Blogging for a living

So a few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine about this blog. We got talking about making an income from blogging and he was curious on how it works and how much I make from it. That conversation got me an idea for a post.

So first of all, I currently don't make an income from this blog. I have already started to get a fairly large amount of traffic to it but I am not sure on whatever I should monetize the blog or not. After all, this blog is mostly a place for me to write about what I do, it's almost like therapy in a way for me since I have so much to share. I don't see it as a job however so monetizing it might feel wrong, anyhow the future will decide that I guess.


Anyhow, I will today be talking a bit about blogging and how monetizing on it works since I have quite a bit experience on it from the past.

Now if you're considering starting a blog, let's make something clear. A lot of people involved in marketing will tell you to target specific niches. "Make a blog about healthcare" or something like that. This is the completely wrong way to go about it. Blogging about a subject that you're not passionate about will be nearly impossible.

Instead, start a blog about a subject you love. I love my job as a freelancer and I could talk about it for days without a break, which is why I can keep posting long (Sometimes too long) posts on the matter. However if someone asked me to write about dieting or something like that, I wouldn't be able to make more than a post or two.

So write about something you love, one of your hobbies or the subject you're studying about. Anything goes if you're passionate about it since it will inspire your readers and pull them in. They will want to know how you work and what your world looks like when they notice how interested you're in it. You can compare it to how we sometimes can get stuck on weird subjects on Wikipedia. We might not care for the subject but we keep reading about it because it's darn interesting to find out how things and people work. Humans are curious like that.

Now don't start out by coming up with ideas that will let you earn from the blog, wait a month or so until you get traffic to it. Which brings us to the next topic, traffic.

Traffic, or in more layman terms, visitors. It's one of the biggest issues for a lot of people. "How do I get more visitors? My blog is so nice and it has tons of interesting posts but only a handful of people read it..." etc.

Now whatever you get traffic or not is decided by factors since there are different ways for people to find your blog. They might find it linked on other websites or blogs, or they might find it on search engines.

Now for search engines, it's all about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Now this is a large subject and I wont go further into it since there are much better blogs and websites for that. One is Googles own SEO starters guide, thirty pages of pure gold facts. Find it by clicking here. (PDF)

Another good source of info on SEO is Moz own beginners guide, amazing website in general for anything Internet Marketing related. Find that one by clicking here or by going to moz.com.

Now it's important as a blogger to connect via social media. Use your facebook or twitter account to inform people when you've made a post, and don't forget to use appropiate hashtags! For help on hashtags use hashtagify.me. If you feel uncomfortable using your private twitter/facebook, just make a new one with your blogs name as username!

Now there are other ways to gain visitors. There are sites that will sell you visitors. These have gotten a really bad reputation lately due to the fact that some provide fake, botbased visits. However not all of them are bad. Some provide visitors to their customers via redirects, so from an old expired website in your category/niche. This is completely legal and a good way to make your blog rank better on blog directories! These types of visits can also convert into real fans on your website. One of these trusted sites for example would be maxvisits. They provide real visitors and work even with ad companies such as Google AdSense. I have personal experience with MV in the past when I ran a news website and it really boosted my rankings so even after I stopped hiring them I kept getting new visitors that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. There are also people on sites such as Fiverr that can provide similar services for good prices.

So don't go judging people too hard before you have a clear view of their services. Using Google to check up on these companies is always a good idea before hiring them. But the legit ones also tend to have money-back guarantees if you dislike their service.

So is blogging for a living possible? Yes, yes it is. Is it for you though? No idea, only you can answer that.

Remember that blogging is a long-time project and using cheap shortcuts tends to backfire quickly, such as duplicating content from other blogs or websites. So if you have the time and passion to start a blog, do it! It's a ton of fun and you learn a lot of new things.

My life in freelancing part two!

So as promised, here comes part two! In this post I will cover more specifics of what I have done as a freelancer to show you some examples.

Now my favorite platform for freelancing is still Fiverr. When I got started there, a whole new era in my life started. I quickly gained myself a notority for being fierce against my competition while at the same time providing the BEST translation services for Swedish. Nowadays I am only use Fiverr part time to broaden my experience rather than making an income but I still hang there daily reading the amazing articles the dev team posts, keeping myself updated with the community and such.

Let me start out by explaining that being a freelancer isn't easy. It's one of the best professions there are but at the same time it's one of the roughest ones as well. The reason is simple, you're your own boss and your own employee. If you mess up, make a mistake or deliver a gig* too late, it's ALL ON YOU.

*Gig is the term freelancers use for "job". Start using it to sound more professional and experienced!

No one will be there to pick up the pieces, apologize to the furious customer or anything, it's all up to you and trust me, you will make mistakes. I have never delivered work too late though like many others do once in a while, I am too motivated by the pricetag on the article I am writing or translating to let myself be late with it.

