PART-TIME BLOGGER, FULL-TIME TEACHER

I have read of people who are full-time bloggers, that is, they maintain a blog to earn a living.  Though I love to blog and take photographs, I do so as a pastime.  The reason I started this blog was all because of a book I wrote about Auspicious Occasions with a bit of Feng Shui thrown in and got a publisher interested. 

However, the book has yet to  be published until now and I had already told my friends Lai Yoong, her hubby, daughter and a few of my other friends like Eric, Sharon, Kamariah, Haji Hasnin and Ben Yew.  Lai Yoong kept asking me when the book was coming out as she wanted to refer to it for her daughter who was moving into her new house and also present it to her niece who was getting married.  Sharon too wanted it as her son was getting married.  Even my friend Haji Hasnin wanted a copy as he said it would be a source of reference about Chinese culture.   It was so malu-fying (embarassing) and to cover up for my shame, I created this blog and wrote about Chinese cultural practices and also Feng Shui.  Since I am not a professional in Feng Shui or Chinese culture, I named the blog Xing Fu (Happiness) with the intent of writing about things that make me happy: Feng Shui and Chinese cultural beliefs being two such things. 

Believe me, Lai Yoong and her daughter Sue Lyn were the first few visitors to this blog which was started in January, 2007 and for the first six months I only had about 4 - 5 visitors a day.  Then I noticed that those who visited were not only my friends and relatives and by the end of 2007, my visitors had increased to an average of 40 a day.  In 2008, the average visitors rose to 100 a day and by 2009 it was 120.  For the first quarter of 2010, I have about 160 visitors daily.  By the way more than half of the visitors to this blog were from the United States of America before I joined Nuffnang (something similar to Adsense) and only about 10 percent from my home country Malaysia.  The rest of the visitors mostly came from the United Kingdom, the Phillipines, Singapore, Hong Kong and other English speaking countries.

For your information, I only joined Nuffnang slightly more than a month ago as I wanted to experiment and see how much one can get out of blogging.  So far I have accumulated the grand total of RM3.25.  However, the good news is that the percentage of visitors from Malaysia has doubled. 

In conclusion, I do not think I have what it takes to be a full-time blogger.  I love teaching too much to even think of such a move.  Furthermore, I think blogging income is volatile and unpredictable. What one writes about may interest readers for a certain period of time only. It is rather risky, isn't it?  So, I will stick to being a happy part-time blogger and dedicated full-time teacher.