Bacchus

Sunni: Ah, so you've a network. Is that a necessary element of blogging success, do you think? And how can a person transition from a day job to supporting themselves online? It sounds like you spend a lot of time online. Most people don't have hours available for developing a site or sites, as you've described ...

Bacchus: "Network" is a fancy word, considering that I keep my projects fairly independent. There are some synergies between my blogs and other adult sites, but I don't think there's any compelling need to link multiple projects together. However, it takes a long time to create one web site that's big enough to show a profit, so the odds are, by the time you get one site to that point, you've been working on several others also.

I do spend many hours in front of a computer; I always have. Even back in the days when I was toiling at an office job, I'd come home and spend my evenings at the computer, doing eBay or playing games. So it's not been a hardship for me; being a blogger and adult webmaster means sitting in front of the computer a lot, but I was already doing that and not getting paid for it, so this is better. Now, when I first got serious about the adult sites, there were times when I was working full time at the office, then coming home and working at least six more hours on my web sites. Essentially I was working two jobs for a while there, just like any home-based entrepreneur tends to do when getting started. The transition is never easy.

Sunni: How much of what you do with ErosBlog could be used by other bloggers to make some money? I don't see a blog like mine ever earning a lot of money, but more mainstream blogs that focus on some niche could, right? What does it take, effort and time-wise?

Bacchus: I think any blogger who writes interesting stuff every day, for years, and builds up a big readership and a big interesting archive for the search engines, should be able to make decent money. Not a living, perhaps -- not from just one blog, not in mainstream selling Google AdWords and the like -- but money. Pick a niche with advertising money behind it -- sports, entertainment, popular media -- and the odds go up. The commitment is not so much measured in hours per day -- the best blog post rarely takes more than half an hour -- as in persistence; can you blog daily and well for years?

Sunni: Sounds to me like you're one of the growing numbers of individuals who are helping to kill the job culture. Would you agree with that?

Bacchus: Unreservedly. The job culture is as big a threat to human freedom as anything governments ever dreamed up. How can you be free and happy when you spend most of your waking hours in a place dictated by someone else, pursuing their priorities rather than your own, and living by their petty rules? With no time or energy to pursue your own priorities by the time you get home after a long unpaid commute? I lived that life for years, until I finally realized that I had to control my own working conditions to be truly free. Nobody but me deciding whether to set my alarm clock, or when to set it for; nobody but me deciding what my project will be on a given day, or whether I'll choose to take that day off. Nobody but me deciding whether my head cold is bad enough I should just go back to bed.

About three days out of five, I take naps in the afternoon now. Why? Because I get sleepy. A twenty-minute snooze in the mid-afternoon cuts two hours off the amount of sleep I need at night. Right there, my life got seven percent longer by escaping the job culture.