Blogging as a respected career

Although I will always class myself as a musician first and a blogger second there is no doubt in my mind that my blogging career is partly, and a big part at that, responsible for the success of my music career. In order to be successful and sustainable in any artistic career you have to be able to draw attention to your work in order to turn that work into a successful business.

If you don’t then you end up being a bedroom artist. Someone capable of creating stunning work that no one notices. Talented but poor.

Plenty of artists are happy to be penniless, content with the fact that their talent exists, albeit in a vacuum, but many, me included, are not. I wanted, and managed to make, my music career flourish financially as well as artistically.

How did I achieve this?

The internet. And more specifically blogging.

Reaching a mass audience was the ultimate, in a nutshell, target and blogging was, and still is, the single most effective weapon.

And I’m not alone. Millions of people use blogging to underpin and promote their work, artistic or otherwise. Why then is blogging still not respected by the public at large as a career in itself?

On Sunday I bumped into, almost literally in fact, a group of people, two couples, who were friends of an acquaintance of mine. They were friendly enough, but since they had never met me before but had been told about me by their friend, my acquaintance, their conversation started with,

I’ve heard about you, you’re that trumpet player who plays around on the internet and makes loads of money.

I was a little shocked but not totally surprised. I explained to them that I was a jazz musician who uses blogs as a promotional tool, that I was starting an independent record label and that I recently took over Upstart Blogger. I was also little taken aback by their interest in my financial position.

Their next response was another gem of wisdom (hopefully you’ll detect the sarcasm here),

I’ve heard about that blogging stuff, it’s what those emo kids are doing, writing about their feelings and taking photos of each others shoe laces with those camera phones and pretending it’s art. That’s not a real job, that ain’t working. You wouldn’t catch me talking on the internet, not with all the dodgy goings on, fraud, and all that chat room rubbish.

Now, I may have made these two couples sound like knuckle dragging throwbacks but the honest truth is that they are all reasonably intelligent thirty somethings. However, they still manage to see the internet, and blogging as a subset within it, as a great waste of time, only of interest to geeks, fraudsters and lowlifes.

Blogging, whether it seems that way or not, is not a respected career in the eyes of Joe Public. It is still something that many people associate with being a hardcore geek. People have heard of it. It is on their radar. But they just don’t get it.

It’s hard for people like you and me, people who read and use blogs and do get it, to understand that a large group of people still view the internet, and anything based in or upon it, with suspicion and mockery.

The upside to all of this is that it proves what I have been saying for a long time. The blogging phenomenon is still in the very early stages of growth.

I really believe that we have only seen the tip of the blogging iceberg.

I’m very interested to hear what reaction you get when you tell people you blog. Please leave a comment if you have anything to add or any stories to share.