Hucksters and charlatans love preying on the desperate, trying to sell you ebooks, upvotes, webinars, and podcasts, all telling you that by pouring a little sweat into a writing a blog that you too, can be at the top making bank just like them.

Let me break it to you, that you likely can't. It doesn't work that way and never worked that way.

Viewership roughly follows a zipfian distribution: most of the viewers view a few of the most popular publications, and most of the rest only get at best a modest level of views. If you're nearer to the bottom than the top – and you very most likely are – it's very very likely that you make nowhere near anything. In fact, you're probably lucky to make even half the amount that a Taco Bell employee makes.

Because these things follow a power curve regardless of whoever is participating in the system, the only way to make as much as the people on the top is to replace the people on the top. And that is exceedingly difficult unless someone from the top simply decides to stop posting. The people who hit the top are usually not popular because they write the best nor the most amazing content. They are popular because they were there first, and they were able to accumulate enough viewership to attract more viewership based on that alone. And even though these people aren't amazing in either execution nor concept, often your ideas aren't either. Often, even with amazing content, you're not going to get numbers that resemble the top. From that perspective, the failure rate for such content generation ends up being several orders of magnitude worse than starting your own business. As this is a sociological or social hurdle, you likely will have a challenge surmounting it if your niche is already kind of taken, and it won't change regardless of what method you use to monetize your stuff.

Starting your own business is in fact a way that you can sidestep this a little: if you're selling a product (even if it's just words) and are/get good at selling, you can get a real income stream from it, but then you're doing something much more involved and challenging than just spurting out words in a blog. You can instead target a niche of people that find things you write interesting, and go out there and sell your product, be it your action book, or cliche travel blog. And in its worst form – have you no other ideas – you will be selling exclusive ebooks telling people how to make money selling exclusive ebooks. There is an entire garbage dump of posts across the internet from the ancient livejournal to the modern steemit that sit in this category, telling people how (provided they got in just as early and garnered just as much of a userbase) they, too could get a lambo writing articles about how great it is to earn money writing articles about getting lambos (which show nothing remarkably interesting, and do nothing but pollute and sully an ecosystem that has very many actually interesting writers, bloggers, and people who depend on it).

Talk is cheap

Once upon a time information was an incredibly precious thing, requiring intense effort to copy, preserve, and disseminate. Not a single step of the process was easy, necessitating legions of scribes copying and transferring scrolls across long distances with unpowered methods of travel. It was, in fact, so expensive to deal with books, the first colleges invented lectures as a means of allowing students to take notes for their own study from these incredibly expensive and rare pieces of knowledge (rather than what these days seems to be the other way around).

Today though, information is very cheap. It gets cheaper every year; advertisers in particular have slowly paid less and less to those wanting to make readable online content. And it's not like the people reading those advertisements are willing to pay for your crap twitter feed blog either; if you're not giving something to them there is someone else who is probably doing the same or a very similar thing and providing it for far less. Likewise, most users, much less whales, will not even deign to upvote your average post usually. It makes sense; there are probably quite a few more people, all themselves trying to "make it" competing for what is quite a limited, or fixed amount of attention that people can give each day. It's a race to the bottom that makes little sense to play.

Working From Within

You can either do something because you're intrinsically motivated, or extrinsically motivated.

When you are intrinsically motivated at doing tasks, you are willing to happily do them for their own sake, regardless of the possible reward. Children are very good at this.

When you're extrinsically motivated, the task itself is meaningless to you. You merely do the task to achieve another end, and oftentimes you're dependent on others to tell you that such and such task is worthwhile or not. Adults tend to be almost purely extrinsically motivated, and no longer find themselves doing very much for themselves. In essence, somewhere in the struggle of life the extrinsically motivated individual has lost himself.

When you turn your hobby into a profession, your enjoyment of it can slowly slip from an intrinsically motivated choice of action, to an extrinsically motivated one where the only reason you continue to really do it is because you need the reward of compensation. Competitive games like League of Legends or Starcraft tend to end in a similar way: once upon a time you played because the competition and each individual game itself was a rush, but slowly you stop playing to play and only play to increase your rank; the only thing that matters is the win and everything that doesn't contribute to that causes you agony. The compensation – in the form of your Elo ranking in this case – has in some sense caused you to cease truly enjoying what you're doing. And when you're out of the ranking system, it is now bizarrely difficult to find the joy that you once had going into the whole experience.

I do not necessarily care about receiving Steem: I do not really consider it at all as a source of income and do not spend it on anything remotely tangible (though of course I would rather have it than not). You may take what I write and enjoy it, or you can leave it. I do not care what article you subscribed to me for, or how often you would demand me to make content, and I refuse to make myself write about any specific set of topics except those which I am currently interested in. I mostly write these screeds on here, because I enjoy writing and venting.

If you like to write, or draw, or take photos, take some time to do things for the sake of doing them, without fear of judgement or "tarnishing" your brand image, or niche. There is no sense in completely ruining your perfectly good hobby for an income stream. And who knows? Maybe you can find something you enjoy creating more.