About 10 years ago, I wanted to be a professional blogger. Now I’m happy to be an unprofessional blogger. Well, most of the time at least.

I thought I wanted the exciting lifestyle of making money from work anywhere I wanted. I saw these people “doing nothing” (spoiler, they were doing a lot more than what I saw) and thought that looked great. Free products to review, working in my pyjamas, travel whenever I wanted.

But pursuing that “dream” did something to me.

When I sought to be a professional blogger, I ended up focusing on tactics and topics which didn’t really interest me. I focused on topics that would help my search engine position with 800+ word articles for topics that could be addressed in 350 words at most.

It wasn’t all bad; it made me a better writer and led to my current career. In many ways, my day job is being a professional blogger. But I don’t need to pursue page views for personal projects anymore.

As an unprofessional blogger, I can

  • write about what I want, when I want
  • not write when I don’t want to (and not apologize!)
  • try out something stupid and fail (but have fun)
  • make grammar and spelling mistakes (and thank kind souls who point them out while deliberately annoying pretentious pedants)
  • make a mess of my website as I change the design

Basically, I can have fun.

Of course, there are times when the green-eyed monster appears after someone else has great success for something which “I could do better” (In most cases I probably couldn’t and in the cases where I might be able to, the fact of the matter is that I’m not doing it and they are. That’s all that matters). It’s something that will probably remain, but I’ll try to stay grateful that I’m an unprofessional blogger.