Deb Ng has experience as a community manager and I know of other community managers as well in other companies and they all have one thing in common, they are excellent bloggers.  Deb recently wrote a blog post about community managers and how not to treat them when in an employment situation.  This is a good post and over all sketch at how companies should look at the position.  Don’t set you community manager up to fail is the gist of the post and to blindfold them and handcuff them it is really tough to do your job.

Bloggers are natural conversationalists.  They need to be able to keep up with the conversation and contribute to that conversation.  The thing they most need is knowledge of the subject and they need to have things to discuss, they need to have answers and they need to have expertise in what the conversation entails.  If this is not something that a social media manager or community manager offers, one they should be talking about you or your company and two they are ultimately going to fail at their job.

Tags: Deb Ng, Community Managers, Social Media Managers, Bloggers, Hiring Bloggers

I have been wondering about time lately.  Where do I get it and how can I make more of it.  It seems as though this is the gold standard in my business this days.  I wake up early go to bed late and never seem to leave the keyboard yet I never seem to be in the cockpit of this craziness long enough.  Part of the problem is I love the world of social media and always feel like I need to have a hand in it.  I often joke about the idea of having a USB port installed in my forehead to stay connected longer and more focused.  I didn’t see that chapter in Tim Ferris’ book about the 4 hour work week.  I try to work the four hour work week into an hour time slot into my already 80 hour week.

I talk to many businesses and they all seem to have the same problem.  The business owner or person leading the charge  always feels as though there is never enough time in the day to get all of it done.  Part of my problem is my infrastructure.  I have myself and that is about it when it comes to the "organization".  Yes I have an assistant that can help with some of the small stuff but my core business runs on me, myself and I.  This can be a problem.  I tried yesterday to get some reading done on blogs, RSS and other social networks and go back to writing and doing some of the things that I have ignored over the last few weeks since I have been traveling and I really enjoyed that luxury.  The problem with having that luxury is you have to pay for it somewhere.  I look today over my calendar after doing that and I had to jam my schedule with phone calls and other areas that need to catch now that I spent the day hooked into my network.  Obviously, time plays a big part in how you lay out a plan for your social media program.  I see social media as a commitment to doing it day in and day out.  Not something that can be done just now and then (please do  not look  at me when I preach this - do as I say not as I do).

The best way is to balance all of the activity and prioritize.  Yes, that is like telling my kids to clean their room.  It all works well in theory, but when it comes down to execution that is another thing entirely.  I try to help businesses with their social media plans and how they can work it into their already tough to crack schedules.  I need to take a page out of my own book.  Perhaps I need to hire my own social media manager.  Anyone need a low paying high intensity job for little to no praise with little to no guidance?  I have the job waiting here for you.

Photo via Leo Reynolds

I have been trying to explain to myself, perhaps even come up with excuses about why I haven’t updated my own personal blog, why I am a professional blogger and my own blogs are completely suffering from lack of attention.  It has to do with professional blogging versus personal blogging.  I started out as a personal blogger.  The personal hobby as it started then became a passion.  I love it.  Then I found a way to take my passion and make into a way I could earn money doing it.  That to me was a bonus.  As is with everything it seems I took that to the next level and then the next and so on until finally now I am a business owner doing it as a career.  This is where I forget about the old days and talk about how hard this fun passionate thing has become.

We all have heard me say I am like the saw about the cobbler’s son not having shoes and that is more of an excuse than I care to admit to, but on this occasion it is true.  I must first sit down and pound out a blog post for a client and by the time I get done with the blogging for the pay, the blogging for the fun seems not so fun anymore.  I had that same experience as a ski patrolman here in Colorado.  I loved to ski.  I then made it a job and it was not so fun anymore.  We always talk about doing what we love.  But what happens when your love becomes a job?  I am still wondering about this myself as I sit here and finally put my thought down here at a blog that has been completely neglected.  It seems that most of my epiphanies and all gone to client posts and this one gets the leftovers.  I guess if nothing else, a little whining now and then is easy to write about too.

