Blogging Dislikes: Administrative Tasks
I love blogging. I love everything about it and considering I’ve been doing it in one form or another for many years now, it’s part of who I am naturally. But there are some things I dislike about blogging and my tasks this morning made me realize that.
One thing I dislike about blogging is trying to make money from it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the money I make from blogging. It’s opened my eyes to a whole new world where I can create my own income and I can be in control of what I do with my life. But I hate trying to figure out how to make more money or how to change things up when something stops working. This morning I spent time trying to find a new advertising network for a couple of my blogs. I’ve been using Adsense and while that works well I’ve grown tired of the kinds of ads that show up on my sites. Unfortunately almost every good network I’ve looked at is not accepting new bloggers and I’ve been pushed into waiting list limbo.
Another thing I’ve spent my morning doing is trying to get my estimated quarterly taxes paid. I completely forgot about doing this until now, just a few days before it’s due. Unfortunately I’m still waiting on a few things to happen before I am able to make a payment so hopefully it won’t be late but that’s a real possibility. I wish I had learned about/remembered/set up a system long before now to take care of this! It’s amazing how many little things there are to remember and do when you are self-employed that no one tells you about. I need to find a mentor to guide me in navigating the system. Anyone self-employed and want to teach me the ropes?
Basically the things I disliked this morning were administrative tasks. Things not entirely essential to blogging, but important to the business side of blogging. Generally speaking these are the tasks that I enjoy the least and the ones I tend to spend the least amount of time on (which might be why I realized my taxes were due so late). I’m not a huge fan of these tasks, or much related to the business side besides getting paid.
I may have just needed to rant slightly about those frustrations, but this morning’s lame administrative tasks weren’t all bad. I mean, I applied to be part of something that seems like a really great idea. I made money by selling direct advertising for one of my blogs. I sent off answers to interview questions for an upcoming interview about my awesome health blogging ebook. All in all it’s been a very good day in the life of a blogger. It’s never going to be perfect days spent writing and doing nothing else – like any job their are less exciting tasks that come along with it. But that’s not enough to dissuade me from continuing down this path.
Well, it sounds awesome to me. I am always doing dumb administrative stuff all day long for work or for whatever else, it would be nice to be doing it for something helping myself. My mother had her own business (till a couple yrs ago when she went back to working for other ppl) and she had to get a tax guy to do her taxes. Esp at the beginning she was bad about saving her receipts and stuff and she ended up having to pay a lot at the end. She never got the hang of saving out $ as she went along, because there were always too many expenses. My friend who does contract work has the same problems..