Paid blogging, yadda-yadda, sponsored posts, yadda-yadda, selling ads... make thousands a day from home, let google work for you, the latest google smackdown of PR... I used to talk about work to my family. Now I talk PR and googlesmacks and Alexa ranks and how many/what kind of paid opportunities I can take day to day. As I've mentioned before, it is possible to make money blogging and sitting on the couch. It is possible to get some income doing this; just as some people are able to make some income on ebay and amazon and etsy. As anything else, it's a job. Me? I blog. I'm good at writing. At electronic babbling. I even have a fairly decent readership at the moment, which does wonders for my self-esteem. I get a boost from reading comments, and I get a boost from seeing my paypal balance increase a little at a time. I'm not unique. At a guesstimate I would think that half the blogs I read are making that little bit extra through their blogs; either by selling textlinks or ads or those sponsored post bits.

Want to know something wierd? I dream in blogging now. Last night I dreamed I was babysitting for a lady who runs one of my daily reading blogs. She wrote a post about me. Just the thought that I had been mentioned on her high-profile blog made me all warm and fuzzy. A Bloglebrity.

It goes to show that sometimes the subconscious tells you things that you already kinda knew but didn't really know how important it had become. So blogging is now my job. It's worth my time and it pays me to sit here coming up with blurbs three or four times a day. It's worth the time and trouble for a whole bunch of housewives who know not to get involved with MLMs, with work-at-home promises that seem to either require massive amounts of upfront money or unreasonable returns. I'm sure that a decent portion of work-at-home jobs are real; but just like with any other job you've got to look at your own needs and figure out what is going to work.

Are you the sort that socializes easily and with lots of people, always picking up new friends and acquaintances and finding it easy to talk with them? Look for the ones that get you out of the house and involve those people. Are you a shy introvert who finds it difficult to get out of the house or to even talk to the people you already know? Find something that lets you play on your strengths! I'm in the latter half, although I'm fairly good at stringing words together. We're on a tight income; can't afford to put the toddler in daycare to go out and get a real job, underlaying medical reasons that make that impractical in any case. Blogger has free blogs. I was blogging in any case. I found a reputable company to start getting paid for this. I tried it out, didn't put too much time into it until the payouts happened. When it proved to be everything promised I went all out- this is my job now in addition to the mother and housewife aspect of me. Twenty minutes here and there. Thirty minutes here and there to read new blogs every day as much as I catch up with the ones I read just for me. Comment. Post. Read forums and articles on how to blog better. Read current events. Read lots. Comment and post lots. Never comment just to fill space- always put something of quality out there so that my readers will forgive the times when I get sloppy/lazy/have a bad day and are just trying to get something out on paper to get through another day. I know you can tell. I can tell too. Everytime I post something that is just too awful I feel bad and make myself leave it up as a warning to myself to do better the next time.

The next couple of weeks I'm going to be bringing in the Christmas shopping money. After that who knows? I'm being googlesmacked again; my PR rose briefly to let me take all those high-paying posts and this week it's dropped to a big fat zero. Which makes no posts available beyond a bare handful of choices. And there are plenty of people who are depending on these posts to pay the bills this season. They're like me. They have young kids. They have to balance school, work, family, kids, bills and mortgages and rent to pay. Paid blogging makes it easier for us all to get by. We don't have to sacrifice the time with our babies to work outside the home. But there are weeks like this one when we're looking at the holidays and the tight budgets and the lack of an income we've been starting to count on to make the ends meet. We're all afraid. We can see the tight times closing in. We try to reassure each other that it's a cycle, that it'll go through again, that things will improve in a couple of weeks and we'll be okay. The company we're mostly working for understands this concerns and seem to be trying to do something about it. Does that help those fears today?

I don't have an answer for that.