Tags: Blogging, Professional Bloggers, Pro Blogging, Jobs

Perhaps Thord Daniel Hedengren of the Blog Herald has said it best:  Blogging probably is America’s Newest Profession, and it shows.

Over at The Wall Street Journal’s Busines website, Mark Penn states that there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.

There are, of course, those who disagree with this statement, but I am not one of those.  I think Penn is correct.

Here is the Wall Street Journal article.  What do you think of it?  Is Penn’s view of paid bloggers accurate?  Please.  Give us YOUR take on this! Let the comments commence:

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth. The Information Age has spawned many new professions, but blogging could well be the one with the most profound effect on our culture. If journalists were the Fourth Estate, bloggers are becoming the Fifth Estate.

What started as a discussion forum for progressive politics and new technologies has now been applied to motherhood, health care, the arts, fashion, dentistry — and just about every other imaginable area of life. What started as a hobby and an outlet for volunteers is becoming big business for newly emerging sites, for companies that now depend upon their reviews and for the people who work in this new industry.

All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story.

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around — but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.

The barriers to entry couldn’t be lower. Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars. But a subgroup of these bloggers are the true professionals who work at corporations, serve as highly paid blogging consultants or write for sites with substantial traffic.

Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours — 50 to 60 hours a week.

As bloggers have increased in numbers, the number of journalists has significantly declined. In Washington alone, there are now 79% fewer DC-based employees of major newspapers than there were just few years ago. At the same time, Washington is easily the most blogged-about city in America, if not the world.

Almost no blogging is by subscription; rather, it owes it economic model to on-line advertising. Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites. Some sites even pay writers by the click, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed.

The United Kingdom has just had a major scandal in which an official at 10 Downing Street had planned to leak to a friendly blogger all sorts of lurid stories about the Conservatives, complete with descriptions of secret sex tapes. But all of it was to be made up, and the friendly blogger who was going to post it all thought it was an “absolutely brilliant” idea. Someone blew the whistle, but had the plot gone through, this blogstorm could have played a major role in the upcoming election.

As a political pollster, I always observed that the poll that often got the most coverage was the one that was different from the others, regardless of whether it was right, or whether the pollster had any track record. This is true with opinions, too: those on the extreme right or left, or those that are the most titillating, seem to drive the most traffic through their sites. The center doesn’t seem to have either the edge or the passion to grab the same kind of traffic.

The implications of bloggers for hire are substantial. While many bloggers probably support unionization in general, they have no union of their own. Most have no benefits, yet they work long hours in front of computer screens which could cause a variety of health ailments. And the owners of the big sites most often pay their bloggers as freelancers, avoiding all of those taxes and benefits that newspapers have to pay for their writers.

For now, bloggers say they are overwhelmingly happy in their work, reporting high job satisfaction. But what happens if they, too, lose work; are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America’s Newest Profession.

It is hard to think of another job category that has grown so quickly and become such a force in society without having any tests, degrees, or regulation of virtually any kind. Courses on blogging are now cropping up, and we can’t be far away from the Columbia School of Bloggerism. There is a lot of interest now in Twittering and Facebooking — but those venues don’t offer the career opportunities of blogging. Not since eBay opened its doors have so many been able to sit at their computer screens and make some money, or even make a whole living.

And with millions of human-hours now going into writing and recording opinion, we have to wonder whether being the blogging capital of the world will help America compete in the global economy. Maybe all this self-criticism will propel us forward by putting us on the right track and helping us choose the right products. Maybe it will create a resurgence in the art of writing and writing courses. Or serve as a safety net for out of work professionals in the crisis. But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most , no formal training? Even the “Wild West” eventually became just the “West.”

Mark Penn Responds:

People have raised questions about the calculations on the numbers of bloggers for hire. First, I was surprised at how few studies there are on this and I believe there definitely should be more. So perhaps in the future I will do some original research, but for this piece we took the best we could find and referenced every number so people would know where they came from.

There is no question that the blogosphere, fast-growing as it is, has yet to nail down one way to measure itself or gauge its activity. But the most comprehensive sources we could find, conducted by reputable professionals, say there are over 22 million bloggers out there; and that 2% of bloggers are making their living blogging. Do the math, and you get roughly 450,000. It’s a fast-growing group and we ignore their needs, and influence, at our peril.

