October 9th, 2006

Transitioning from Full Time to Part Time Blogging

The past year has been one of the most rewarding periods in my (yet short) life so far. With a chance to try out full-time blogging, I got a chance to build up a range of blogs, forge relationships with tons of bloggers (and PR staff, unfortunately :)), and of course, generate a (relatively) large and passive income source. But a new stage in my life has arrived, and unfortunately, blogging will now have to play second fiddle.

Over the past few weeks, university life at the London School of Economics has pretty much taken up the time I used to spend researching, crafting and publishing articles. Yep, I’m sure you’ve noticed… A big thank you to the well-wishers who’ve emailed and IMed me during this break, and for RSS readers who’ve not unsubscribed just yet.

But this sort of mushy stuff just isn’t my forte. So, let’s move away from it, and instead, look at some of things I’ve noticed while transitioning from a highly consistent ~8-hours a day of blogging to my currently erratic blogging schedule:

  • Lack of Drive to Post
    Perhaps the most often complaint of bloggers doing it part-time is the lack of drive to post regularly. I’ve never truly understood it before, but it has now become a disease that I’m trying to find an effective solution for. Coming back after classes and events may not be as mind-numbing as a boring 9 to 5 job, but it certainly kills the blogging “mood” as effectively - at least for me.

  • More Incentive to Blog Faster
    Considering the severe decrease in the amount of time I actually have to touch a computer, there’s a very strong incentive to get each post done in the least amount of time possible. Admittedly, even when I was doing this full-time, I was always trying to streamline my blogging process, and getting it done as fast as I could without sacrificing quality. But when you know for sure that you only have one or two hours to get all your blogging done (over 15+ blogs, urghh…), the words flow much easier than usual. However, I’m still not completely sure whether this is a result of sacrificing quality, or unconsciously tackling inefficiencies I’ve never noticed before (such as pressing the WordPress’ Save and Continue button twenty times before completing a post!).

  • Less Worries + Easily Satisified
    I used to look at my stats, e.g. traffic, RSS subscribers, advertising revenue, every 10 hours or so. Moreover, a drop from their usual values would often be a cause of worry, with thoughts of increasing my post frequency or trying out that new ad positioning technique coming to mind almost immediately. And to think that was already an amazing show of restraint then. These days, I check stats at most once a day, if not once every few days. If there’s a drop in some indicator, I find myself brushing it off easily - assigning a relevant, yet not necessarily satisfactory reason (by past standards) to it.

    Clearly, this is highly related to the lack of drive I’ve been experiencing, but unlike that, this new behavior might very well be a positive change rather than negative. What’s the point in worrying about a dip in today’s or this week’s AdSense figures or traffic anyway? (I admit there is definitely a point in finding out why though, but no point worrying about it)

  • Increase in E-mail Response Speed at the Expense of Comment Replies
    It’s quite natural that my e-mail reply rate has not decreased since I have to login to my e-mail account and reply to non-blogging-related e-mails anyway. But I’m sure you’d be surprised to know that I actually replied to blogging-related e-mails faster than I’ve ever done last few weeks. One reason for this could be my desire to “get it done with” as fast as possible rather than dump it in my backlog. But unfortunately, this desire doesn’t carry over to blog comment replying. While I used to reply to almost every comment made on over half of my blogs, I’m barely replying to five or six comments a day now (none on blogHelper in fact, sorry).

These are just a few of the more obvious ones I’ve noticed. I’m sure some of you guys can easily triple the size of this list, but I’ll leave that for you. :)

In any case, I would certainly say that what I’ve experienced the past year has been a stroke of sheer luck. Few would have had the chance to try out full-time blogging before transitioning to the part-time version. Heck, 95% of the time, it’s the other way around.

That said, I have no regrets. Even part-time, I’ll still be able to produce articles people will want to read. I’ll still be able to learn and practice the skills web publishers today absolutely require. And hopefully, I’ll still be part of this unique “Web 2.0-ish” revolution that is involving more and more people daily.

P.S.: I feel like killing myself for putting “web” and “2.0″ next to each other. But bear with me.

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Posted by ZMAng

Filed under Pro-Blogging

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