The terms “blogger” and “freelancer” are often used interchangeably to describe ourselves, but it’s important to differentiate between the two to minimize disappointment and maximize profitability. One can certainly be a blogger with a freelance business or a freelancer with a blog. However, to do one successfully requires a different skillset.
I’m a blogger first with some services I offer to anybody or any business looking to develop a presence online or seek help with their personal finances. However, such services are not my main focus as I limit my clientele to four a month maximum. The reason why I limit my consulting is because I mainly want to write, which is my joy. If I wanted to work, I wouldn’t have retired!
Whether my writing makes money or not is secondary to being able to share some thoughts and interact with the community. It’s always going to be this way. The thrill of getting picked up by some major media organization or doing an interview on a public radio station is addicting. So is learning about different perspectives from readers all around.
As it turns out Financial Samurai generates enough income to eat ramen noodles in San Francisco. But again, this is a side product because I’m currently living off my passive income streams in CD interest, dividends, and rental income. Everything generated from my blog is a bonus.
Despite four years of blogging, I’m still struggling immensely with selling a product or myself. I just don’t enjoy the process of trying to make money from readers and am seriously considering outsourcing the work to a freelancer.
THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BLOGGER AND A FREELANCER
A freelancer’s main job is to make money through work provided. The same cannot necessarily be said for a blogger. It’s much easier to become a freelancer than a blogger because there is immediate reward i.e. payment for services rendered. A blogger can literally go for months without seeing a single penny of income. Is there any wonder why so many quit after a while?
Of course there are plenty of bloggers whose main purpose of creating a site is to make money. And that’s fine too. There’s just an entirely different way of making money through blogging vs. freelancing. Just think about all the massive blogs out there who have sold for millions of dollars. Most did not make it a mission to blog for money.
Blogging vs. Freelancing
* A blogger has to figure out ways to generate enough traffic to be able to generate sales of their product or their affiliate products.
* A freelancer needs to generate enough traffic to be able to find enough work to a comfortable point.
* A blogger needs to develop high enough web metrics for their site for SEO clients to take them seriously.
* A freelancer isn’t as concerned about SEO once they get their own name out.
* A blogger not only has to write, but be in charge of marketing and branding.
* A freelancer also has to market and brand themselves up to a point of maximum capacity.
* A blogger writes the majority of content for him or herself.
* A freelancer writes the majority of their content for someone else or some other publication who now owns the content e.g. write an article for The New York Times.
* A blogger is master of his or her domain.
* A freelancer does not control his or her domain and therefore does not control revenue channels.
* A blogger doesn’t need to find clients as a large amount of clients find them through search engines.
* A freelancer needs to find clients in the beginning and will hopefully get referrals to fill up his or her day.
* A blogger’s revenue potential is much more scaleable given a post can be seen by millions.
* A freelancer earns more money by working more hours and charging higher rates.
As I think about things a little more, if a freelancer can do all the same things a blogger is doing, a freelancer will be absolutely booked to the gills with work!
A QUESTION FOR FREELANCERS
The reason why I prefer being a blogger vs. a freelancer is because I can do what I want, when I want practically all the time. There is more freedom to blogging because clients aren’t necessary, only readers looking for answers who perpetually land on your site through search whether you want them to or not. I also want to provide the best advice possible to one such individual.
The biggest test for all freelancers is to simply ask themselves this: If they started making much more money from their blog than through freelancing, would they continue to freelance? My suspicion is that most freelancers would say “no” or seriously ratchet down their freelance business in order to just write for themselves.
Freelancing is a great way for anybody to start making immediate money. The issue with freelancing is that if you become successful, freelancing will feel like work. Once freelancing feels like work, you’re almost back to square one working for a corporate 9-to-5. Sure you have more freedom than your typical office worker, but there is no denying the gnawing feeling of having to work to make money. You have to be responsible. You have to create course work. You have to follow up. You have to respond to e-mails. You have to be present and helpful. When I was away for 4 weeks, I just put up a huge out of office e-mail and didn’t do hardly anything online while the ramen income still came in.
Scaleability of time is a problem that can be better resolved through blogging. Once you complete that app, design, or post and send it off for payment there’s no more perpetual income stream for a freelancer. What I recommend freelancer do is lower their rates to get a share of revenue with successful clients or completely participate in a revenue share model. It’s important to identify who are the potential or existing successful clients out there and latch on. Once you do, you’ll have a much easier time making more money and scaling your time.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BLOGGERS AND FREELANCERS
Both bloggers and freelancers want the same thing: more money and more time. Freelancing provides more freedom from working a 9-to-5 job, while blogging creates even more freedom from having to freelance. Bloggers and freelancers just go about their goals differently.
