Loyalty is Meaningless if Both People Aren't Loyal

This post might seem like a bit of a downer, but hopefully it will help you learn from my mistake before it is too late for you.

When I first started my career, I was in a blog network that treated me really well. I considered myself a lesser partner because I had been there from the beginning. I constantly talked to the owner, and had his ear. Things were going really well, and I was happy. I wasn’t just a blogger for a network of blogs, but I was tapped into everything going on in the network. I felt secure, comfortable, and had no complaints.

Then things changed. New people were hired, an investor came in, and the whole feeling of the network changed. I no longer had the strong relationship I once had with my boss, and everything slowly began to fall apart.

Later came an e-mail that many blogs were being sold off. Many of them were blogs that I was the primary author of, and so I was being transferred with them. I didn’t want to leave the company I had spent so much time and effort building. I had thought myself irreplaceable. I had set up so many custom things, and worked so many fourteen hour days. I took it really hard as I had gotten many job offers over the course of working with them that would have meant better pay, more regular hours, and less stress and responsibility, but I never took them out of a feeling of loyalty to the blog network that gave me my big break.

I felt many of the assumed promises that I had held fall short, and I tried to look at the movement as a positive opportunity. I was really worried though, and since then, I have always kept up work outside of whomever I am working for so that I can continue to grow my personal brand beyond my network blogging work, in case something like that ever happened again.

My advice to you would be to tread cautiously. Blog networks aren’t always working hard to look out for their employees, and so you have to look out for yourself.