When Should You Become A Full-Time Blogger?
Mikael from FosFor Gadgets, who handed in his notice a few weeks ago, asked me today if I’d quit my day job yet to become a full-time blogger.
I told him no, and that actually I’m starting a new job today (I’m not actually at work as it’s a Bank Holiday and this post was written yesterday), which pays a bit more money, so the bar has been raised higher before I’m able to quit my day job and become a full-time blogger.
I think that before a blogger considers going full-time they should be able to meet the following conditions:
- Have a blog that is earning at least 50-60% of their current job, and has done so consistently for at least 3 months. And/or,
- Have 3 months salary (preferably 6 months) saved up, or be able to dramatically reduce expenditure in the early lean (or ‘economical catastrophy’ as Mikael put it!) months like Daniel did when he moved back in with his parents
I think that if both of these conditions can be met then it reduces the risk of becoming a full-time blogger. If you are young and don’t have a lot of commitments like Daniel, then you can potentially make the move sooner and ignore the conditions.
One of the reasons I’ve been working so hard on making money form Connected Internet over the last 6 months is because I got made redundant, and I wanted to see whether I could grow my revenues to the point where I could officially go full-time. The redundancy cheque meant that I was able to meet condition 2, and the time that I was expecting to use up trying to find a new role would give me time to meet condition 1.
The blog lost the race, as although I did manage to significantly increase my income from $573 in October 2006 to $8913 in March 2007, within a few weeks of being made redundant I started working as a contractor for my old boss, who stepped in quickly to help for which I will eternally be grateful, and in fact is who I will now be working for full-time.
I guess the problem I have now is I’ve kind of introduced a 3rd condition. I’ve got used to the blog bringing in $6-8K per month, and it is now factored into my monthly budget. My new condition is that my blog income now needs to cover 50-60% of my combined income i.e. if my combined income were say $10K per month then the blog would need to be generating 50% of this or $5k per month before I’d go full-time.
My blog income will hopefully continue to increase, and hopefully so will the income from my day job. I think though that eventually the blog will win the new race as I think it has more growth potential, but I don’t know how long it will take.
What conditions have you set, or did you set, before becoming a full-time blogger? How long do you think it will take to reach your goals?
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Comment by Vinod @ VinodLive on 8 May 2007:
I love my job. Period.
If I were to ever leave to blogging for a living, I would have a congress of blogs and bloggers with Me!. Not just one blog.
Comment by Budi S on 8 May 2007:
If my website can make money like your site …
I will quit my job …