Honest answer? In the closet. No, I’m not talking about the gay bloggers. Just in the Closet, no sexual innuendo, like Tom Cruise. even semi-professional bloggers say their online efforts are just a bonus to their “real” readers,and that their “real” work is to write for magazines and newspapers. Even superstars like Ricardo Noblat, who reaches a far broader audience online, still presents himself as an old school journalist who happens to blog.
Amateur bloggers don’t like the idea of making money with a blog. Actually they despise it. Brazil’s catholic background explains it a lot. When a priest writes in a national newspaper that “profit is a sin”, and nobody disagrees, it’s hard to be proud of making money.
The “early bird catches the worm” preached by protestant faith finds no echoes here. Only the roman-catholic “The Lord will provide”. No self-made-man for us, sir. Oh, and 100% of all rich entrepreneurs and industry men are corrupt and stole their way up. Yeah, right.
I know it’s strange, but the idea of making money with a blog offends a lot of people. They’re reading your content for free, sometimes stealing it, they KNOW it takes time to create such content but they DO NOT WANT YOU TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF IT. I remember reading a few posts where people declared (with all the exclamation marks): I’ll not return to such blog because there are ads in it and there’s no place in the Internet for advertising. ‘
Well, baby, let me quote Dr Johnson here:
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
Dr Cardoso agrees and expands the diagnostics to modern blogs: Envy. “I can’t write as good as this guy but I don’t want him making money out of it, while I need a real job to pay my bills”. Life’s a bitch, huh?
So, to make money in Brazil through blogging, two things are imperative:
- Don’t be perceived as a ProBlogger.
- Don’t brag about your earnings. No matter if you’re driving a Ferrari with a license plate “THX-ADSENSE”, don’t brag about it. Remember, poor is beautiful, complain all the time about how it was so much easier “back in the old days”.
Above all, remember Tom Jobim: “Brazilians take other people’s success as a personal offense”.