If you are a blogger:
* Create a Services/Freelance page that will capitalize on your expertise as written through your content. You will be able to tell if such a service is right for your community by the number of comments and e-mail questions you receive. With 13 years working in finance, an MBA, and a livable passive income stream I feel I am able to legitimately help clients better get a grasp on their finances. With over 10,000 hours of online publishing experience, the Yakezie Network and strong monthly traffic, I will be able to help small businesses and new bloggers gain a better footprint online to jump start their journey. Look to your most popular posts by pageviews and comments and see if you can package a service based on your expertise.
* Create your own product. The benefits of creating your own product are numerous. For one, you get to learn how to put things together from start to finish. Your project management skills, team work skills, discipline, and creativity all come to light. The second benefit is branding. Once you have a product you are proud of, you help build your online brand further. With my book, How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye, I’ve been able to brand myself as a unique career counselor who helps people transition from same old to something exciting and new in their lives. Once your product is out there, it will stay out there forever and bring about new opportunities with other businesses and outlets you won’t even anticipate.
* Hustle like a freelancer. If you want to generate revenue from your blog, then you’ve got to follow the lead of freelancers who proactively reach out to prospective clients on a frequent basis. Too often we are lulled into kicking back and hoping that business comes to us. I’ve seen a very tight correlation with hustle and revenue during the times where I want to make money. You will see the same once you’ve established the voice of your site.
* Try to get some freelance jobs. If you’ve already got a stable blogging platform where you are earning money, figure out other sites where you would like to contribute your knowledge to expand your exposure. It’s generally a good idea to look for bigger sites with stronger metrics. Don’t get stuck in your little bubble community. If you can write just one new article for a bigger site a month, you’re well on your way to super charging your readership.
* Always focus on the end game. Blogging is about writing, connecting, and having a lot of fun in the process. I personally want to have a journal where my family and I can look back to when I’m old and have a chuckle. The money will always come if you gain enough traffic, but don’t let the money sidetrack you from the freedom you get from your blog. Again, look at the biggest blogs in the PF space such as GRS and TSD. JD and Trent just wrote about their journey and ended up with multi-million dollar windfalls!
If you are a freelancer:
* Diversify niches. One of the main risks for freelance writers is content spin, the act of writing the same thing over and over again in slightly different form. A freelance writer might not intentionally write similar topics, but there’s only so much you can say about spending less than you make or reviewing so and so product. The end result could be a knockdown of your own site’s metrics, your brand, your client’s site, or getting banned from Google+. The solution to content spin is to diversify niches or topics as much as possible so you don’t unconsciously start writing the same stuff.
* Try becoming a pro blogger. The only way a freelancer can really appreciate how hard it is to build a blog with a sustainable income stream is to give it a go on their own. Work on guest posting, building a product, branding, and your own content generation while making no money for months on end. Chances are you will fail, but even if you do you will gain a renewed appreciation for bloggers everywhere. Chances are that you may even succeed and no longer want to freelance. You will never know until you try.
Note: I remember getting big wigged by a freelance writer because she wrote for a large media publication and I did not. She criticized my writing style for being too long, which I’ve worked to improve. But as bloggers know, thick content is in if you want to do well in search. It was strange for her to compare her job at a large employer to my own little site. She was confusing being a freelancer with being a blogger! She’s since given blogging a go and has failed at making any type of income from her site. Not so easy is it? Maybe, just maybe her employer’s massive media foot print has something to do with why she gets so many readers from her freelance articles. Riding someone else’s success is a great way to get ahead. But’s it’s much more satisfying creating your own success.
* Also create your own product. Unfortunately, perhaps the only product you can create is on how to become a freelance writer in the immediate term. However, maybe there is an app you can create to connect freelancers with publishers in different niches? Or maybe you can outsource your work to someone and pay them a large percentage of revenue once you’ve built your freelance empire. The product is about branding and reoccurring revenue for years down the road.
IN SUMMARY
Bloggers who want to build sustainable money making sites need to think long term. Freelancers who want to grow their freelance business and not get burnt out should think more like bloggers. After all, bloggers hire freelancers and not so much the other way around. There’s great opportunity for both sides to incorporate each other’s work. Strive to eradicate the short-term temptations and short-cuts. Once you build a critical portfolio of writing or projects, you’ll receive more business than you’ll ever expect.
