Do You Remember When Writing Online Was Fun?

Keyword density, marketing tools, hot content… do you remember when writing online was about having fun? When writing was something you did for love?

I had several reasons to spend almost 11 months not writing online, and losing the fun of it was in the top ones.

I remember finding out about Triond and other websites like it, that allowed us to earn money writing articles. It was almost unbelievable that, in the reach of a click, I could be paid to do what I loved and used to do for free.

The first weeks writing articles were the most fun I had writing in years. I had a notepad with all the ideas for articles I kept having, and every morning was just a matter of picking one. However, after the honeymoon period passed, something unpleasant and almost unnoticed started happening; I couldn’t keep my eyes from the money meter in the dashboard. 

 In a little while I was searching articles about how to make more money writing online, and in a a few days I was analyzing word density and searching for popular topics. That’s the point when fun started to leak away, when the dashboard commanded the writing, and not my heart.

The first articles I wrote analyzing keyword density looked like Frankensteins, and not mine at all… either way, I published that substandard material because I believed that the audience might like it – in fact, some became quite popular.

I don’t know about you, but me… Writing is not my primary tool to get money. I wish it was, but I don’t have the time or the marketing eye to guarantee my money just writing online. A pretty nice and decent day job, which I’m also proud of, pays my bills and provides for me and my family. There is no reason for me to degenerate my writing – that was the feeling I had – for a couple bucks. Writing is not a game for me; is a passion.

I’m not saying that the ones who know how to live from online writing and know how to market their material are materialist or disrespectful to their writing… I’m only saying that it doesn’t work like that for me. I’m probably one of those weekend writers that won’t build a life of it, but will certainly have a lot of fun.

The point that I wanted to bring to this article is that fun and happiness don’t need to be measured in monetized terms. Realization doesn’t need to be wrapped in 20 dollar bills. We can just keep doing what we love to, and let Paypal deal with that number changing in the dashboard.