I love blogging.  I love blogging so much that sometimes I forget to eat dinner because I’m busy responding to comments, writing posts, and socializing online with friends. If I was a high school student again, I think my parents would worry about my health and offline social life. I can hear my father now, “Sam, how about going outside and meeting some nice girl or something?”

We have three main verticals on Yakezie.com: Personal Finance, Lifestyle, and Writing Contest.  What I’ve come to realize is that we might very well be missing one of the most important verticals… Blogging!  After all, the Yakezie Network is a network of bloggers who are all trying to figure out how to improve our respective sites.

Writing is a lot about self-reflection.  How do I feel about this situation?  Why do things happen the way they do?  Will I ever be able to get ahead?  I think about things constantly and if I didn’t put anything down in writing, I’d miss out on so many things because thoughts come and go in a flash.

One evening, I was reflecting on whether or not I have become a blogging addict.  Spending an extra 20-30 hours a week in front of the computer seems kind of excessive frankly.  I want to make sure that I won’t be checking into rehab soon and came up with a list to check my pulse.  Won’t you have a look and share your thoughts?

YOU MIGHT BE A BLOGGING ADDICT IF….

1) You utilize your precious vacation days and savings to go to BlogWorld instead of the Hawaiian tropics.

2) You check your Google Analytics everyday.

3) You get upset when you lose an RSS subscriber.

4) You get upset when you lose a Twitter subscriber.

5) You get pissed when your article gets rejected from a Carnival.

6) You tweet about how much you hate your hosting company.

7) You threaten in your tweets how you will cut off your hosting company.

8) You change your hosting company and then months later start tweeting how much you hate your new hosting company.

9) You have registered more than 5 URL domains and dream that one day someone will pay you big bucks for them.

10) You tweet about how many subscribers you have and ask your audience to help get more, more, more!

11) You throw yourself a party when you hit 100 subscribers.

12) You tell your parents and friends to comment regularly because you’re concerned about nobody saying anything.

13) You spend more time blogging than kissing your wife, husband, or online fantasy, Michelle or Bubba.

14) You constantly use the term “A-listers” when describing your experiences with other bloggers.

15) You blog about blogging so you can comment more about blogging with your blogging buddies.

16) You are a Social Media Consultant.

17) You started a blogging network.

18) Your blog is a part of a blogging network.

19) You change your Gravitar every quarter and of course you like the movie Avatar.

20) You constantly tweak your blog with this and that design while nobody notices any changes.

21) You need to buy new pants because you love to blog.

22) You fantasize about hooking up with other bloggers, or at least fawn about meeting other big bloggers more than anybody else.

23) You’d rather have 1,000 more subscribers than lean abs and a hot girlfriend or boyfriend.

24) You’d rather have 10,000 Twitter followers than earn thousands of dollars a month on-line.

25) You’ve paid hundreds, and maybe thousands of dollars on on-line products on how to make money on-line and build a better blog.

26) You have a man cave.

27) You have a woman cave.

28) You can win a finger wrestling competition because you type so much.

29) You print out eBooks from work so you can read them at the pool, on the beach, or on the bus to and from work.

30) Your favorite book is “How To Make Money Blogging.”

31) You give up your job to blog full time.

32) You have chronic back pain or headaches because you worry so much about how your blog is doing.

33) You refer to yourself in the third person on your blog and write that you are the “VP of Marketing” in your bio.

34) You print blogging business cards and call yourself a ridiculously long title like, “Founder, Editor, & Chief.”

35) You can’t stop thinking about the strategic scheduling of posts.

36) You have a backlog of over 50 draft posts with little to nothing written.

37) You sneak away into a conference room at work so you can tweet on your iPhone or respond to some comments.

38) You ask your wife, husband, girlfriend, or boyfriend to proof read your posts and type up some ideas during long road trips while you are driving.

39) You listen to podcasts on blogging and earning money on-line instead of Barry Manilow and The Backstreet Boys.

40) You can crush peanuts with your butt cheeks because they’ve become rock hard and calloused due to sitting too much.

41) You can start your own mini-bookstore thanks to all the books that are sent your way by PR folks who want you to highlight their authors.

42) You join the minimalist movement because that’s what’s trending at the moment… also because you have too many books.

43) You then start the maximalist movement because you realize it’s no longer cool to be a minimalist since everybody is doing it.

44) You can’t get a mortgage because of the unpredictability of your blogging income, so you buy an RV instead and meet your readers.

45) You tweet your whereabouts, hoping other blogging addicts are around so you can do a tweet-up at Comic Con.

46) You go to your optometrist and she pulls out the biggest “E, D, F, G” vision card and all you see are hopefully post comments.

47) You have a Tweet Meme button and a Share Everything plug-in just in case people can’t see the Tweet Meme button.

48) You sometimes have nightmares of accidentally hitting the publish button instead of the save button.

49) Your dreams of flying are replaced with dreams of your post going viral

50) You change your really catchy blog post title to something generic like, “How to do this” for SEO.

51) You pray to a divine being that your blog takes off instead of praying to save fuzzy pandas from extinction.

52) You write a “You Might Be A Blogging Addict If…..” post!

SO TELL ME, ARE YOU A BLOGGING ADDICT?

Are you a blogging addict? If you relate to more than 10 of these points above, you most certainly are!  And even if you are one, is it so bad to be so into writing, socializing on-line, developing a deeper understanding of things, and doing something good once in a while?  Of course not.  Blogoholics of the web unite!

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.