STARTING A MONEY MAKING BLOG
I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, creating, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, learn how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes like this one.
Leverage the 3+ billion internet users and build your brand online. There are professional bloggers now who make way more than bankers, doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs while having much more fun, much more freedom, and doing less work. Get started. You never know where the journey will take you!
Updated for 2017 and beyond.
Hmm…definite food for thought. Almost too much food – I feel stuffed!
I’m a “blogger” although very new to the game. I’ve noticed on the “my monthly income” type of posts from various sites that many “bloggers” actually make the majority of their income through freelancing. As such, I’ve been contemplating moving in that direction (or at least exploring it). However, now I’m not so sure that’s a wise idea. Free time is one commodity that I’m short on right now and freelancing doesn’t seem to mesh with that constraint so much. Plus, freelancing is, for the most part, not really passive. You stop the work you stop getting paid. Blogging, while still requiring lots of work, at least has elements of passive income.
I’m curious, how do the freelancers out there feel about their work? Surely it’s a step up from a regular 9-5 job. Is there joy/satisfaction obtained out of it though or does it still feel burdensome like a regular job?
For me, freelancing is a huge step up from my old 9-5 job. To begin with, I make more money. I also am able to work when it’s convenient for me instead of clocking in at work and begging for 5:00 to come around. I have small children so the convenience factor is priceless for our family.
But, yes. It still feels like work. Not nearly burdensome as sitting at my old job from 9-5 each day but it does still feel like work.
There’s always going to be a step up in satisfaction working for yourself I think, but the stresses will all depend upon how much you make and your financial buffers. Hopefully most people have planned for a while before taking that leap. And if freelancing is all you’ve know then that’s all you need!
I honestly don’t know why they hire who they hire. However, J.D. came back to the site as of last week. They did have two other male writers, Robert Brokamp and El Nerdo, but they both bowed out earlier this year. My guess is that they are probably looking for someone else.
How did I get the gig? I don’t know. I sent them a ton of guest posts and they kept publishing them and eventually hired me.
Good stuff Holly. It will be great to read more of JD’s stuff and his new perspectives on money after the windfall.
I think less people would do freelancing if they knew how to make money with the content themselves.
The freelancers aren’t good at monetizing content so they sell their content for a quick hit of cash when the other person who buys the content can earn on it for years (assuming they know what they are doing)
most folks I see are doing best of both worlds, try blogging for long term cash and then get the quick fix with freelancing
however I think that longterm the blogger will always win and the freelancer loses. if the freelancer doesn’t write they don’t get paid. a blogger can continue to make money on content they wrote over and over with each new visitor, in their sleep ;)
As a freelance writer and blogger, I pretty much agree with everything you said. As a freelance writer, I feel fortunate that I write about things other than money. Aside from staff writing at Get Rich Slowly, most of my freelance articles are not related to personal finance at all. This makes things easier, I think, because I’m not writing about the same financial topics over and over and over. It does feel like work and there are days when I absolutely don’t want to write the articles that I’m paid to write, but I am very grateful to have as much work as I do.
I think that owning a blog is a great idea for any freelancer. That is where most people find me! The fact that I have a blog has led to a variety of different opportunities that probably would’ve have been available to me otherwise.
As far as freelancing and blogging go, I like doing both. When I get sick of working on one thing, I work on the other. I also like doing both from an income perspective. My income fluctuates on both fronts and they tend to balance each other out most of the time.
Good stuff Holly. I’ve been meaning to ask, why do you think GRS hires all female freelance writers after JD left? You’d think they’d hire at least 50/50 if not more make writers no? Also, how did you land the gig? Thx
The biggest difference between a freelancer and a blogger is that a freelancer isn’t guaranteed to work but will get paid when they do. A blogger will always have work, but isn’t guaranteed that they will get paid!
Sounds like a freelancer wins in that description! Which would you’d rather be?
From a pure financial standpoint, I’m making more and making more per hour as a freelancer, but from non-financial perspective, blogging is more rewarding for me because my freelance work usually don’t have my name attached to it.
True. And isn’t the rewarding feeling the most important at the end of the day?
Freelancing is part of my self-employment strategy because, as you pointed it, it is quick cash (assuming you can get gigs; fortunately I had one before going full-time and then brought on several others). But it is only a small portion of my income streams, as I see it is “short-term strategy”, whereas blogging is a long-term strategy. I’m willing to freelance for now to continue paying for my long-term strategies, but yes, I think once my other streams make more money freelancing will go away. This is because if I keep the articles that I write, then I have potential to make money from them forever versus selling them now for some quick cash.
