Hey guys, it’s Kernook here, coming to you with a behind the scenes look at the blogging lifestyle. What you’re about to see lacks polish, and that’s the point. I’m going to show you what one of my workspace areas generally looks like on a day-to-day basis.

No more, no less than that simple reality.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t my gaming set-up for Twitch. I wouldn’t even begin to show off the absolute mess at the moment. There’s a lot of clutter upon that desk currently that isn’t reflective of the gaming sphere. I was doing video editing, and that takes a toll on my surroundings. That entire office looks like a tornado hit it right at this very second.

I was video editing for 12 very long, incredibly tedious hours this weekend. It’s going to look like that after that kind of grind. There’s a soda bottle graveyard and plates set aside because I need to do the dishes. I’ll be doing that later today… the fact I’ve even said that much tells you what I’ll be doing after I’m done writing this post.

However I do have one other “workspace” that’s still far from “perfect” and likely abysmal to many. However, this is where I write a vast majority of these blog posts, so let’s dive into it.

What you can’t see is that I’m sitting in a rocking chair, but the sight in front of me looks like this:

A common and flat out stupid misconception is that all bloggers have a perfect workspace, neat and tidy all the time. This asinine idea isn’t always true. We don’t all have the perfect haven to work on our posts. That’s just what we want you to think.

Like all things having to do with “buzzwords”, product management, productivity, or anything else going on, it’s just a fallacy to a degree. We want to give you an image that makes us likable. Let’s be really honest here, how do you think of a blogger?

Are they walking around with a five-o-clock shadow, grumbling at their computer in a lackluster space? Are they gritting their teeth as racket and distraction drives them crazy?

I’d hazard a guess, probably not… but, it’s true. We have lives, families, insanity just like everyone else. Daddy bloggers for example (yes, fathers blog about child-rearing too), I do not envy the one I know personally.

I’ve seen the mayhem. He may be trying to write a post, meanwhile he’s got a ten year old being obstinate about homework, a toddler jabbering nonsense in his ear, and a newly adopted set of twins that aren’t even a year old yet. They demand his full and complete attention as a solid care giver and father.

In the face of day-to-day imperfection that children bring with them, he is still a blogger. Somehow, he manages to be a blogger and keep the household from falling to pieces. He gets dinner on the table before his partner gets home, and his family life is very well put together.

As a blogger though, I hate to say this but he doesn’t even have a desk. No, I’m not kidding. He blogs from his smart phone or on his tablet at the kitchen table. It can take days for him to write a single post, because he has a busy life, he’s a full time dad and blogger about all things fatherhood… but I digress.

He’s still a professional blogger, a breadwinner for his family.

See, people have this image of professional bloggers. Unless we live in a perfect world, perfect household, where there’s never a thing out of place and all the chores in life magically do themselves, those images are staged or sugar-coated.

We’ve cleaned up first. We waited until all distractions from the outside world were out of our way. We’ve taken the BEST Instagram worthy photo that you could… because that’s what we’re expected to do.

Sometimes though, we blog in lackluster conditions. Right now my family is blasting the baseball game from two rooms away, and I am sitting here trying to write a post. The particular Gateway laptop in front of me is over 10 years old and I use it to draft concepts. I toy around with ideas when I’m on-the-go.

It’s a small laptop, so it fits in compact spaces. I do all kinds of simple “puttering” and marginal tasks with it, nothing too complicated.

For the beefier stuff, I have a Chromebook… which, yes, is currently sitting on the foot stool for the sake of the next image. Generally, the thing is in my lap… as I type this, it is in my lap, and will stay in my lap.

Yep, you can see WordPress in the background, because I was preparing to type this post when I decided to take the images… and I took them on the fly, no preparation required.

Why did I do this?

Because…

I want you to see that you don’t have to be like the other bloggers to be successful. If you can write blog posts consistently despite the occasional absolute ciaos or imperfection of daily life, you can be a blogger.

A successful one…

So what else is on that end-table? Beyond the simple technology, you can see my soda glass and my cigarettes with ashes having littered it. Oh, yeah and I should tell you that the Chromebook is the cheap one by the way, not one of the exorbitantly expensive monstrosities.

However, I hope this illustrates the point.

When we see “professional” bloggers online, we like to think all of them have it figured out. A perfect workspace, top of the line gadgets and gizmos, a monogrammed mug, because why not!

What do I have?

Cigarette ashes on the table, and cat hair currently clinging to the outside of my soda glass because Sabin was just trying to get into it. I can look out into my front yard. It’s not a glorious yard, just a normal one.

My backdrop is the racket outside, the neighborhood kids look like they’re trying to figure out how to use skateboards in the subdivision. Meanwhile, my family members are watching a baseball game. It isn’t perfect… it is so antithetical to what we want to see from a “blogger”.

However I am a blogger… more than that I’m a freelance blogger, I make my living this way using freelancing mills under other pen names I’m not supposed to disclose, as writing mills typically don’t like when you do that. Either way, the point stands.

Yes, you can make a living this way without having all of the high-end tech in the world. Yes, you can do the grind it takes to reach success despite that. As long as you come to grips with the “have nots” you too, can be a blogger.

There’s only a few things you actually NEED to be a good blogger, and they’re all low cost to start off, they just take effort. Here’s all you really need:

1. Some way to access the internet, and something that can let you work with wordpress.com (free site is just fine for a newbie).
2. A few social media accounts (also free).
3. Regular access to a computer that can function on the internet well enough to type on (it doesn’t even have to be yours).
   1. Tip: Fresh out of high school I would go to other houses to blog. If you have family or friends, ask around. Do something nice for them in return.
   2. Tip: Use your mobile phone or tablet if it’s powerful enough.
4. Search up the tools to educate yourself about how to be a blogger; SEO, Keywords, niches, things like that.

That’s it, that’s all you need to start off. Read other blogs, use social media, network often, and even on a free website you’ll start to get the hang of things. That’s the way you want it to be… invest and upgrade when you feel confident enough to do so.

If you can be consistent, start up at a few mills. Yeah, they’ll pay low, it isn’t a get rich quick scheme. Even so, blogging for mills will teach you about the kind of client you want to work for.

I would love it if The Demented Ferrets could become my main source of income. I’d like to spend my time here, full-time… perfecting this space and all that it has to offer. For now that’s just not the case, and I have to pay my bills elsewhere. However, I am a blogger and I do it for a living. A little support goes a long way. If you’d like to help me attain that, you can.

It takes a fair bit of time, but you can be a blogger too. However you need to start slow. If you’re on a budget, get your own free blog. Post up content two or three times a week. Get work at a mill, that way you aren’t tied down to “set hours” in the same way a 9-to-5 is.

Take a client here and there, earn a little pocket change. That will help you to hone your craft, believe it or not. It’ll give you a better taste of the industry at large, and what it takes to be a blogger.

That’s the reality… you don’t need bells and whistles early on. You need hard work and the gumption to try. That’s about it.