I Blogged Every Single Day for a Year and it Changed my Life
I 50X’d my income and that was the least of the benefits.
By Shaunta Grimes
I read this Seth Godin quote a long time ago that’s stuck with me: Everyone should write a blog, every day, even if no one reads it. There’s countless reasons why it’s a good idea and I can’t think of one reason it’s a bad idea.
He talks pretty often about this idea that everyone should have a blog. Here are some of the reasons why he thinks it’s a good idea.
“I’m encouraging each one of you to have (a blog). Not to have a blog to make money, because you probably won’t. Not to have a blog, because you’ll have millions and millions of readers, because you probably won’t. But to have a blog because of the discipline it gives you, to know that you’re going to write something tomorrow. Something that might not be read by many people — it doesn’t matter — it will be read by you. If you can build that up, you will begin to think more clearly. You will make predictions. You will make assertions. You will make connections. And there they will be, in type, for you to look at a month or a year later. This practice of sharing your ideas to people who will then choose or not choose to share them helps us get out of our own head, because it’s no longer the narrative inside. It’s the narrative outside, the narrative that you’ve typed up, that you’ve cared enough to share.”
— Seth Godin
I already had a pretty good thing going. Ninja Writers was almost three years old in late 2018. It was providing me with a solid full-time income. I was making an average of about $4000 a month before taxes and expenses, or about $3000 a month after, which was enough to let me just be a writer and a teacher and not need a day job.
A year ago my friend Shannon Ashley told me that she was making $1000 a week with her blog right around the same time that my family’s rent increased by 20 percent a month for the third time in three years in the same week that my husband was laid off of his job.
We couldn’t stay where we were, in Reno, on $4000 a month. We made a pretty split-second decision to move to my husband’s hometown in Northwestern PA when our lease was up in a few weeks. The cost of living there was drastically lower.
It was a perfect storm of information meeting circumstances. I was sick and tired of barely scraping by and for the first time I knew someone personally who was making real money writing a blog and I was pretty sure if I put my mind and effort to it, I could do the same.
And if I could, it would double my income.