If you have just started a blog or is already a full time blogger and you have begun to tell everyone you know but no one seems to be interested…. do not feel sad about it.
Sometimes, it may be better to remain a little low profile when it comes to your blogging life, especially if you have been blogging on the side.
Among the blogging community, there are lots of support and inspiration from other fellow bloggers. These support, unfortunately is not available within my own circles. I am not sure about you, but I do not have any friends whom I know in real life who is a full time blogger, vlogger or YouTuber.
My personal experience
Even though this blog is very new- my journey into blogging have begun more than 10 years ago.
When I first started my blog (my first site was in 2002 but I began blogging in 2006) and told my friends and colleagues about it, literally no one was interested to check out my blog. Even my own family members and my best friend does not visit my blog, not because they are not supportive, but because it was just ‘not their thing’.
Eventually in 2008 when I left my job- I had more time to write and experiment with various ideas. In 2009 I took a paycut job while working on a job on the side to see if I was able to make it as a full time blogger.
I couldn’t because despite pouring in hours of effort (a less taxing job meant I had more energy to write after work)- I hardly made 25% of the income I made from my paycut job….. and I could hardly survive even with the salary of my paycut job! My total earnings put me below the taxable range.
For about two years (1 year off work and going off to Thailand and another year in a paycut job)- I tried to see if I could make it as a full time blogger and see that I couldn’t.
So when my former boss asked if I would like to help to manage the intranet in the head department that she is heading, I accepted the offer.
By the time I join the second company, I removed my blog urls from my Facebook profile. I did not tell anyone in the company that I am a blogger with a few blogs.
One of the reasons was because during the period when I was not working, I actually wrote a number of articles about leaving the rat race, why we want to take paycut jobs, bad bosses, etc. I did not think it is appropriate for my bosses to know about those articles that I have written…. least they may have misunderstand that I am judging or talking about them.
Also, I share a lot of my inner self in some of the articles that I have written. In my job previously I often had to have a firm stance to defend my department in meetings. I’ do not want anything related to my personal life to be used as an unfair attack against me.
The best part is, no one in the office suspected I am a blogger. No one thought of googling my name…. perhaps they did (as I do get search queries from people searching my name…. that was before Google stopped displaying those search queries) but they probably thought it was another ‘Yin Teing’.
Once, they were looking for a caterer and they actually googled and found a review that I wrote in my blog (my blog domain is actually my name). It never occurred to them that I wrote the review! They ended up signing the caterer up based on my review, hee hee.
When I eventually left the company in 2017 to become a full time caregiver, I decided to assume back my blogger status, ie I updated in my FB profile that I left my company and that in fact, I had been a blogger and my site urls.
After I updated my profile I did notice that for a while the number of people arriving to my sites (referred from Facebook) spiked for a while. But it sizzled after a short period.
Still, I never shared or posted articles that I have written in my personal Facebook profile. There was no need to because over the years, I have gotten a lot of targeted traffic from search engines, coming from visitors who directly benefit from what I write about.