Just last month I celebrated being self-employed for two years, and this month marks my one year anniversary as a paid/pro blogger. Before I was blogging (for pay) I was doing other work from home, as a virtual call center (VCC) worker, which I am still doing, but thanks to blogging that has been scaled down to make time to blog.

My blogging experience so far has been more than I could imagine, having some ups and some downs but overall it has been very positive. Ranging from simple things such as friendly comments, to playing with and testing products to going to CES this past January.

My first paid/pro post was actually on April 11, 2007 and it was just a post, nothing that I am particularly proud of, nor am I really embarrassed by it. Since then I have written a total of 1543 paid posts, which averages out to be about 128 a month. I have gone from a blogger to a blogger/editor and will hopefully be able to continue to grow as a blogger, in terms of experience, pay and hopefully some name recognition within the community.

The recent article about stress on bloggers does have some truth to it, but it really depends on the individual situation and the type of blogging you do. Personally I have some stress, as I think most tech bloggers feel, because its all about time and urgency and being first. But my stress comes mostly from having to find and also keep quality writers, then once that happens a little more stress comes when those chosen writers are not actually writing or just writing badly. But that is why everyone should have a stress reliever, and the stress from blogging is certainly not enough to give me a heart attack.

You have to find a stress reliever, mine is endurance sports, triathlon, running and biking. I do some of my best thinking when out of the “office” getting exercise. I often think to myself that I should run with my iriver recorder instead of my ipod shuffle to make sure I do not lose these thoughts. Heck, most of this post was put together during the run I just finished. I am now standing here (at the kitchen breakfast bar), typing on my MacBook, still listening to my iPod while I struggle to get as many notes down to make sure I can finish this post the way I though it up during my run.

I like to think that stress comes with risk and without risk there is no reward. For me the risk is being self-employed, which is the same as my reward, being self-employed. For me my reward is not about being incredibly wealthy (although that would be nice) but to control my time and enjoy what I do, I worked a regular 9-5 for way too long and was always looking for a way out due to feeling trapped. Not too mention being self-employed allows me to have a flexible time schedule and be around for my wife and two daughters more often.

I am happy with my blogging up to this point, but on some level feel like I could have done a lot more progress wise. Moving forward, within the next few months I hope to expand a little more, and make myself available on more sites and cover a little more variety of topics, perhaps picking up a post here and there as a guest for a larger site and in turn (hopefully) gain some additional exposure. I would like to move into writing about being an entrepreneur, the internet and overall general topics that someone who wants to make a living online would benefit from. While I do not yet consider myself an expert, I do have a fair amount of experience that could benefit someone just beginning their journey.

I also hope, while I am happy where I am at now (pay wise) to be able to increase that amount and start to do virtual call center (VCC) work less and rely more on blogging, because after all, for me its about time management and blogging allows for more freedom than VCC work. The VCC work gives me some flexibility, but I still have to commit to certain hours on a week to week basis.

Overall I do consider myself very fortunate and sometimes catch myself smiling and thinking about just how lucky I am to have the freedom and flexibility.

I originally began this post with intentions of making this into just one post but was (in my opinion) better broken down into a few parts due to size, so keep reading for some follow-up posts in the short-term future.