It seems everyone has a blog to drive business these days. For many, blogging is a career built off a hobby or passion project. There’s a lot of push out there to monetize your blog and turn it into a business. But not every blog should be a business. Here are my 4 reasons why you should keep your hobby blog just a hobby.
1. You Could Hate Your Hobby
Running a professional blog takes a huge time commitment. There’s managing an editorial calendar, actually creating your content, and marketing to name just a few of the big tasks involved. Even when you don’t feel like blogging, you have to because it’s your job.
You have an audience (ahem, customers) to consider. Analytics to monitor. Strategies to adapt as algorithms and markets change. If you have to force yourself to work on something that once gave you joy, you might start to resent the hobby you blog about.
2. Your Hobby Blog isn’t Marketable
Don’t confuse “marketable” with “worthwhile.” If your blog is all about analyzing every facet of every single Fast and the Furious movie, there’s probably an audience waiting to eat up your every word. But it’s not the foundation of a business.
Sure, you can add advertisements or affiliate links to make money. But a business has to sell a product or service, even if it’s a non-profit or volunteer group. It’s a lot harder to make the kind of income you need to quit your day job if your blog is just for expressing yourself.
3. You Just Don’t Have Time
Have I mentioned how much time a blog takes? I spend anywhere between 1-4 hours on each blog post. That just includes writing, editing, adding links, making adjustments for SEO, laying it out, and finding a good image to pair with it. There’s also the time I spend on making a custom social media sharing image for each post, scheduling the post to go out on different social media channels, and then going back to fix a typo I didn’t catch before.
To stay on top of a blog, you have to be able to set non-negotiable blocks of time to do the work. It really helps if you can have up to three weeks’ worth of content ready to go. Otherwise, your readers may stop visiting because you’re not meeting the expectations you set for your blog to deliver. For a fun hobby blog, it’s no big deal. For a business, it could make a huge difference financially.
4. You’re Honestly Not That Invested
Of course, your blog matters to you. When you first thought about it, it probably seemed like a great idea and you couldn’t wait to dive in. But once you got a handle on it, you realized you’d rather keep up with it whenever the mood strikes.
Your blog has readers, but at the end of the day, you’re doing it for you. And if your blog ever stopped bringing you joy, you could walk away from it with minimal heartbreak. If keeping your relationship to your blog light and casual is one of the things that makes you happiest about blogging, then don’t spoil a good thing by turning it into a job. You’re just setting yourself up to quit because of problem #1.
Bottom line: don’t make your hobby blog a business if you don’t want to.
There’s a lot of encouragement and pressure from all directions to make money with your blog. If that’s not what you’re here for, then don’t do it.
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