If you define a “problogger” as being someone who makes the their entire income from blogging, then I’ve finally become a problogger. A couple of weeks back, I got my first payment that exceeded the monthly earnings of my previous part-time job. [I’ve been freelancing for several years now, since the recession of late 2001, sometimes taking cooking jobs to pay the bills. You want this freelance life, you have to take the good with the bad. I’ve had enough of the bad; bring on the good.]

What you should know, though, is that over 95% of this new blogging income is not from my own blogs. They still make a pittance, though I’m detecting  marked increase earnings per contextual ad click on some days. My trend graphs show that I’m still on course to have well over 1000 pageviews/ day (my network, not a single blog) by the end of they year, maybe sooner. A little bit more effort will bring that sooner, along with a bit more monthly ad revenue.

However, a great deal of my outside effort is going into blogging for several clients, as well as co-administrating the new Performancing Exchange and blog. For the last two weeks, I’ve had several new contract offers for blogs and freelance writing, as I’ve no doubt already mentioned on this site a few times.

So what am I earning and how? I’m writing for a number of blogs and websites, as well as doing a bit of consulting. There are a few ebooks on the pipeline, but they require a longer-term commitment, and earnings don’t always show for up to a year or longer. That effort is an investment for the future. The blogging clients is for the present. And any remaining time I have each day is put into researching and writing for my own blogs, in hopes that they will eventually bear fruit.

As for how much I earn, I don’t liking discussing details like that, but it’s just barely enough to get by - almost four figures per month (US dollars). I know it’s not a lot, and doesn’t compare to five- and six-figure yearly (pro-rated) earnings from when I was a consultant, but it’s a start. It beats toiling on the hot line in restaurants, getting burned and cut and not evening getting a share from the floor staff, or doing coat check in the night club I used to hang out at, being sneered at by punk-ass kids who think they’re better than me for being on the other side of the checkout counter. (You’d think that in the 21st century, people wouldn’t behave like this…)

Do I sound bitter? I’m actually not. I am immensely enjoying what I’m doing, and for me, blogging is the most perfect job for my personality and skills. I dislike workplace politics, sitting in traffic jams, road rage, and all kinds of other craziness that goes with the regular rat race. And being induced to be a part of that sickness brings me down a notch in my civility, so I really don’t miss any of it. Well, I miss living in the big city (Toronto, Atlanta), but currently living 20 feet from the edge of a small wildlife preserve puts me at peace.

Maybe I’m revealing a bit more than I normally would, but my fictional equivalent would be a good wizard living in a stone tower in the forest, with a bubbling laboratory at the top, loads of ancient books, and doing all sorts of experiments, learning about the magic of the universe. And of course, there’d be a computer. How much more perfect could making my living from the “ether” of the Internet be, turning thought into wealth like a spiritual alchemist?