My job? Blogging! (Now there is an idea)

Imagine this …
(hazy mist rolls in as the scene changes)
Weary of many long hours maintaining a full-time job and still remaining faithful to your blog, you make a momentous decision one day …
To blog full-time!

Sound far-fetched?  Not at all.  In fact, I am noticing more and more people (and I am not talking about groups of people, I am talking about lone bloggers) are blogging full-time and earning a decent living off it too!  One person who does this and who springs to mind almost immediately is Darren Rowse, also known as ProBlogger.  When he wrote about what he thought bloggers doin’ it for themselves, he had the following to say:

Is it possible to make money from blogging? I believe so. Will there
ever be ‘millionaire bloggers’? I suspect it will happen in the next
few years. Will people earning a living from blogging be as common as
people earning livings from plumbing, stock brokering or gardening? I’m
not so sure.

Blogging has the potential to generate income
– but I believe it will only be a select few who will be able to make
their fortune (or even earn a full time income) purely through
blogging. A few very creative entrepreneurs, good marketers and
powerful communicators will make it big but the average joe shouldn’t
expect to set themselves up for retirement through blogging.

Now, he wrote that in September 2004 and at the time Rowse spoke about how he would have liked to be able to support himself for a couple days a week with his blogging.  As for now, when he posed the question whether his blogging activities have made him rich (specifically, whether AdSense ads on his 17 blogs have made him rich?) he said:

Adsense is currently the largest source of money from my blogs. I’m unable to go into specific dollar terms except to say that it pays my rent and is well on the way to giving me a deposit for a home.

There is a catch though.  You really have to work at your blog and post regularly and hope that your readers really are interested in what you have to say.  After all, it depends on the numbers!

What got me into this post was a hit off Eclecticism.  This post mentioned Jason Kottke’s decision to leave his web development job and blog full-time.  A big part of his plan is to attract what he calls ‘micropatrons’ to support him by funding his activities on his blog.  I haven’t read much of his blog beyond this particular post so I am not going to comment on the feasibility of this plan.  It is an exciting plan though!  I am going to keep an eye on this one (actually, check back once in a while – have quite a bit of daily reading as it is).