This is part two of: Advice for a husband of a blogging wife. There are three parts to this series.
I remember for a while, that you (Becky) had to point things out to me.
You would say: “Mic, look at this coding. This is what I am doing right now. I have to do all of this just to add a link to my post. The point of adding a link in here is to bring more page views to my post. The more views that I get, the better off my blog will be.”
Or you would say “Look at this header and how I have to go into PicMonkey to fix mine. If I don’t edit it, it will be really small, like this, and then its not appealing enough for someone to stick around and read it. Just doing this edit is taking me an hour.”
Seeing it like that helped because I saw that you weren’t just “playing online”, you were doing things that I didn’t understand, but I did understand how much time it was taking you and why. Once you showed me what you were doing & I understood, I realized that you were starting a buisness and that you weren’t just “playing online”. I appreciated that.
Now that you have been blogging for a year, you have found that you can do it in just two hours a night. You aren’t doing it all evening long anymore. You don’t blog when the kids are up. You have found a good balance, that it doesn’t take up family time.
The way I look at it is if I wanted to watch the football game for a couple of hours, you used to say “Oh, really? Ugh. Ok.” but now you always say “Yeah, go ahead and do that. I’ll write up a post.”
Plus, it frees up time for me to do some of my own things because if I want to do something that you don’t want to do, like watch Gold Rush, or football or if I want to work on the car, you can work on your blog while I do my thing. It gives us our own hobbies.
And it has been a huge benefit to our family. The supplemental income part… is huge. They say money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it helps to alleviates worry.
Plus, you are doing something that you have 100% control over. You are helping other people. That’s what you love to do. You get e-mails from people needing help or advice and you can give them what they need, which is big. That’s who you are anyways- someone that helps. Like your new blog, Blogging on the Side, you are helping other bloggers because you always want other people to do well. Or like teaching- that’s just you. Blogging lets you do that. I like that you enjoy doing it.
It is like a self-starting job. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it.
If I had to give one piece of advice to the husband of a blogging wife, I would say “Rather than discourage, encourage.”
The biggest thing: Be a patient partner. You were so frustrated at first. You couldn’t figure out the technical side of it, but you did it because you stuck with it and figured it out on your own by doing research.
Oh- and for the husbands… let your wife spend money on a nice computer, once you see that she is sticking to it for 6 months. It will cut down on her blogging time by a lot! (Becky’s little note: I have a macbook pro. My old laptop was very slow and would freeze often. This has made it so much better. Plus, its a tax write-off!)
I really wanted her to quit blogging when I was working a lot and coming home and had to do more around the house because you were trying to start up your blog and it was taking up a lot of time. Especially in the summertime. That was tough. You wanted to work on it and the kids were off from school and it was nice out and the kids stayed up later, but you had to blog a little when they were up and that was tough. You were getting discouraged and so was I, but you figured it out and got a good flow and balance.
YOUR SCHEDULES WILL CHANGE.
She will have to restructure schedules. You aren’t really giving anything up, just look at it in a different light. You still spend time with the kids, but now you have figured out how to blog when they aren’t there, like during nap time or quite time. You write down ideas when the kids are up, but save the writing for night. You preschedule social posts in the morning, before the kids get ready for school. You are always thinking about it, but blogging about it later.
You don’t have the down time that you used to have. I don’t think you realized that you had that much down time, but now you see how much you can get done on your blog in the time that you used to spend doing just house stuff.
Expect crock pot meals.
Expect pizza or pasta night once a week.
Expect that she won’t get the laundry done every day or the house spotless every day.
READ PART THREE…. “Beck, it bothered me, at first, that you weren’t doing as much housework. I know, I know (he says this because I rolled my eyes). It just that”… click here to read the final part of this series.