Blog Professional

While Tris is doing the Office 2.0 gig in San Francisco in a couple of weeks, I’ll be in the Windy (Flooded) City of Chicago in September.  If you are going to be near Chicago or if you want to come out and hear some great speakers, and participate in a wonderful conference about business blogging, join me at the Blog Business Summit 2007.

Many people want to know how they can get a job as a professional blogger or get a job earning a wage at doing what they do every day anyway for free.  Easy, come out and meet me in Chicago and I’ll get you on our rolls to be in line for the next company that wants to get into the world of business blogging.  If you are a company and you have no idea how to start into the world of online social media and need someone to manage your company’s online presence, why not hire a blogger to do the work for you?  We can help you get set up with a person to help manage your blog and online social media campaign.  We specialize in getting companies into the world of blogging.

If you want to come to the show and participate in the conference, please do, and use our special code to get into the conference at a special discounted rate. When registering, please use the code P65CHI and you will get an instant savings! Once you get to the conference, look me up, I’ll be the one that is having lots of fun and talking to lots of different people about the exciting world of professional blogging.

If you think you’re stumbled on posts here on Blog Professional, you have because Sticky Blogs is stealing the content from here.  We are in the process of sending Cease and Desist orders.  But want the best part?  The site makes it look like they are helping us.  Rich Benvin has the unmitigated gaul to say Bloggers For Hire is a contributor to the site.

Gee, Jim and I haven’t seen a cheque from them for the ad revenue.  Gee, we weren’t asked if our content could be re-published.

So Rich, just cut it out.  Take the site down.

Like yesterday.

If you aren’t reading this in your feed reader (or FeedBlitz e-mail) this content may be stolen. Please report the offender to legal AT onebyonemedia DOT com.

My new playground? Facebook.

Here are some stats that are astounding (Source: Shel Israel)

* Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January.

* 35 million users today. Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.

* Half user are outside college. That number was zero in Sept. 2006.

* 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007

* Average visitor stays 20 minutes

* Most growth is among people over age 25.

* 47,000 Facebook groups.

* #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.

* More than 2000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.

I've been connecting with friends, colleagues, and new acquaintances at Facebook, and it's been enjoyable.

It's also a fantastic platform to discover interest groups (think: brainstorm ideas).

Speaking of groups, I've created an open group called: "Beginners Guide to Mastering Web Basics" - a place where
technophobes can hang out.

Here's the URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5668471204

I'll be providing some video tutorials targeted for beginners, and hopefully even technophobes can learn a thing or two

[Jeff Foxworthy voice] If you are one, that's great!

If you're savvy, you're who I need to speak to. You see, you may have a host of friends or family that who're constantly hounding you about how to do this, how to do that - sound familiar?

It's my hope that we can help them out in a non-intimidating, social community place like Facebook, where they can learn basics about the Web.

There are no opt-ins (except if they don't have a Facebook account, and need to register for one to connect with us) so no need to fear a flood of emails to their inbox.

So whaddya think?

Here's the URL to the group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5668471204

See you there!

ps. I'm hoping that the savvy ones can offer little tidbits of how-to's along the way too! Every little bit counts, and it'll grow to be a huge vault of knowledge that will help a bunch of folks!

According to a post by Marshal Kirkpatrick, hiring bloggers is becoming more popular.  So much so, he is getting cold calls from companies looking to hire a blogger.

I’ve been getting so many inquiries lately from companies looking to hire bloggers, and so many responses to messages I send out about them over twitter, that I’m losing track.

This is not an anomaly, as Tris and I get calls regularly and emails from people wanting to hire a blogger.  They are very excited at the idea until its time to pay the bill.  They feel it’s a nothing job for nothing pay.  My response is usually the same, hire a full time employee and let me know your bottom line at the end of the month or do the daily blogging yourself and let me know the amount of time, energy and difficulty you feel the job entails.  They tend to hire a blogger right away when they have done this comparison.  Marshall is an evangelist when he writes:

I believe that top-tier bloggers that will be tied closely to your brand should be paid between $5k and $8k per month. Pay your blogger well, communicate with them clearly about expectations and if it doesn’t seem worth it after some time then fire them and find a new one.

If you are going to pay a blogger $500-$1000/month, it had better not take very much time or that blog had better be a great way for said blogger to gain visibility and move onto a better gig. That’s what AOL Weblogs Inc. paid me for a whole lot of posts, but the blog was great for my career.

I wish all of my clients have been referred by Marshall because then they may know the sticker shock coming in to the game.  Send them my way Marshall and I promise they will be put in very capable and good hands.

