Bloggers and dogs and working hard

LiewCF recently wrote about how successful bloggers work like dogs (ie. work really, really hard). It was a thought provoking short post that gave folks a much needed “Wait a minute - have you considered…” word of caution. It’s easy to sit at your computer, frustrated with your full-time job, angry with life, and think how great it is to blog full-time like this guy.

The problem is that people may not go more that a couple of Liew’s recent posts to realize that he’s been blogging for a long, long time. Like ANY other career, he’s paid his dues, made his mistakes, and yes - probably slogged like a dog behind the scenes. While others can afford to work fixed hours because they get a salary at the end of the month, bloggers like Liew are likely up till the wee hours tweaking their sites and crawling the web for their next big post. Like any other jobber, Liew’s just reaping the rewards of his labour. And I must say that I like visiting his site. Unlike many other blogs, Liew’s blog has reached a level of maturity in that his posts are relevant, timely and well written. This, coming from a guy who candidly admits his English is not very good speaks volumes of the amount of work he has to put in.

Like how most perceive Liew, people think that my wife and I have it easy working full-time at home. I suppose you could say I’m pretty lucky in that I’m getting the best (and worst) of both worlds - making money online AND offline. There is however, a fundamental difference between my offline home catering biz AND my online work.

It’s stated in our agreement with our catering customers that we will give them a refund for every day that we do not cook - for medical or personal reasons. And so we work like dogs five days a week, 52 weeks a year. When we go for our annual short holiday this year-end, we have to factor in approximately 2.5K in refund money just for a couple of off-days!

My online income is pretty good, BUT it’s prone to fluctuations beyond my control - something MOST bloggers and website owners DON’T admit often enough. This is probably why bloggers are always working like dogs. There’s always this constant nagging thought at the back of our minds that web traffic will suddenly come to a halt, that Google will suddenly give us the cold shoulder or we’ll screw up and get booted out of the serps.

I consider myself a blogger newbie, but I HAVE been building websites and writing for a long, long time. So I understand when Liew says bloggers work like dogs. To consistently come up with good content takes effort. It’s pretty much like a dog franctically digging up the yard looking for that special bone. For bloggers and website owners, it’s like digging deep in our brains for that nugget of gold we call content.

If you’ve been thinking of being a full-time bloger, go visit LiewCF.com first and if it fans your flame even more, then go for it! Get blogging… woof-woof!

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