Social media is magic.  Use it wisely or you’ll scare everybody away.

I’m going to assume that you’re all on Twitter, and tweeting away REGULARLY and at least daily, right?  Because if you’re NOT already on Twitter, we’ll need to start there, and not where I’d planned to start. . . . .

Ahem.  Everyone’s on Twitter, right?  Okay.

First item on everyone’s agenda:  Get rid of that obnoxious, robotic, automated DM that some people send to all new followers.  It’s horrendous.  Ditto for any popups you’ve got on any of your pages – people hate them.  Some people claim popups are good for business, but you’re driving away more people than you might think.  Me, for instance.

Next item: Be sure your Twitter account is attached to your Facebook account!  What does that do for you?  It cross-posts everything you put on Twitter to your Facebook status!

You DO have a Facebook account, right?  It was just a hypothetical question, of course.

Because, you know, if you DON’T use Twitter and Facebook and ideally use them together, you’re really missing out on a lot of attention.  In fact, these days, many customers, clients, friends, and potentials might not ever find you because Twitter and Facebook are where people look for other people nowadays.

Magazine sales are way down, and newspapers have shrunken to the size of a middle school newsletter, and any marketing done on them costs money.  Why not take advantage of Twitter and Facebook and all the perks they offer?

And while I’m lecturing you, PLEASE remember that any kind of marketing you do that doesn’t involve conversation is nothing but annoying.  You want to friend people, not pimp them.  In, among, and around telling us what you can do for us, let us see you and your kids and your dog, and keep us posted about your Aunt Matilda’s stroke.

People in general would much rather give their business to a friend than to a stranger in a suit who knows (and cares) nothing about them except what’s in their wallets.

And if you can’t do this yourself, and find yourself paraphrasing Dr. McCoy on “Star Trek” and saying things like “Dammit, Jim, I’m a businessperson, not a writer!” then you definitely need to contact Jim – Jim Turner, that is – and have him set you up with a writer.

Preferably me.

Some of the best social media I’ve seen has not been on the internet.  It’s been encounters in real life that made me hurry home to look up a business on the internet.

A casual encounter in the mall, or in a doctor’s waiting room, or while standing in a four-mile-long slow-moving line in WalMart, and someone who started out as a total stranger can turn into a valuable business colleague.

A few friendly words are exchanged.  Then a few business cards are traded, and like kids on a playground who discover another source for baseball cards,  a relationship of sorts has begun.

We must always remember that first impressions are of vital importance.  If that rude, uncaring person in the elevator turns out to be the business rep you’ve got an appointment with, you are not going to be able to rid yourself of the image of the rude bum in the elevator.  Whatever this person says or does now will always be secondary in your mind; real life trumps all.

Therefore, let us all be and stay aware of how our actions and words can make or break a relationship, be it business or personal.

We here at Bloggers for Hire will strive to put your best foot forward for you, so when your clients and potential clients seek you out online, they will find exactly what you hope they’ll find.

I am one of Jim Turner’s writers, and as such, I do a lot of writing for various businesses.  I become very attached to “my” businesses, and it’s extremely important to me to do a better than merely “good” job for them.  I want to do a GREAT job for them.

This is one reason why I go to so many conferences.  At each conference, I learn something, and often many things, that will enable me to do a better job for my businesses.

No one conference can do it all.  Some conferences specialize in networking; others focus on the tech aspect.  Some are more “social” than anything else.  Some are mostly opportunities for brands to connect to people.  At all of  “my” conferences, I focus mainly on social media and connections, which, to me, are the most important of all.  Remember, though, that the Bloggers For Hire writers all write about different things and perform all kinds of services for their businesses; it’s just that social media and connections are what I focus on, for mine.  After all, nobody can possibly know everything about anything!  However, I strive daily to learn more and more about things I can do for my clients.

I got back from BlogWorld on Sunday night, and already my email is full of messages about social media and connections, and other aspects of this business.  Does this mean that the conference was a success for me?  Darn right it does.  I will answer each and every one of those emails, even the ones that don’t really concern what I do.  It might even be that one of those emails will inspire me to do even more for my businesses!

