Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level

Jim Turner, founder of Bloggers for Hire and creator of the Genuine Blog (a “Daddy blog”) spoke about the challenges and triumphs of blogging professionally. He suggests that there are significant differences between those seeking to blog part-time and those looking for full-time professional blog-writing gigs.

Most part-time bloggers are hobbyists (so many yarn blogs!), stay at home moms and dads (blogging for diaper money, as Turner says), and students. Full-time bloggers, by contrast, tend to be professional communication, marketing, advertising, and PR specialists.

Companies hiring professional bloggers are generally going to have different criteria based upon the company’s knowledge and experience with blogs and bloggers. Small companies are most apt to look for one individual to blog on behalf of all departments. These companies will include startups and will have an interest in finding fast and flexible individuals who are willing to work on a small budget contract. Large companies are apt to have a communication/marketing/PR department that would oversee any blog-related communication and PR efforts. These guys are slow and inflexible and are likely to take their large budget to an agency for outsourced blogging. Media companies and Blogging networks have their own distinct foci, with Media companies relying on seasoned journalists to do their blogging efforts and Blogging networks offering meager per-post or revenue share payment options.

Whatever the environment you choose to do your professional blogging, expect that you will develop content which may include writing, videocasting, podcasting, and live/lifecasting on behalf of the contracted employer. Many companies will expect you to become their evangelist–so if you’re especially uncomfortable with the professional practices of an organization, you may want to reconsider the idea of blogging on their behalf.

In addition to developing content you will also be expected to converse with the company and their readership. This can take the form of e-mail, commenting, and other networked communication. Of course all of this conversation and communication requires quite a bit of monitoring. Who is reading these blog posts? What kind of buzz are they generating, is there any data mining that can be done? Finally, you have to report all of those data you collected while doing all of that monitoring. You’re going to need a fairly good grasp of analytics to do a good job with this last bit.

Blogging for a living is definitely do-able. Realize that it’s a new profession and as such the salaries may not be there yet–but on the other hand, this leaves you a lot of room to negotiate. If you can sell yourself and blogging as the solution to whatever 2.0 quandary an organization is having you may just be in a position to set your own salary. There is some expense involved in blogging for a living, the budgets vary widely at this point, and as a new profession there are very few professional guidelines and certainly no blogger union to keep everything on the level.