Day in the life of a full time blogger

It’s been nearly nine months since I quit my teaching job of 17 years to work solely on craftwithcartwright. I regularly get asked about what my job actually is and what do I do all day? So here is a typical day in the life of a full time blogger.

what does a blogger do all day?

I can obviously only speak from my experience. Mine of course will be very different than someone who writes about travel. As my site is mainly focused on crafts and DIY with a few lifestyle posts and recipes.

But basically my day is made of these main parts:

social media
content creation
photography
research
SEO
admin

My working day starts straight after I drop my children off at school. Coming from a teaching background I like a structured day and so most days follow the same schedule.

9am – home from the school run, kettle on and check my social media apps on my phone. Respond to messages and share new posts to groups on Facebook.

Then I head up to my office and craft studio in the attic of our house.

How many hours does a full time blogger work?

I work from 9 till 3 Monday to Friday with about a half an hour break for lunch. This is my main time where I’ll be up in the studio. After the kids have been picked up I normally catch up on house work, and cook dinner. Then in the evening I’ll probably do another hour, but that may be downstairs if I’m making something that can be done in front of the t.v

So it works out at 32.5 hours a week.

From 10 till three my day will be a revolving carousel of researching new ideas. Writing the content for my site, photographing projects that are complete and scheduling them to social media.

I also try to look back over old posts and update their SEO (search engine optimisation). As this site has been going for over ten years, and when I started this blog, I really didn’t know what I was doing.

I try and avoid the admin side as it’s very boring, but I’ll drip feed in replying to emails and updating my accounts. Otherwise I know my inbox will have a thousand unread messages and my tax return seems to come faster each year!

Can blogging be a full time time job?

The hours can certainly be a full time job! But it all depends on how much you want to earn and whether you want to spend all your time working on a certain topic.

I hadn’t worked full time as a teacher for about 10 years, so I was used to a smaller income and my blog earns roughly equal to what I would be bringing in from teaching.

I also LOVE this job far more than I ever did teaching, but I know it wouldn’t be for everyone.

How much do craft bloggers make?

I have heard of crafts bloggers making over a hundred thousand dollars a year! I make no where near that but it comes close to my part time teachers salary. This is mostly made up from my ad revenue and some sponsored work I do with brands.

In the future I’d like to incorporate my shop onto the site, so I can move away from etsy and ko-fi as I pay fees on my sales.

How do I become a craft blogger?

Becoming a craft blogger is easy and can be done for free if you use blogger or the free wordpress sites. If you are looking to make money from it, my recommendation would be to focus on a niche craft that not many people are writing about as many topics – such as cricut crafts are very popular and if you want your posts to be seen it can be very difficult to get them in front of readers.