Business Bloggers – Don’t Lose your (Blogging) Soul

“Blogging is… to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud” – Andrew Sullivan, published in The Atlantic

Man, I gotta tell you. I lost my soul. I was so busy focusing on how to make more money online. I was also diverse my focus from business blogging to anything else you can think of: Affiliate marketers, website designer, website builder, copywriter, link builder, social media marketer, and so on.

I’ve managed to build a couple of somewhat successful blog-turned-online-magazines, and I will continue to build more online magazines.

Unfortunately, I feel that I’m losing my soul in the process. I enjoy building websites, but slowly, I drift away from what I am initially: A business blogger.

Drifting away from my root

You see, I’m not a good blogger, let alone writer. I don’t enjoy writing, podcasting, or video blogging. But I know one thing: I LOVE sharing my thoughts, and one of the best ways for me to do so is via blogging.

As I build my blog as a business, my circumstances made me turning my writing into something that is more formal, to cater professional audience. I can’t see any other way to maintain my voice, and some other bloggers are also experiencing what I’m experiencing.

But in the past couple of years, I started to pour my soul back into the content of my websites. My own articles and blog posts have this particular uniqueness that is genuinely me.

I try to edit articles to show “me” in them – something that caused some issues in the past with several clients who feel offended that I nearly overhaul their articles and rebuild them ground up, just to turn the content into something that reflects my ideal. I know this is somewhat unethical, but I’m the editor of the site, so…

Pondering time

Unfortunately, there is always this barrier when your blog is also your business: You have clients to please, and sometimes, they just want to do it their way.

If it’s your situation, you basically have two choice: To play along or to stop doing what your clients want. Doing each has its own pros and cons…

Choice #1: Want to play along?

If you want to play along, you need to set aside your uniqueness and focus on maximizing the impact of your content for your clients. You might also need to do something you don’t want, that is totally against your content writing policies. The pros: You generate more income by catering to more opportunities, and any kind of requests. The cons: You may lose your voice and chances are, your site would lose its uniqueness.

Choice #2: Want to do it your way?

If you want to stop your clients from doing what they want, you may lose the revenue that your site deserves – just to maintain your voice in your site. The pros: You maintain your site’s unique voice. The cons: You won’t get much income due to your strict content policies.

There is no right or wrong in this – it’s your website, anyway – you may do it the way you like it. But if it’s up to me, I’d focus on balancing those.

But whichever option you choose, you need to understand one thing: If you are a blogger at heart, make sure that you don’t lose your soul. You need to find the balance that works with your passion, as well as your income generation potential.

So, how to find the balance?

If you asked me, my answer is this blog – AsepOnde.com

AsepOnde.com was initially an online business blog I started 7 years ago. I tried to start an online business service It was a total failure. Then it was collecting dust for 3 years, posting once or twice a month. The reason I keep it was just for the name.

For 2015, I planned to go back to my ‘root’ – business blogging. I’m executing it today.

So, instead of changing the focus of my online magazines back to blogs, which is not ideal, I decided to do what I should have done it with AsepOnde.com: Publishing posts sharing my online entrepreneurship journey. This is ‘officially’ my personal business journey, and I will keep this blog as a, well, blog until the end of time!

So far, the quality of my professional life is improving, as I can now do my thing with AsepOnde.com.

Takeaway

Losing your soul ‘kills’ – you and I should roll based on our strengths, not weaknesses. If blogging is in your soul, you need to feed it by writing blog posts the way you want it; no any other agenda.

If you want to make more money online but don’t want to ‘sell your soul’ to your clients, I suggest you do what I do: Build websites, offer services, sell products, write for clients and so on – basically, do your business as usual, but do this one additional thing: Set up a personal blog, the official blog of you. This can be random muse, rants or a professional blog like this – it’s your choice.

If you can balance both worlds effectively, by all means, stick to what you are doing. But if you start feeling that you are losing your voice in your own blog, again, start a personal/professional blog that is entirely you.

Question of the day: Have you ever feel you lose your voice in your own blog due to business demand? If so, how would you tackle the whole situation? Please share with us!

Cover photo credit: Rasmus Johnsen / Flickr