After my failed attempt to run a blog membership I was disillusioned with trying to monetise my creative things. Annoyed that although a few people contributed, it didn’t do anywhere near the level that I expected and really knocked my confidence.

Truth is, I have been trying for a while to make writing and blogging pay like it used to. 6-7 years ago web ads paid ok with a few thousand hits a month and didn’t completely wreck your website and income paid for my hosting and even allowed me to, shock horror, make a little profit.

The web is much different now than even that brief time ago. The level of content available online for free is ridiculously high. With little searching you can find software, services, videos, and even news coverage for free. At least in the sense that it appears to be free, admittedly some apps, service etc do show ads. Which makes it much harder, without a very dedicated audience to charge for anything.

So what’s the solution — if there even is an issue at all? I asked, I gave many hours to the cause and like many of us, hit a wall. I could stop doing what I am doing, which isn’t likely (I talked about this in a recent edition of my newsletter) given my very low bar of what success looks like. But it would be easy for me to do so. I feel that jealous rage when someone does things better than me that we all do at some points. It’s dead easy to just throw in the towel and admit defeat.

It’s not defeat though. It’s the same result that thousands of bloggers feel. Those that make typos like I do, rush like I do, and write about things that have a huge talent pool. The elite group is a tiny little percentage that start out, especially in tech, and I don’t even want to have to write about tech all day every day anyway. It would just kill off my love of anything!

I asked, I’m giving, and I am still blogging — now more than ever.