{"id":9062,"date":"2009-10-15T00:02:14","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T13:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/?p=9062"},"modified":"2015-10-02T09:53:35","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T22:53:35","slug":"the-1-reason-my-blogging-grew-into-a-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/the-1-reason-my-blogging-grew-into-a-business\/","title":{"rendered":"The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float:right;\"><script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/tweetmeme.com\/i\/scripts\/button.js\"><\/script><\/div>\n<h3>Have you ever had a moment in your life where everything changed?<\/h3>\n<p>You might not have known it at the time - but the moment was defining, it changed the course of some area of your life in a way that turned things upside down.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I had one of those course changing moments early in my blogging<\/strong>. It was a moment that resulted in my blogging moving from being a hobby that generated a nice bit of secondary income into a full time business.<\/p>\n<p>It was a moment that at the time didn't feel life changing - but it was.<\/p>\n<p>The funny thing about this moment is that it wasn't a discovery of some secret way to make money blogging, it wasn't the day I started one of my blogs\u2026 in fact it was a moment that didn't immediately lead to any particular change on my blogs - because it was largely something that happened in my mind - a paradigm shifting moment.<\/p>\n<h3>It all started with 9 words from my wife - Vanessa<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/styleandshenanigans.com\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?resize=300%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-45101\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?resize=355%2C355&amp;ssl=1 355w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?resize=100%2C100&amp;ssl=1 100w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?resize=70%2C70&amp;ssl=1 70w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/problogger.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/Style-and-Shenanigans-Headshot-Pink.jpg?w=500&amp;ssl=1 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><i>'You've got 6 months to make blogging full time.'<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Vanessa then told me that if I didn't get it to this kind of level I'd have to get a 'real job'.<\/p>\n<p>This sounds like a rather harsh kind of ultimatum but it actually emerged from an ongoing conversation we'd been having about my dream of becoming a full time blogger.<\/p>\n<p>Up until this point I'd been talking about how blogging could one day provide us with a full time income. I'd been showing her the growth of the earnings from the blogs so far and projecting forward to what they <em>might<\/em> be in the future if things kept going.<\/p>\n<p>I'd been on about it for months and things were going OK - the earnings graphs I kept showing her were trending up - I could see the possibility of one day being a full time blogger.<\/p>\n<p><strong>But I'd been talking a lot\u2026. dreaming a lot\u2026. creating a lot of pretty graphs\u2026. and not really DOING a lot.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Vanessa had very graciously supported my dream for quite some time but realised that to achieve it things needed to change.<\/p>\n<p>I didn't really see it (I was too close and too caught up in my dreams) but Vanessa knew it and so she set me the 'ultimatum' - a deadline that changed my thinking and more importantly led to me changing the way I went about my blogging.<\/p>\n<p>In the moments after Vanessa's ultimatum I had a realization that while I dreamed that one day my blogging would become a business that I'd been treating my blogging like a hobby.<\/p>\n<p>I knew that if I were to succeed in going full time in the next six months that that had to change. I needed to start looking at my blogging as a business now - even though it was only earning a day or two a week's income.<\/p>\n<p>That moment changed everything.<\/p>\n<p>That was the day I....<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>started putting serious time aside for blogging<\/li>\n<li>became more focused upon my core tasks of creating content<\/li>\n<li>wasted less time on distractions<\/li>\n<li>became more strategic in my thinking and set myself goals to work towards<\/li>\n<li>began to look for new income streams - beyond AdSense<\/li>\n<li>started hustling for advertisers - ringing up businesses in my niche and pitching my blog to them<\/li>\n<li>began to seek out guest writing opportunities on other blogs and even in main stream media<\/li>\n<li>started setting myself deadlines for posting a certain number of posts a day and developed an editorial calendar<\/li>\n<li>I started networking more with other bloggers<\/li>\n<li>began to invest more time and even money into my learning of different aspects of blogging<\/li>\n<li>started to look for a business coach who could teach me how to look at what I do as a business instead of a hobby<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That day began the process for me of looking at what I do as a business.<\/p>\n<p>While not a lot changed on my blogs that day - the impact over the last 4-5 years has been significant. I've not looked back and many of the things I changed back then have become patterns and a natural part of my blogging work flow.<\/p>\n<h3>The #1 reason my blogging grew into a business was that I began to treat it as one.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever had a moment in your life where everything changed? You might not have known it at the time &#8211; but the moment was defining, it changed the course of some area of your life in a way that turned things upside down. I had one of those<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/problogger.com\/the-1-reason-my-blogging-grew-into-a-business\/\"> &#8230;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,20],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Have you ever had a moment in your life where everything changed? 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