What do you do for a living

While attending a quiet New Year’s party with friends the other night the inevitable question came up, “what do you do for a living” and as I’m sure many of you can attest to this can sometimes be a bit challenging to answer.

Do I go with the standard “I’m an internet marketer” who works from home? Try explaining the various revenue streams I’ve got going on, and how they all add up to something of a living that I am continuing to grow in hopes of being an internet millionaire one day? I mean really what am I?

I usually say internet marketer as that covers quite a bit of ground, but when I actually thought about this for a minute I realized I actually do quite a lot in the typical week.

Here is a breakdown of just my previous week’s activities.

  • Writer – Wrote articles for my blogs
  • Proofreader – because I make mistakes like nobody’s business.
  • Editor – because even after I fix my mistakes I find things that need tweaking.
  • Advertiser – Negotiated ad placement for my sites
  • Promoter – Placed other peoples ads on my sites
  • E-Mail marketer – Because my list doesn’t grow itself, nor does it market to itself.
  • Affiliate marketer – Because it’s nice to promote products you didn’t create yourself. I mean seriously, who thinks I could have coded up Market Samurai? J
  • Graphic designer – Edited images for use on my sites, as well as in training material
  • Video producer – Created my first video, and added intro’s, music, and all that cool stuff
  • Technician – Had to troubleshoot a WordPress issue when my site went offline
  • Web Designer – to keep my sites pretty
  • Coder – To tweak those sites, and fill them with custom widgets that benefit my business.
  • Security Analyst – Dealt with trackback spam coming in from autobots worldwide
  • Manager – Though to be honest it was only I, my time, and my activities that I was managing this week.
  • Social media geek – Monitoring and growing social networks could easily be a full time job around here.
  • Executive – At the end of each week I sit down and go over metrics, results and opportunities so as to direct my business in the best possible direction the following week. (It can be quite easy to get into the trap of simply working in your business and forgetting to take a step back and getting a broader view of things.
  • Webmaster – I’m continually trying to appease the Google gods, and spend way too much time in Analytics, and Webmaster Tools trying to make sure all is good according to Google’s TOS. (Which by the way are way too vague, just tell me what I did wrong and I’ll fix it and never do it again… now could we move my site back up from page 100 to 2? LOL)
  • Freelancer – I do take on clients from time to time, and they have business needs that are just as important as mine, so when they have problems, I have problems and problems need solutions quickly!
  • Bookkeeper – It’s always a good thing to know if the money coming in is greater than the money going out.

Now I won’t go into a million more of these as I’m sure you get the picture, and if you run a blog or website you know exactly what I mean. The items on this list are just the tip of the iceberg, and represent nothing more than a typical day or week for me so answering the question “what do you do for a living” ended up turning into a conversation that lasted about thirty minutes and seemed to raise more questions for my audience than it answered.

If you’re a full-time blogger or internet marketer how do you answer this question? How do you find people typically react, and do they have questions about your lifestyle?

Please comment and share your views below.