3 min read

If You\'re Not Passionate About Your Message, Don\'t Start a Blog

I received an email from a reader recently asking for my opinion. According to their words, they had narrowed down their blog topic to two “profitable” niches and couldn’t decide which one would earn them the most money. They wanted me to decide for them (Oh, and I got their permission to share my a

I received an email from a reader recently asking for my opinion. According to their words, they had narrowed down their blog topic to two “profitable” niches and couldn’t decide which one would earn them the most money.

They wanted me to decide for them (Oh, and I got their permission to share my advice in this post).

My answer….

If you’re not passionate about your message, don’t start a blog.

Don’t ask me how I know this to be true. There was a time when first starting out my focus was on discovering profitable niches. At the time, I had built my Google Adsense revenue to about $800+ month on JonathanMilligan.com. I was fascinated by this because all I did was write and publish blog post to earn this kind of income.

I did what I thought was the “smart” thing to do and did some research on which niches earned the most adsense revenue per click. I would then built several “mini” WordPress blogs in an attempt to raise my Adsense income.

I had blogs about personal finance, swimming pool covers, basketball goals, and birthday theme blogs. I’m not saying it’s completely wrong to use this strategy, but here were some of the problems of “chasing the dollar instead of passion.”

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1. You start with the wrong motives.

There is certainly nothing wrong with earning money from a blog. In fact, in many ways you serve your audience better by offering products for sell. If you’re not passionate about your message, your quality will always suffer.

When I was trying to grow “niche” blogs, I became so bored with writing on topics I had no interest in that I began paying other people to write them. I’m embarrassed to say that I published low-quality articles because I just wasn’t interested in value. I was only interest in production.

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2. You have no deep well to draw from.

Another reason you need to be passionate about your message is so you can be a leading learner. A leading learner never runs out of things to talk about because they have a natural drive to learn more about that topic. Do you have a deep well to draw from?

Jonathan Mead refers to it as your “no end path.” It’s a message you don’t see yourself becoming weary of anytime soon.

3. You won’t survive the pre-profit stage of your blog.

Regardless of what your blog is about there will be a pre-profit stage. A length of time (usually longer than we want) that we consistently share our message without much attention or income. The only thing that is going to get you through this time is if you are truly passionate about your message.

4. You are better off with a “worldview” than a “niche.”

I thank Jeff Goins for building this perspective into my life. It’s hard to get passionate about a niche, but it is easy to get passionate about a worldview. Having a worldview allows you to be you. Following after a niche often makes you become something you don’t really want to be.

A worldview allows you to share your opinion, vision, and unique perspective that causes others to either passionately connect or politely disagree. It’s hard to share a worldview and not be passionate to some degree.

Our worldview here at Blogging Your Passion is simple: “We want to help you discover your passion and earn money blogging about it.”

There are many experts who say “following your passion” is a bad idea. We believe differently. If Gary Vaynerchuk built his business talking about wine, you can build a business on your passion. Of course it goes without saying your blog has to be useful and you need to provide solutions, but it can be done.

How about you? Are you passionate about your message? Comment below…