I’m not the kind of blogger who will tell you how to get a quarter of a million page views a month, or your own fan club, or an online stalker featured on Good Morning America…although I had all of those things once. A very long time ago.

I’m something of a rare breed in that I blog both personally and in-house as a professional. I blog for a company, which is a whole different kettle of fish dinosaur.

I’ve been blogging (personally) for almost fifteen years. When I first started blogging, you couldn’t even have built-in comments on a self-hosted blog. My first actual CMS (though the term didn’t exist then, and it was nothing like the content management systems of today, being more of a bloggers’ platform) was called Greymatter, and it was written in Perl. I still have blog entries backed up from 2001 in text form because I failed to save the required CGI files to import to my second CMS, which was Movable Type. The web largely consisted of complete strangers – I knew maybe two or three other people in my real life who actually used the internet (bearing in mind I was a pretty naive fourteen year old with not much of a life). It was way less commercial than it is now. There were no bloggers buying multi-million dollar homes and going to film premieres. Hell, you couldn’t even upload a video unless you have the space and bandwidth to accommodate it on your own hosting.

It was common for blogs to be down regularly towards the end of the month due to surpassing their bandwidth allowance. You can buy a domain name now for a few dollars or even get it free with a hosting package. Back then you’d pay around $100 for a .com – not cheap, especially for a teenage blogger. The first money I earned was from Dreamhost’s affiliate program when I was 14. I bought an iPod mini with it, which I still have in a drawer. I earned more than enough to pay for my hosting and names, but sadly not enough to cover the dial-up bill; our internet costs were regularly over £300 a month.

I was addicted. I treated it like a job, but it never felt like a job (the only chore was returning comments, especially as etiquette demanded every single one be returned and I averaged 90 comments an entry and was posting every other day). When I started university, I didn’t really keep up with anything. I didn’t have the time or the willpower, and the family desktop and dining room (later, a study) were inaccessible to me. I had a laptop, an internet connection which refused to let me upload anything via FTP, and a million distractions. I had freedom for the first time. I do remember one day though, after moving into my house in second year, when my first boyfriend and I had stayed up all night moving my forum from XMB to phpBB and the postman knocked on the door at 6am to deliver a games table I’d ordered. He seemed shocked to see us dressed and working at computers. The fact that we must have looked about fifteen probably didn’t help…

I make my money from blogging, and have done for the past five years. (Before that it was mostly from writing for the web but not blogging). That’s a bit of simplification, especially since in my current role I do all kinds of marketing, including social media, email, paid advertising and so on in addition to blogging – my last job was purely social media and blogging though.

There are pros and cons to this. On the plus side, I earn a decent salary (especially considering I live in the second poorest city in the country). I don’t have to worry about pissing visitors off with advertising, or worry about where the next sponsored post is coming from, or how I’m going to shoehorn a link into a blog entry when it’s totally unrelated to anything I ever write about. I don’t have to pretend I earn enough to justify blogging being a job, even when the reality is that the vast majority couldn’t survive on their personal blog being their sole income.

On the cons side, I’m effectively doing double the writing, double the promotion…and the company blog always comes first (my own rule, always has been, always will be). This is a small price to pay for the joy that is loving what you do. If I’m having a bad day, blogging cheers me up. Writing in general cheers me up. I’m incredibly lucky that the eight years of my full-time professional life so far has consisted of writing millions of words to inspire people. Make them happy. Sell things. Promote work and projects and charities and all kinds of stuff. For the past five and a half years, I’ve been able to blog about things I genuinely love and enjoy. I’ve given input and care to blogs that were previously pretty rushed or neglected. I’ve developed stories and consistent tones and made some dull corporate blogs into places people actually want to come back to, no matter how dry or technical the subject matter originally. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, even if it’s for other people’s/businesses’ benefit.

But as a result, it’s always been a conscious effort to find time for this site. If it were a book, it’d be that beaten-up old copy on the shelf that has its merits but isn’t as appealing as the shiny, new, reliable copy. I can work on that now I’m not writing a professional blog post every single day. I’m not burned out. I’m not massively stressed out on a personal level any more. Do I wish I had a life where I had more time for my personal blog? Of course. But the truth is that I need to find the right balance for adult me. I’m not coming home from school at 3:30pm and sitting in front of the computer until bedtime. I have a mortgage and five cats. If I don’t earn enough money, I can’t get money from anyone or anywhere else. I don’t have a safety net of a student loan or a partner or parents who will make up the (initial) shortfall pretty much guaranteed from being self-employed in a non-technical web job in a small city. Plus, I love being independent. There are so many different things in my life that I enjoy, and I think younger me would be very happy about that (although she’d definitely slap me down for not keeping on top of my sites over the years).

Blogging was never something anyone really thought would turn into a job. Even back in 2010 I was amazed to see what looked like my dream job listed on a recruitment site – SEO and social media. When I found it included blogging as well, I was in disbelief. I was never one of those children deadset on their future career (I remember in particular a class discussion at age eleven – I had no clue what I wanted to be, but one of my classmates was hellbent on being a pilot. He’s now a pilot). I say to people now that it’s because my dream job didn’t actually exist then. Even at university, other students I met were always confused.

‘Oh, you do English? So do you want to be an author?’
‘No’
‘Oh…a journalist?’
‘Nope’
‘A teacher?’
‘God no’
‘Then what?’
‘Dunno’.

I remember an old boyfriend being particularly scathing about Arts students and future careers (there was, and probably still is, a huge divide in Arts vs. Science at university). I ended up going out for a meal with him and another friend several years after we graduated, and the subject came up. He actually apologised for saying that and seem genuinely impressed with my job (most people who don’t know anything about web hosting or APIs generally are). He himself was studying locally again after deciding he needed more qualifications and not wanting to do them in Canada, where he’d be forced to study subjects he didn’t like as part of his degree.

A lot of the people most likely to succeed at school (aka swots as they were known – I was one of them) are now almost universally teachers. One in particular who was just cool enough to not be a swot and was one of those annoying ‘great at everything and attractive as well but really nice so you couldn’t hate them’ types is now, against all odds, a bartender who aspires to be an actor.

Nearly fifteen years on, I’m still trying to find my niche and decide who I want to be when it comes to personal blogging. I don’t fit neatly into a ‘food’ or ‘kids’ or even ‘lifestyle’ category. And I’m okay with that. I think it’s all representative of how I’ve changed and how the field has changed over the years.

What’s your blogging story?