As far as the $75,000, the Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000. True, it’s not the median, but it is the average. We can quibble about how easy it is to make this kind of money — but the point is, the huge potential is there.

Here are some further details on the sources and calculations:

The Technorati Poll — The methodology stipulates that in order to qualify for the survey, Technorati “state of the blogosphere” respondents needed to be bloggers over 18 years old. The survey was hosted by Decipher Inc., was in the field from July 28, 2008 through August 4, 2008, and received 1,290 completed responses from 66 countries. Survey design and analysis was conducted by Dr. Michele Madansky and Polly Arenberg. Dr. Michele Madansky runs a media and market research consultancy specializing in online media and Internet startups. From 2003 to 2007, Michele was vice president of global market research for Yahoo! Polly Arenberg is a marketing strategist with more than 20 years of experience; her clients include Yahoo!, Microsoft and Flickr, as well as numerous start-ups.

The 2% of bloggers making a living comes straight from the Technorati Poll. The total number of bloggers–22.6 million–is supported by a research report from eMarketer (2% of 22,6 million is 452,000). This report was written in May 2008 by Paul Verna, a senior analyst there: “The Blogosphere report aggregates the latest data from marketing and communications researchers with eMarketer analysis to provide the information you need to make smart, accurate business decisions.”

The question of how much traffic it takes to make a living also comes from the Technorati report. We say it takes “about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year” and Technorati states those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors the average income is $75,000

If this post was nothing more than a "link bait" post, I fell for it hook line and sinker.  I just had to point everyone in the direction of John Chow’s blog where a guest post by professional blogger David Risley puts to post a great article about how professional bloggers and certainly in my opinion bloggers that want to blog for pay from others should also be marketers.  This is a great statement:

I think the simple truth of the matter is that most bloggers suck at marketing.

"I think the simple truth of the matter is that most bloggers suck at marketing. They just don’t understand it. The traditional model of “post often, throw some ads up there, cash the checks” is a VERY slow road to a full-time income. That isn’t marketing."

This is a great look at how I vet my bloggers and how I see them as marketers.  What are they doing to market their blog.  Those skills transfer over to being a great professional blogger. Are you a professional blogger that knows about how to market?

Tags: professional blogger, blog marketing, John Chow, Marketing

I wish I had found this while single and without responsibilities, I would be the first in line to try to get the job. How about a blogging job in paradise and get paid a decent wage to do it? That is what the folks at the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef are doing. The job appears to be closing in February so now is the time to get your resume into them and application. So blogging about what is happening sounds like the job for me when they describe it:

The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef is a newly created position. There are a few minor tasks that need to be taken care of, but the most important duty is to report back to Tourism Queensland (and the world) and let us know what’s taking place on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

That is a classic blog job it sounds like to me.

[HT: Welikely]

I was reading a blog post by Seth Godin this morning and he asks the question: What would a professional do? I can see the campaign now behind WWPD. All kidding aside Seth raises some good points in the blog post. In our everyday lives we are up against professionals. I consider myself a jack of all trades master of none, and I grasp his point with clarity. How do we as business owners compete with that? He suggests a list of how we can look at it:

When you compete with professionals, you have a problem, because generally speaking, they’re better at what they do than you are.

I think there are four valid ways the think your way out of this situation:

1. Hire a professional.

2. Be as good as a professional.

3. Realize that professional-quality work is not required or available and merely come close.

4. Do work that a professional wouldn’t dare do, and use this as an advantage.

I like the first option as someone that helps businesses by outsourcing talent like professional bloggers. He is correct in stating that this option requires time and money and these may not be the best options given your situation. I would argue that it is the best investment however, and your time and energy can be used in other areas for a small investment of money. The second option is a good if you can afford a little time and effort. The third option is for those that just want to get into the blogosphere and participate. This is still a good option for your business. There are benefits of being in the game that you will have over your competition. I really like that he put in the fourth option as this is what makes you stand out in the crowd. So what if you are not a professional blogger. You still have an edge because its your business and you can be flexible and passionate. Do something fun with it, and know that you are the one that is to blame if it goes wrong. This is a powerful way of blogging. Seth is right, you are the Captain of your own ship, and there is no way a professional blogger can compete with that way of doing business.

