makes me exhausted with the things I have to do just to maintain a single blog.

Let’s examine why non-bloggers see problogging as a slacker job, shall we?

1. Many probloggers work at home.
2. Bloggers might have deadlines but we make our own hours.
3. We can type up posts and publish anywhere we are in the world. No need to report to editors in person.
4. We can work wearing anything we want.
5. We use informal and friendly voice when blogging.
6. Some print journalists just won’t take us seriously no matter how hard we try.
7. Many people just don’t know there’s such a thing as a professional blogger.

Problogging, a slacker job? Ha. Just look at what we have to do regularly:

1. We have to come up with a niche we want to write about.
2. We have to constantly find ideas to write about every single day.
3. We need to find the right monetization model for our blogs.
4. We need to organize our own time and multi-task.
5. We don’t only have to network, we also have to use social bookmarking web sites.
6. We have to deal with trolls.
7. Sure, print journalists might have a set of guidelines to follow, but we have to constantly watch what we say or else we’ll be getting flak from all over the world.
8. We have to constantly watch out for content thieves.
9. And basically, we do all of the above over and over again, sometimes all on our own.

Whew. Just listing all those got me dizzy. Sure, I did say before that problogging is equivalent to freedom for me. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a job for slackers. When someone tells you something similar, show them this post — maybe they’ll learn something from it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 7:34 am and is filed under blogging. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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