Definitely a good short-term strategy to buttress the longer term strategy which hopefully is more sustainable.
HI Sam,
Miranda Marquit and Donna Freedman are personal finance freelancers who happen to have their own blogs. They predominately sell their work as independent contractors to others and have blogs as well. Although I don’t know for certain, I assume the main part of their income is from freelancing.
I agree with you that making money from a blog is quite difficult. Freelancing is a bit easier. I freelance a bit, but my main goal is to build a site with financial products I create which offer real financial value at an affordable cost. This is a long term strategy.
Indeed. From a longevity perspective… I thought blogging would win. But with so many blogs not being able to get past the 1 year mark, maybe not so much.
For me, a blogger is a business owner and responsible for much more than just content. I see freelancers as more of a consultant who is only responsible for their content. I am not saying that one is more important than the other, but their responsibilities are different..
That is a good analogy as well. And then of course freelancers can incorporate and be their own business owner as well. Lots of similarities after writing this post.
I thought of a freelancer as a professional writer earning a living through writing.
I thought of a blogger as someone with strong opinions looking for place to express them and perhaps make a dollar doing it.
I am a blogger and would love to make some money doing it but I lack the training of a writer and overuse and abuse commas and get the apostrophes in the wrong spots so I don’t consider myself a writer.
The conclusion of this post is to try to take the best of both and do both!
Yes…there can be confusion between being a blogger and freelancing if, like me, you are new to the blogging world. I’m only a year into this and didn’t get the distinction early on. When I finally learned the differences, I realized freelancing would not be for me right now. I already have a career that supports our family and freelancing sounds like another job to me. Blogging produces more flexibility in my life (I can post when I can) and less pressure (to make money to support myself).
Freelancing is just a sweet thing to tell your friends and impress girls. Blogging is better because less people understand it. They know that there is the potential to make money, but they don’t really understand it. They think you just write some garbage on a website. And some people do. But then when they find out you possibly make +$1,000 per month, they become intrigued and want to know more.
Didn’t know girls are impressed with freelancers! Might have to try that “Hey, I’m a freelancer” line one day then.
Just imagine if they found out you made over $10,000 a month from a blog. Casanova!
I think some people out there are confused but I agree there are many big differences. I like being a blogger and being in control of all of my content as well as my site’s image. It’s definitely much harder startig something yourself versus riding on someone else’s existing success. I might try more freelancing but I have no plans to stop being a blogger. It’s a lot of work but I love it!
Nothing good comes easy it seems. It certainly does feel great to be the “Master of our own domain.”
Great breakdown Sam. I agree that sometimes the roles get confused a bit. I like the blogging apporach a lot more. I’m still working on things like finding my voice, honing my niche, and getting to know my audience. The tips you gave here will help me to always have a forward-looking approach and to think long-term.
Just an FYI: on your “Always focus on the end game” bullet point you have a typo. You mention “GD” when it should be “JD”. I know you always go through and correct any errors so I figured I’d give you a heads up.
Thanks for the correction! They are always welcome.
It really is about moving forward and gaining that momentum. If you keep going, you’ll eventually reach a tipping point that may open up the floodgates for boku bucks!
I enjoy being both. As a freelancer, I perform the service and get paid. I don’t have to think about monetization, ad placements, or metrics. As a blogger, I’m on the hook for everything. As I learned my new course and product launches, there are no guarantees with blogging.
I would much rather be a blogger, personally, even if it never turns into income. It’s why I started a blog in the first place. I have a ton of family and friends that ask me for insights on personal finance and I enjoy helping them out, and sharing my experiences.
Honestly though, it’s been difficult for me so far to keep “finding my voice” when I see the potential of financial gain from other bloggers out there. I would love for my blog to be a helpful resource that folks trust, because I think I have a perspective that’s different than most. Still working on that part, and I’m sure you all do too!
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I love blogging, but I’m not opposed to freelancing, either. Sometimes the quick money is nice, and it the content you contribute is good enough, you may even build more traffic to your own blog. So maybe freelancing could propel the long-term efforts of blogging if you approach it properly.
“Despite four years of blogging, I’m still struggling immensely with selling a product or myself. I just don’t enjoy the process of trying to make money from readers and am seriously considering outsourcing the work to a freelancer.”
If you want to outsource this job, send me an email, I’m eager to help you out with this problem.
Good post. I am a freelancer. But, I am new to blogging. Inspiring post :-)
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