Yesterday, in a conversation with someone, who has a personal blog herself, I was a big source of confusion when I mentioned that, in the future, I intend to blog full time, without a normal day job. The surprise, among other sources, came from the fact that people still think of “blogs” as something entirely personal: even in the case of, say, someone who blogs about technology, to many people it’s still a personal blog – that person is still writing about his or her life, it just has technology in it.

In other words, to many people a blog is like a diary, a journal.

As I explained my dark evil plans to that person, a useful comparison came to mind: what I write (except in the case of my personal blog (in portuguese)), aren’t “journals” at all, but, instead, the equivalent of magazine articles – in fact, it’s as if I published several magazines, each one about a particular subject. Whoever enjoys one, reads it (and not necessarily the others) and possible comes back. Whoever searches for something I’ve written about, may just get there by searching. And, like most magazines, I have advertisements.

Besides a magazine, a blog can be other things. A book, for instance. Many books that have already been published (in real paper) have begun their “lives” by being blogs – I, myself, plan on creating a couple of them, although they will be ebooks, for a start.

Or it can be like a pub or coffee house – a meeting place for friends, or simply people with similar tastes, who enjoy talking about them regularly. In such blogs, comments are as important as the posts themselves, if not more.

And there are many other kinds of blogs. The idea that a blog is “a teenager talking about how boring his life is” makes as much sense as, for example, saying that all comic books are for kids (which, unfortunately, a lot of people still believe…).

Chris Garrett from Performancing has an article called “The Great Adsense Hypocrisy Part 2“, in which he writes about how the most effective users, in terms of AdSense earnings, are those who come to his blog, don’t exactly like what they see, so they click on an ad to leave it. That is, writing good, interesting, useful content, and encouraging return visitors, in terms of short term gains, is actually worse than writing something that has a couple of lines of text which look good in Google, has the right keywords, but then doesn’t really offer what the visitor was looking for.

It’s not exactly the same, but, in a way, it’s related to an old post of mine, What kind of visitors are best?.

That’s why a lot of bloggers “join the dark side”, and make their blogs more spammy. The bad thing about doing so is that blogging, then, becomes something you do just for the money… that is, work – and a dirty one at that, much like telemarketing, or email spamming.

So I won’t do it. Sure, I intend to one day get rich from my blogs , but I also intend to keep doing it because I enjoy it.

Besides, in order to sell my future ebook… ahem… too soon to talk about it.

Darren Rowse tells it from the beginning. I can’t recommend reading that post highly enough – it’s long, but more than worth it. Not only educational, but inspirational, as well.