{"id":4352,"date":"2020-11-18T13:33:27","date_gmt":"2020-11-18T11:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/?p=4352"},"modified":"2020-12-13T15:56:14","modified_gmt":"2020-12-13T13:56:14","slug":"writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/2020\/11\/18\/writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Have Decided Not to Make Money With My Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

In February 2020<\/a> I told my brother as a joke “I should have a blog to express my ideas” and he proposed to host it on his server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why not”, I thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I started a blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t have any plans at the time. I just wanted to put my voice out there and express in writing my ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I needed some sort of physical support for all the crazy thoughts that were going through my mind. I wanted to get them out of my head and into the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started, I didn’t fix any goals. I knew I wasn’t really good at committing to long-term work. I didn’t see myself writing more than 10 or 15 articles, and expected to quit as soon as I’d be bored, which is usually pretty early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I had decided to commit to nothing. Making the blog was free anyway, so I wasn’t going to lose anything if I decided to quit the next day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so I wrote my first article. I enjoyed it. So I wrote a second one. Then a third one. Quickly enough, I reached 20. It was fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, it was amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could write what I wanted when I wanted. I didn’t have any guidelines to respect, no one was giving me a note at the end and I was the sole judge of my writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I liked it, I published it. If I did not, I didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I told people about my blog, they would directly ask me about my readership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had none, but I didn’t mind. I wasn’t writing for others. I was writing for myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing eventually wasn’t as much about spreading ideas as it was about learning WordPress, SEO, and being able to directly export my thoughts to my friends. I was happy to send them my articles and ask them what they thought of the topic I had written about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing enabled me to quickly gather feedback about important ideas. I didn’t have to lead conversations about them anymore. I could just write something and ask “what do you think”?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blog also really helped me with Tinder!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a brief introduction, I would share my articles and ask girls what they thought of them. It was a nice, non-boring way to get to know each other, and it increased the number of dates I managed to get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, the writing was great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had finally found a routine of something I enjoyed and that stood in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then one day, it changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should I make money with my writing?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I don’t remember exactly how it happened but one day, I ended up discovering Medium, Quora, Linkedin. I found out that I wasn’t the only snowflake writing in this world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also found out people were making serious money out of their writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, it bit my interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started learning about email lists, digital products, affiliate marketing, newsletters, sales, copywriting, AdSense, and freelance services. Every day, I was eating dozens of articles with titles such as “How I am making $1969 every month with my online writing side-hustle”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was addicted and couldn’t stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somehow, a need to make money off my writing started to develop. I registered on Fiverr and started publishing my own articles on Medium, Linkedin and Quora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started becoming obsessed with statistics. I was going to sleep thinking about strategies to “find a niche”, “market my writing” and “write what others want to read”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a passion that enabled me to relax and enjoy my life, writing became a job with its lot of procrastination, long hours, and completely unrelated tasks that “needed to get done”. Making money writing, I read somewhere, was about doing marketing 80% of the time and writing…20%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suddenly, what had started as a joke became stressful and ate up most of my free time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then one day, I came to my senses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I realized I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I realized that looking for the perfect click-bait title wasn’t something that was adding any type of value to my life. Writing with the perspective to have others read me wasn’t something I liked either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just wanted to write. I wanted to express what interested me. I wanted to go back to doing what my blog was originally intended to do: speaking about things I wish I had known when I was 18 or so to avoid making the mistakes that I have subsequently made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, I understood that readership did not matter as much as the pleasure I got from writing about my own thoughts, ideas, and mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can’t deny that having an audience and people to interact with would be nice. But, I never intended to become a professional writer at first, and do not think I’d like to become one anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing is not my job. It’s my hobby. It’s what puts a smile on my face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if making money doing so involves spending days of doing sales work, copy-past my work on multiple platforms and social media, interact with people in the comments, build email lists and fight for paid work on Fiverr…then that doesn’t interest me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would rather keep it as a hobby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Picture credits: Photo by Patrick Fore<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In February 2020 I told my brother as a joke “I should have a blog to express my ideas” and… Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4362,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bornmillennials.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/94.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}