Blogging for Money is a Business Model. Say it Clear. Say it Loud.

The passion before profit idea has always made sense to me. I always tell start up newbies to make sure that whatever they pursue in business they had better be sure they can find joy in the journey. Otherwise you’ve have nothing to offset the inevitable drudgery that comes in those early, cash-tight days of doing your own bookkeeping, staying up late answering emails and, God help us all, fixing broken websites. But I’m kind of getting tired of these online marketers chanting the “do what you love and the money will come” like a mantra. And one specific blog post by a blogger who has very publicly monetized his blog is particularly bothersome to me (which, damn you anyway, Jeremy, was probably your purpose in writing that post).

In Want To Make Money From A Blog? Dont Try Jeremy Schoemaker, a.k.a “Shoemoney,” concludes his post by saying this:

“So honestly, even though this blog will make more than $500k in revenue this year, the real value is in launching our other products (which you barely have to mention).

So how do you make money from a blog? You don?t!”

Huh?

I get that the posts themselves aren’t what people are shelling out money for. Duh! What I don’t get is why Schoemaker feels the need to be all esoteric about the subject of blogging for bucks. Or maybe I need to more fully grasp the semantics?

Does Schoemaker mean “you” as in the rest of the blogosphere excluding him? Or is he saying he, Jeremy Schoemaker also really does not make money from his blog?

Is there not enough confusion and downright misinformation propagating across the world wide web that we need to get all philanthropic about our raison d’etre as bloggers?

Yeah, a lot of bloggers start out as hobbyists writing for the sheer pleasure of sharing their thoughts and ideas about something they love or care about deeply. And eventually, as their following grows, they figure out how to monetize their content. So for sure, the passion came first, profits later.

Yet how the advice to not blog for bucks follows from that escapes me. Why can’t you blog for passion and profit at the same time? Can you not set out to create great content AND make some bucks while doing it?

I don’t want to be a whiny pants here, but I found Schoemaker’s post insulting. While I’m always the first one in the room to preach the content is king spiel, fact is that fab content can and does create cha-ching for a ton of people working online today. And you can bet that lot of these bloggers had this intent from the outset. I’d even go so far as to say that if you have the intent to monetize your blog from the get go, you’ll probably do better faster with it. Intent, after all, is critical to anyone’s success in just about any kind of venture I can think of.

Time is precious and a lot of people don’t want to blog just for the fun of it. They want to make money having that fun.

Let’s call a cigar a cigar. If you want to blog as a hobby and worry about monetizing your blog later, great. But if you want to create a blog around a business model, that’s pretty darned okay too. If it’s not, could someone please tell me why?

PS: I do love your blog, Mr. Schoemaker