The title might sound a bit strange, so let me expand upon it a little more.

Are you enjoying what you are doing with your time online? That’s aimed, of course at people like Monika and myself who spend a lot of time online in the pursuit of enlightenment, education, knowledge as well as honing our writing skills and for me in particular my CSS and website building skills. But above all our ultimate goal is to make money doing these things that we enjoy.

I personally treat what I’m doing as a business, because I’m a person who really cannot work for anyone else. I did that for many years in my younger days when I was less confident and more accepting of my circumstances as being pretty much my lot in life.

But around 14 years ago I changed all that and started working for me. I realized there was much more to life than working my backside off to make someone else rich while getting paid relative peanuts for my efforts.

Does that sound like you?

That’s why I gravitated to this wonderful medium in order to create my own little online empire of websites, lenses and blogs that all perform the function of generating an income from various sources. I still write the odd article that I sell online, as well as writing those controversial paid reviews on some of my blogs to make some extra cash. It’s all part of one grand scheme – to make me financially secure in the years to come.

But I came to another conclusion about making money online that isn’t all that much fun – well, not for me anyway.

It’s in the definition of whether we’re actually working for ourselves or working for a boss. You know, like a… a job! Yeewww, wash my mouth out with soap!

I know it’s hard to believe, but when you think you’re working for yourself, you’re actually working for someone else and bending to their rules. I got that wake-up call when I started looking for some paying writing gigs.

Most on offer involved writing content for someone else’s site but the pay was the same old peanuts for a lot of hours work and to hammer the final nail into the coffin there was a damned deadline for which the content had to be presented. Just like a job. In fact not like a job – exactly that, a job!

Exactly what I never want to have to do again.

So I stopped right there and clicked the close tab and never went back. I value my writing skills highly and my ability to bang out an easy six thousand words in an afternoon is not for the exploitation of some website owner who needs a load of content so his site will make him rich and me with a paltry wage and nothing to show for it once the content has been handed over.

When I think about it in those terms, it make me even more determined to succeed for myself, not for someone else. That content could and should be sitting on my websites and making me rich! Do you see where I’m going with this?

I believe you have to make a sacrifice in the early days by writing an awful lot to build up your own portfolio of articles, website content and blog content to raise the profile and popularity of your own online empire in preparation for a future that those then heavily populated sites will bring you in a steady and sustainable income for the coming years.

A legacy, so to speak of a ton of work that was generated by one person for one person – you!

I don’t mean to knock the stuffing out of anyone who is busily beavering away at an online job to make ends meet – it has to be done sometimes! If you are cool with that, then that’s fine for you.

For me though, it would never sit well with my personal feelings about the whole idea of creating my own wealth. The very thought of giving all my hard work away to someone else for far less than its worth in the present let alone what it will be worth in the future, gives me a severe dose of the screaming abdabs.

No way Jose… it’s not for me!

Terry Didcott
Author and Originator of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: Writing