What it means to make a living as a blogger

Here at Blogging For A Living we of course talk about blogging for a living. Both as a blogger for someone else and as a blogger for yourself. Since we talk about this stuff all the time I figured it’d be good to define what we’re discussing – i.e. the distinction between blogging for yourself vs. blogging for others. Also important is what I mean when I say, “Make a living as a blogger.” That said, I thought I’d take a moment to break it all down.

What it means to make a living as a blogger:

To me, making a living as a blogger, or problogger, whatever you’d like to call it means you make enough money to live on through blogging. That may be via your own blogs, blogs for clients, or blogs for networks.

Making a living means you make enough money to pay your bills. Ideally you’d also have enough to sink into health insurance and some money to save as well, but at bare minimum making a living (to me) means you pay your rent, buy groceries, pay all utilities, and all other monthly bills with the income you get from blogging. If you can’t cover the bills and household necessities you’re obviously not making a living.

Oh and keep in mind you’ll also need to make enough to pay all your own taxes which can be substantial depending on where you live and your personal tax situation. I’ve seen very few blogging gigs that cover taxes, most of time it falls on the blogger.

Making a living blogging for yourself:

If you make a living blogging for yourself it means you own a blog or blogs and you also make enough $ off said blogs to live on.

Making a living blogging for others:

If you blog for others, those other people pay you for your work, your posts, your networking ability, and more. You don’t own the blogs, your client does. You may blog for one super lucrative client, but it’s more likely that you blog for many clients. However you swing it, you also make enough $ off said clients to live on.

Making a living as a mixed bag blogger:

Among my pals who do make a living blogging the most frequent situation I see is a mixed bag – you own a blog (or blogs) and blog for clients as well. In some cases bloggers also branch out to other writing venues such as magazine articles, website copy, e-books and more. I’m not the blogging income police so take my opinion with a grain of salt but I think that if you spend more than half your time blogging and doing blog related tasks AND make a living income, you can officially say, “I make a living as a blogger.” Some people probably think you should blog FT to say that, but I think diversifying is smart so what the heck.

Right now I’m a mixed bag blogger with about 80% of my income coming from clients not my own blogs so here at Blogging For A Living I tend to lean toward writing about client issues. If you’re looking for more posts related to blogging for a living while owning your own blogs, check out more of Deb’s posts.  Deb tends to write posts about blogging for yourself, which is currently exactly what she does.

Hopefully these terms are useful – I think a lot of folks lump all forms of blogging together but owning your own blog is extremely different than blogging for a client. Also, I wanted a clear definition of “Making a living” posted so I can refer back to it. Now when I say, “Make a living” you’ll get where I’m coming from.

Do you have different opinions about what it means to make a living as a blogger? Anything to add?

Coming up soon; how many people are actually making a living as a blogger.