I am not a blogger myself. At least I do not have my own blog nor I ever liked to write about my personal life extensively and share it to the public.
However, in Pinktrotters, the lifestyle social network of women I founded, we host a Blog session where we collect the experiences of the community, we share travel tips and we interview cool women.
So, in a certain sense, I think I know what it means to have a blog, to manage it and to make money out of it.
It's still not so easy to understand how it's possible to live and make a lot of money out of a blog. Indeed it's not possible to create a company out of a blog unless you make it become a magazine (...and it's still pretty difficult as the only revenues come from adv, so you need A LOT of traffic to really generate high revenues).
The difference between a Blog and a Magazine is that in a blog you exclusively talk about your own personal experiences and share your personal views. Blog posts are short, they tent to give tips to the readers.
A Magazine is more extensive, the subjects can be various and it includes more than one writer, and not necessarily personal experiences. However, nowadays, both terms are used generically, there is not a precise distinction.
As the sentence above said, Blogging was born as a form of self-expression, so it sounds pretty strange to hear people making money out of their own experiences...
...Because if the brands and places mentioned are the ones who pay to be there... then the AUTHENTICITY is totally lost.
...but at the end, Blogging is a JOB and it's fair to pay for it.
Why it's not so easy to manage a blog?
1) You need to create your own website and be very sure of what you want to communicate and care about the UX
2) You need to have a precise, detailed and updated editorial plan
3) You need to look for brands and partners who pay for what you write (maybe not always, but sometimes, at least to pay for your expenses)
4) You need to take professional pictures otherwise it doesn't look professional...
5) You need to find the right words and right grammatical composition of the concepts you have in mind and make them easily readable (not everybody is good at writing!)
6) You need to create engagement and attention via social media and be there EVERY DAY
7) You need to have a lot of followers, readers and comments!
8) It takes time to write a single good quality blog post (at least between 3 and 4 hours)
Do you agree with me?