No, I am not hiring this person but I am seeing this as a new classified advertisement all over the web. I am seeing it on many new marketing company pages in their “We Are Hiring” page and I am seeing it come up in RSS feeds in my aggregator for hiring bloggers. Hiring of this position is the new black and a very sought after position in many companies. Personally I love it and want to tell all of the naysayers that “I told you so!”

There is a very large demand for this new position because it is a new commodity to know how to handle all of the media platforms, all of the applications and the many networks out there as well we being a “blogger”. I have said it many times before, as a professional blogger I have to wear many hats. These hats include all of the job descriptions as described in these jobs. The fine folks over at 6s Marketing have listed just this position and describe the duties as:

Responsibilities May Include:

* develop social media marketing strategies

* develop corporate blog strategies

* work on website content

* write blog posts

* develop legitimate inbound links

* social bookmarking with DIGG, del.icio.us, stumpleupon etc.

* Twitter for business including creating daily Twitter posts aka “tweets”

* maintain Facebook business pages

* locate and become active in social media groups

* stay current with new social media sites and platforms

* constant mindset of leveraging and branding in social networks

* Youtube channel setup

* social Bookmarking

* flickr account creation, description optimization, tagging, geotagging

* outsource and manage custom application development

* blog post moderation

* forum moderation

* attending Vancouver social media events

Requirements

* a passion for social media marketing and other inbound marketing strategies

* excellent written and communication skills

Desired Experience

* experience with social media, SEM and SEO

* maintaining a blog

* familiarity with WordPress or other blog tools

* developing web site and/or press release content

* minor graphic design and Photoshop experience

* 2 years experience in; marketing, communications, public relations, journalism or related field

* participation in the Vancouver social media scene

Now that I think about it I may put in for the position as I appeared to be qualified. Many bloggers a=out there are the perfect fit for this job. If interested contact the company at 6s Marketing.
Obviously, all of the above are things that we as bloggers do on a daily basis. This is typical of what companies are looking for as they call me when they want this person in their seat of their office computer. I spoke about blogging for a living in Vegas, I am speaking about it in Miami next month and in Denver the week after. Many bloggers want to do it and many companies need the help. My business is doing well!!

I was out in Vegas recently speaking at the Wordcamp Las Vegas conference. The folks there recorded the presentation I did via Ustream and now you can see it on the newly released Wordpress.tv. Wordpress.tv was announced at the Wordcamp Las Vegas and it is an exciting new site. I encourage you to check it out and of course also check out my presentation.

Live TV by Ustream

I will be doing a similar presentation coming up on February 28, 2009 at Wordcamp Denver.

If you are going to be in Denver in or around that time, please get registered and check out the speakers and the fun that will be had there.

Not that I am saying that the top 100 bloggers in Technorati are professionals, but you get the idea. There are some real dominators in this space and it was interesting of Brian Solis to put together this list. Take a look and see where your own application is being used by some of the top bloggers in the world. I would have liked to have seen this list 5 years ago. Moveable Type was the dominant force then, and Wordpress splashed on the scene with Matt Mullenweg and the crew. I would also like to see where we are a few more years from now.

I myself started out using Moveable Type. I was wanting to make sure I was using the best of the best available, and when I finally completed my research, they seemed to be the best. The reason for my change? It is very simple. I was overrun by spammers. I had a few problems with their “Black List” spam filter and I was inundated by spammers and porn sites and all the rest and I heard about this new blogging platform that made that better. I never looked back after that and I wonder what the UI is like for that platform now that I have been away for a while.I might just set up a MT blog and check it out. My problem is I am addicted to using a blog editors now. I love Windows Live Writer and get along with ecto because they have yet to show me any other options for my Mac Book Pro. In fact I have said that if I had a developer with some skills I could make an editor that we professional bloggers and the serious blog enthusiast would love to use.

Photo via via “How To Make A Badass Wordpress Logo” from 3nhanced.com