I was bragging a bit about my night last night because I was able to sit and read a book in the quiet of my own home.  It is not normally I can do with 4 kids 7 and under trying to upset my routine in every way possible.  I usually only have time to gobble up the more than 2000 RSS feeds I read everyday, but for some reason I was able to finish those earlier than normal during the day and I found myself with some free time.  A luxury of the highest in my home.  The book I devoured in one evening was “The Road“, by Cormac McCarthy and published through Random House.  The book itself is not the most important part of this post, but the fact that I was able to actually read written words on a page was important.

In blogging we tend to write our posts quickly and in a conversational style that sometimes loses the reader as we sometimes speak to our own minds and the only person it makes sense to is us as the writer.  The reader is left with blank spot where your message was lost.  Conventional style writing, as in authors of fiction writing tend to be very descriptive with use of adjectives and other forms that place us in their minds and we absorb their pictures and the message it brings.  Reading that book last night brought me to an epiphany that I too had begun to fall into a style of wiring that may be too close to home and I may be losing readers.  Sometimes you have to reach out and rattle the chain of the reader and have them understand and see that picture or message in your own mind.  We can all be better bloggers and better at content production with just a little reading.  By the way, I really recommend the book.  It was a gift from my mother-in-law of all things.

I have been following a small debate in forums and other online social meeting places and have been trying to keep track of the ongoing dialogue of outsourcing bloggers.  Basically, when people begin to talk about outsourcing, the discussion drifts to paying people very small wages for work performed that would normally be higher priced if kept within a company.  More specifically, outsourcing has been tied to very poor economy countries such as India and Philippines and others.  In fact, outsourcing is what we here at Bloggers For Hire are doing on a daily basis.  We make it affordable for companies to have a full time blogger and a social media manager.

I ran across an interesting interview of my friend Jeremy Wright, CEO of b5media, that I thought I would pass along to our readers here.  One question and answer I really thought hit it out of the park was:

Should corporates hire people exclusively for the purpose of blogging?

That is certainly a direction some corporations are starting to go ? whether it?s Blogger Relations team members that exist as part of marketing, or Social Media professionals who work in sales or corporate communications.

On the other side, some companies are simply training their sales/ marketing/ PR/ communications teams on blogging principles so that they can engage in the activities themselves (instead of having dedicated folk).

Ultimately, the best mix will depend on each company?s corporate culture and whether an individual champion for blogging would work best or a properly trained team would.

Jeremy Wright is certainly a guy that would know how to answer that question, he has been in the blogging world more than most. 

Check out the interview, as I think Jeremy is always spot on.

We have seen companies both large and small trying to understand the “blogging principals” as Jeremy refers to and we have helped them by allowing them to test the water a little and have a temporary employee of sorts, sit behind the keyboard and allow them to see how it works in real time and in real life.  It is a unique opportunity to be able to pilot a program for your company and to see how the world of blogging could impact your company’s communication, PR and advertising areas. 

Outsourcing is becoming more popular as we all begin to live more in the virtual world.  Companies are able to hire a person that doesn’t need to spend all day in a cubicle farm but perhaps a couple hours in the evening or morning providing good quality content and a voice for their company blog.  This person can also be hired for much less than a full time employee with the accompanying price of benefits and taxes and all the other things that come with employing a blogger.

Being a professional blogger is far more than being just a blog writer.  When professional blogging, it is required that a blogger be a technologist, a social media manager, a reader,a marketer, and a networker.  You have to have a little knowledge about PR in addition to all the other duties. 

Many of our clients that have hired us to blog for them, have an expectation that the blogger will be doing more than just writing good quality content on the company.  They want the blogger to participate in the conversations going on in places like Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and all the other places where people go to socialize.  This requires the blogger to know how to use these tools and know how to communicate by using these applications.

If you are a company hiring a blogger, please take the time to ask if they are well versed in the social mediasphere.  Sure they have a great writing style, and good grasp of English, spelling and grammar, but do they know how to set up a group in Facebook?  These are tools all bloggers need to know to be successful.

When hiring a blogger, there are many things that a company should ask about the blogger, the blogger’s background and other questions you would normally ask of an employee about to join your company.

Being a blogger is a cool new profession.  Companies are hiring bloggers at a fever pitch since the new angle to online marketing advertising and public relations is through social media.  If you want to be a professional blogger, now is a great time to get a job.  If you want to be a pro blogger and work for yourself, there are a few cons to pro blogging as this article states.

I especially like the idea that:

There is something about problogging that requires a strange personality. One that can deal with being alone for long periods of time, and yet that same person also has to be able to network, and be interesting to be around. This type of personality is rare, and also a bit odd, and so that is why it is in the con?s column of being a problogger.

I for one have far too many people (little ones) around to sometimes get any pro blogging done, but I like the idea that you have to be a little schizophrenic.