So I’ve kept this blog for nine years now, but it’s only in the past three that I started taking it seriously. And by serious I mean no sporadic posts, always networking on WordPress, and acting as if I know what I’m doing.

Thing is, I’ve never earned a dime from my blog, and I can’t use it to sell anything even if I wanted to.

But just because I didn’t gain monetary rewards doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from ‘going pro’ when it comes to blogging. So what can a domain name and a paid WordPress account get you? Let me count you the ways.

I remember landing my first writing gig as a young journalist. I was so hopeful, dying to unleash my voice upon the world. 

But I wrote for the newspapers, where every story bordered between direct and sterile. Didn’t the other writers care about craft? Surely, they knew something about the arts?

Oh, they did. They definitely did. But I was young enough to think I knew better than everybody else.

It wasn’t long before I became one of them. Before I realised how writing for a living and writing for yourself were two totally different things. And after scraping by for more than a decade, I can safely say this: writing can be a real bore sometimes, especially if you’re paid to do it.

Here’s why.