There are two types of bloggers – one that records videos and uploads the same to YouTube or any other similar website and another that writes content and publishes it on a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, etc. Freelancers work for someone when they’re hired, and apply for some small short job. Unless they’re popular, no one or very few people will hire them. Below, we’ve covered some more differences between the two professions:
Freelancing vs Blogging
Work
If you’re a freelancer, you can get a job quickly if you have an online portfolio and good skills. Before people hire you, they may test your skills or may ask you to prove that you’re the best person for the job. Bloggers don’t earn money until their YouTube channel has a good number of subscribers or their videos are watched by thousands of YouTube viewers or their websites get thousands of visitors from search engines.
Guarantee of getting paid
If you’re a freelancer, you are bound to get paid by someone who has hired you. You can ask for the person to send your fees to PayPal or the bank account before you hand over the project to him or her. Blogging is not easy. Search engines won’t send visitors to your website from the day you publish a post. Also, you’ll have to make yourself familiar with Bing or Google webmaster guidelines and follow the same to make sure that your website is not affected by a Google or Bing algorithm update.
As long as the content on your website is good and your site is unaffected by a Google algorithm update, the site will make money. Search engine algorithm updates can be brutal. If your blog is impacted by an update, its traffic may tank by more than 50% overnight. Freelancers on other hand will keep earning money as long as they get clients. Getting new clients online isn’t easy.
Hard work
I consider blogging as a business. A website that makes money is like a shop that is open 24 x 7. People from various parts of the world may visit your website read your content, purchase something from your affiliate link, click on ads displayed on your website, etc. If your blog gets good traffic from search engines, social media sites, etc, it will make money for you while you’re sleeping. For example, I’m from India. Some of my websites get traffic from the US. When it is a day in India, it is night in the US, and vice versa. If your blog is hosted on a server owned by a reputed company, it won’t be down for a minute. The server on which this website is hosted has an uptime of 447 days. Here’s the proof of the same:
Freelancers will have to continue their routine i.e. find work, apply, and complete the job till they work as a freelancer.
Fees
You need three things to start a blog – domain, web hosting, and some knowledge of the framework you will be using to build your website. Hosting can cost between 3 to 30 dollars per month. Domains cost 0.99 to 25 dollars per year. To use an open-source CMS, you don’t have to pay any subscription fees. Freelancing sites such as Upwork, Toptal, Guru, etc will deduct some fee each time you get paid by the client after completing a job/task.
Is freelancing better than blogging or vice versa? Neither one is great, to be honest. Although you can access the internet from any part of the world, it is difficult to make a living or money online. Google algorithm updates have become dreadful in the last few years. After one update, your website traffic can drop by 90% in just a few hours. Hundreds of accounts are created every day on freelancing websites. Not all professionals are hired.