That’s the thing about Bloggers for Hire, you see.  Jim tries to match each business with a writer who can best serve that business.  I’ve had as many as nine clients at once, each one uniquely special to me.  I’ve learned more while researching and writing for these companies than I learned in all the years of grad school, in fact.  Remember: it’s not possible to write knowledgeably about a business, or anything else, unless one knows a considerable lot about that business, or anything else.

I would venture to say that all of Jim’s writers feel the same way about their clients.  I know I feel as if I am an employee of my businesses, and as such I try my absolute level best to give them the best posts I can.  When my clients profit because of my contribution, it’s a matter of great pride and thankfulness to me.

As for Blogworld, last weekend in Vegas. . . . it was the best conference yet.  I met some of the most awesome, knowledgeable people, learned an amazing lot of useful, fascinating things, and had a fantastic time.

I sincerely hope I can use all of my new knowledge for YOUR business.

I just got back from BlogIndiana, and I can’t wait to use some of the skills I learned on my clients’ blogs!

Many of the Bloggers For Hire writers attend writing/blogging/social media conferences faithfully; I am one of those and I love it!  Conferences help me hone my skills and keep up with the many new things that any internet business simply must keep track of.  I believe that to fully appreciate the honing of one’s skills by attending conferences, we simply must attend more than one kind of conference.

In other words, we attend some conferences for certain reasons, and we attend other conferences for other reasons.  Often, these reasons overlap, and just as often, they do not.  I don’t expect my every professional need to be satisfied by every conference; I, like everyone else,  need more than one, to wit, a combo of conferences.

In the long run, however, by attending various types of conferences for various reasons, I have learned far more than I ever learned in graduate school.

The best thing about conferences by far is that the more things I learn, the more efficient and useful I can be to my clients.  I hope one of them is you.

I have heard a number of companies that start blogs and they go very well the first few weeks of the life of the blog.  You can see the passion and you can see the excitement behind those early posts, and then it starts to wane and they start to fall off in number and even the posts that come out on the published side are not much more than going through the motions.  The problem is the honeymoon is over the the real meat of why they began the blog has left.  So in the immortal words of the Wendy’s lady, “Where’s the beef?”

Mark Thompson has a post over at Search Engine Journal on “10 tips to Supercharge Your Blog’s Content“.  It has some really good points in it especially the one about hiring a blogger.  A blogger can be a great asset to your company when if comes time when the honeymoon is over and the blog begins to lack real content or staying with the analogy, the meat.

The Bloggers For Hire portion of his post states:

For some blogs this may be out of the question. If you simply do not have the funds to pay for professional bloggers, you can probably skip this section. Many of the best bloggers out there are the best for a reason and in return, require you to pay them for their services. However professional bloggers typically have a lot of experience in the industry, so they can add valuable content to your blog that will many times gain a lot of industry recognition.

My advice would be to maybe not find the most influential blogger in the industry, but to find someone with a few years experience that has written for a number of other blogs. You can probably hire these bloggers for $25-$50/post and it can be of very good quality. Also keep in mind the reach they may have socially. Usually these bloggers will promote their content on other sites as well, in turn getting you lots of additional traffic.

SEO firms know that with good quality content comes better SEO results.

Mark is right on the money with the idea behind hiring a blogger.  He has a pretty good handle on the budget and the concepts.  Mark is in the SEO world and those are the companies that understand beefy content most.  SEO firms know that with good quality content comes better SEO results.

Hiring a quality blogger that can take your blog over and give it the attention it needs is crucial.  If you want to talk to us about getting a blogger to take the mundane out of your social media marketing plan, contacts us.  We can help and we know the process and the importance of good quality content.  Consider us your blogging butcher!  We can show you the meat.

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

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]

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.

I will be living it up in Vegas but at the same time talking about companies hiring bloggers and how blogger can earn money while using their skills as bloggers.
Of course the idea of living it up in Vegas is relative as I am actually working. At the same time I am also revamping the site a little at One By One Media, as we are trying out some new look and feel and upgrading the WordPress application to the new version of 2.7.
I attended the event today and listened to some real rock stars. I have some celebrities I have to follow tomorrow as well that will make me have to bring my A game. I am really looking forward to it. You can even watch the event tomorrow live on their live feed using the Ustream application for their event. You might say I’m in my church away from church.