Trial year of semi-pro-blogging in retrospective

jan van iperen • 16th Jan 2007 • ipears

It is a bit over a year now, since I put up ipears.com.
The initial thought (as the tagline said in those days: \”Steppin\’ into probloggers\’ footsteps\”) to take a shot at making a little something on the side… some extra income next to my dayjob.

Setting up multiple blogs in different areas of interest with some nice interlinkage should provide in a strong and small blogging network. That was the initial idea…

Fastforward >>
Looking back at a quite hectic year (hectic outside my blogging-life), I can say that I misjudged quite some points:

  1. Keeping up and maintaining multiple blogs asks for a lot of time. Especially if you do not want to be a copy-pasting blogger and are in search for original content, blogging asks for time.
  2. Setting up blogs for niche-markets is very interesting, but it is necessary to maintain the enthusiasm for the subject. In my case, I hit the blogger\’s block for a few areas of interest earlier than expected.
  3. Priorities need to be set. If you blog on topics that ask more than average effort from you and you do not put everything aside for it, the resulting blogposts are not paying off. In my case work, girlfriend and friends were more important than actual blogging.
  4. Passion… oh PASSION! Probably the most important. If you do not have passion for what you write about, above mentioned points are what will cause you to slip.
  5. Focus. Even if a topic is your passion, you will need to focus and target on it in order to set yourself apart from the millions of other bloggers and therefor get some extra out of it.

So, is all for nothing??? NEVER!
For me it has been a very interesting period in which I learned A LOT! Even more important I learned what is not my passion, what is not my thing and what I do not like.

Furthermore, I did manage to create a second stream of income (although small, it pays my broadband 3/1 MB connection) and found the passions I want to focus on on-line.

Concluding: ipears will be ipears and I will shift focus from \”making money online\” to something like \”Jan van Iperen\’s experiences on-line\”… [Actually, I just leave out my tag-line/description]

I look back and know that what I have learned is and will be useful. And that is good.

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