I will be covering Fiverr a lot more in the near future since it's played a major part in my career so I can easily help anyone get started with it. Late today or tomorrow I will be releasing a "Getting Started" post specifically on the topic of Fiverr. I can also announce a sweet surprise for anyone whole follows the help in that post since I will next week release surfire methods on getting popular quickly on Fiverr!

Now being a freelancer is tough as I mentioned. So what you need to do is to make sure you're prepared for it.

You must be dedicated to your customers. Realise that you might have to postpone fun once in a while to get successful. It will all pay off though when you get to reap the fruits of your labor, cold hard cash that is!

In my career as a writer and translator I have managed to stumble upon some amazing things. You get to learn a ton of interesting things as a freelancer since you get in contact with so many different people in various fields. One of my first larger translation gigs for example was a medical research book on the topic of hair loss. Translating scientific terms is much tougher than I thought it'd be...

One of the best parts of being a freelancer is also the way the work pays off the more time you spend in the business. Making five dollars for a shorter article might sound dull to do but if you get happy customers the odds are high they will start paying you better and offer you much better work. For example, when I got started with translating for people in Fiverr, I one day translated a small 400 word blog post for someone. The day after, he contacted me and wanted me to translate the hairloss book I mentioned earlier. Sure, it took me about a week to translate but he also paid me nearly three hundred dollars to do it! So from doing a five dollar gig I suddenly rose to a three hundred one.

So once again the article is getting a tad long. I will leave it at this for now. I will probably keep writing about my career in the future and if there is anything about it you're curious about, don't hesitate to ask in the comment section below!

And as always, I'd appreciate it if you'd share the blog on social media! Only if you like the content so far though.

My life in freelancing

Tomorrow I will be making a minimum of two posts on the subject of getting started in freelancing with AMAZING tips on how you can get started immediately with freelance work and make your first 5$ within a day.

Until then, lets start with myself and some of my experiences, to give you an insight in how a freelancer can be.

I started with freelancing when I was around fifteen years old. You all know the situation, you want some extra cash for videogames, candy or a new computer. Your parents aren't rich so they can't help you. Now, some would look for a summerjob or a job that pays per hour with a really bad wage.

Now, I loved writing essays. Whenever we were told in class that we had to write a ten page paper on a subject, I would always be finished within a day even though we usually had a month to do it. I'm not sure why but I've always loved writing.

So, when I wanted to make some extra money I decided to look into freelancing. My absolutely first gig* was to write an essay for a classmate. He knew I was superior than the average student since my essays always got B's or A's. He offered me the equivalent of 25$ to write a five paper essay on the subject of "How Apps are taking over the IT world" which was a topic we discussed in class the week before. I was already finished and hey, 5 bucks a page sounded sweet for a guy that writes a page in an hour!

Now, that was some easy cash for me and I fell in love with being paid to write. I used the money to buy myself a pizza and some drinks, while I was enjoying the fruit from my labor I started signing up on various of freelancing website. Odesk, Freelancer and such are all great platforms to use.

Now sure I was good at writing essays in Swedish, getting into writing in English was a bit different but I got a hang of it after a while. Since there are tons of great tools for correcting spelling it wasn't a huge issue for me that I was writing in my secondary language.

Due to that I also discovered a new niche for myself, translation. If I can write articles and papers in both Swedish and English, why not broaden my field and get into translating between the two?

To this day, writing in Swedish and translating between Swedish-English is still my major income. I tend to get my work directly over email or phone today though since I have such an established customerbase, platforms aren't necessary if people want to hire you specifically rather than risking their money on a lesser known freelancer.

Now I am noticing that this post is getting fairly large so I will be splitting this up in two parts. Part two will be released within a few hours, so sit tight.

In the next part I will be going more in-depth about my favorite platforms and how you can learn from my experience to make some simple side cash to pay your bills or buy useless junk.

And as always, feel free to show some love to the blog by sharing it on Facebook or Twitter! I'd appreciate it.

Sweden Freelance launches!

Hello non-existant readers that will most likely not read this post because it will be too far down!

On this blog I will be writing about various subjects but mostly all will be related to freelancing. I've worked as a freelancer in various different niches and categories for about seven years now. Translating, writing, design, marketing, PR, Social Media and such.

In my work I've experienced quite a lot and run into various situations, both good and bad. Since freelancing is getting more and more popular lately I decided to do what I can to help people out as much as possible.

My goal will be to post a minimum of three times a week but I hope it will end up being more often than that!

If there is anything you're interested in or curious about, feel free to drop a comment and I'll see what I can do. I'll also gladly help out if you're struggling with freelancing!

If you feel like showing this blog some love, feel free to share it on Facebook or Twitter, I wouldn't mind the extra help.