A Day in the Life of a Professional Blogger

So what does make a professional blogger?

For me it requires just one criteria. The amount of cash one earns. If the amount of cash earned from hobby blogging consistantly exceeds the amount of cash earned from ones "day job" one can call oneself a professional blogger.

You might have other ideas as to when to use the term for yourself but that is for you to decide. In the last four months of 2012 I consistantly earned more cash from my various blogs, HubPages and affiliate programs than I did working my real "day job."

I will say that the sum was not in the millions or thousands of dollars. But it was enough to add a margin of comfort to my life, though I will still not be giving up the "day job" yet.

So how does an average day go by?

4:00 am Get up. It is cold so make a pot of coffee and shower quickly.

4:30am Log on to my computer to look at the early morning figures for views and income reports generated for yesterday. All in all several hundred views produced some income.

4:45am Log on to Google Analytics for more detailed views of who is looking at my sites and blogs and to see how they behave.

5:30 am Breakfast. Get an idea for a new product design so call my cell phone to leave myself a message to remind myself later.

5:45am Log into blogs to look at, screen spam or answer comments.

6:15am Open Windows paint to work on the initial design that had come to me at breakfast.

7:45am Save work and Log off. Time to go to work.

2:30pm Return home from "Day Job." Open Paint software to clean up the design from this morning. As I do so some new ideas come to mind so I make a note of those again on my cell phone.

3:30pm Log into zazzle.com to upload designs and create some items.

3:45pm Having uploaded designs created a few shirts and saved them I begin writing the descriptions. Come up with appropriate tags, check how the design looks on the store page. Repeat several times until all designs are posted on the correct store page.

5:30pm Go to blogs to check statistics. Some good traffic flow. Write a post or three. Update some items in older posts and check again for comments which need answers or possible spam.

6:30pm Dinner

7:00pm 'Jeopardy" Time to relax for half an hour with Alex Trebec.

7:30pm Answer any comments on blogs, look for interesting questions on HubPages and consider some subjects to blog about in the future.

8:15pm Check on work in progress items on zazzle.com and look for interesting items on Amazon.com. Add links or update my Amazon aStores to include new items of interest. Check various RSS feeds and work on any problems.

10pm Log out of my computer and go to bed. Till 4am tomorrow.

Anyone can become a professional blogger/internet entrepreneur.

But I think this diary of my average day, where nothing went wrong by the way, shows you that it is not easy.

It takes time to build up to generating an income. I began writing online and opened online stores in 2007 as a more serious hobby. In that time I got hit hard with a loss of Amazon.com as a business affiliate during the time when Californians were excluded from the affiliate program. The California Amazon affiliate ban is now over, and it has taught me to spread my sources of income. This was an important lesson I had forgotten prior to the ban.

There are days when I spend many more hours online than this average workday. Weekends often lead to a choice family or internet? Sometimes the family wins but even then I am thinking of the next piece of work to do, the next T-shirt, the next blog post. It never really stops.

If you would like to take up this lifestyle then it is freely available at the moment.

Hard work, you'll be tired and frustrated a lot of the time.

Small reward for years.

But great personal gratification when it all goes right for you and you can enjoy that first fruit of your internet labor.