Looking over my other blogs and then looking at the stats of my personal Daddy Blog, I realized that I have lost a little of the joy I had in blogging.  The sheer passion for hitting publish and wondering who would read my post and whether they would leave a comment that would spur a discussion.

These are the the joys of blogging that I myself experience when coming up with that perfect anecdotal post or that well thought out piece that I’m proud to publish for all to read.  My Daddy Blog sits dormant like a ship caught on a reef taking on water.  I last updated it in October of 2007.  The anniversary of its birth is coming up on March 1, and I am wondering if I will be putting it out to pasture or if I can make it come back like the Phoenix rising from its ashes.  I’m not sure of the answer just yet.

So what happened to the joy of blogging I was experiencing?  It’s still there on a personal level, but now I am a professional.  I am paid to blog, and help others get paid to blog as well.  It’s now a job and a new career.  I was told once by someone much wiser than myself that I should not make a job of what I enjoy otherwise it will kill the joy.  The context there was working in the golf industry.  I went against the advice and it did kill some of the joy, but I still love golf.  I am wondering if the joy of blogging has had its own wound that makes it a dying hobby.  I suppose time will tell in that regard.  The first thing I must do is update that Daddy Blog and see if the joy comes back.  No, I won’t start in on the metaphor of setting something free, the profound nature of this post is already getting away from me.

How about you?  Are you a professional blogger?  Have you lost the joy of blogging now that its a job or a career?

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. 

I recently ran across a post by Hillel at Jackson Fish Market regarding thoughts on hiring a blogger instead of trying to find a high priced MBA to spend all your money on a marketing campaign. I think the advice given to his friend that wanted to hire someone to handle a marketing campaign was solid advice.

Instead of hiring this person you could hire a “blogger plus”. In other words… you start a blog targeted at your target audience. It’s not about your offering per se… It’s from your company and all about the trials and tribulations of being a member of your target audience and what they spend their time doing. In fact, the best person would be a former member of that audience talking about how hard it is. Someone with personality and excellent communication skills. In addition to furious blogging (I mean 3-5 short posts per day, 5 days a week) they would troll discussion boards and forums targeted at your audience making several relevant posts a week. They could also do podcasting and videoblogging if they had interesting ideas that would best be expressed in those forms. The url should be it’s own, and not a subdomain of your main site. The blog would be “brought to you by Your Company”

This is exactly the pitch we give to many of our companies that approach us for our help in a marketing campaign through the use of professional bloggers.

Tags: Blog Marketing, Hiring Bloggers, Professional Bloggers, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

As a professional blogger, typically you have an agreement with your client to post x times/week (or the like). Most of the time I’m sure you don’t have a problem keeping up. Post everyday or something to keep things flowing. Awesome. Then something happens. For whatever reason you get behind. I’m not talking about not posting on Tuesday and it’s Wednesday, I’m talking about getting a week or more behind.

It happens to all of us. Really. It’s a big deal for you and your client, but it does happen. There are some easy ways to deal with it to get you out of dutch with your client and back on track.

First thing to do is see exactly how far behind you are. When I’m behind I try to just double up on posts. Now if you’re really behind, then you might have to triple up, but I wouldn’t go more than three posts a day. Also don’t post them all at once. Spread them out over the day (morning, noon, night for three– morning and noon for two). Wordpress lets you do this easily in the post editing area (change Timestamp).

Then let your client know. They probably know already, but a good accounting up front is important. Make sure you tell them how many posts you think you’re behind, how you’re going to get caught up, and how long it will take.

Simple, see?

Yes, it might take burning the midnight oil and I’d blog on weekends to get a couple extra days in there (since you are behind … you should), but you’ll catch up.

Tags: professional blogging, blogging tips, pro blogging

One of our star bloggers was asking me about putting his typing speed on his resume.  As is the case with all of our bloggers, they seem to have a better handle on the social media than most, so he not only made it part of his resume, he decided to show the typing test in real time on You Tube!  This is the look of a true professional blogger at work.

Crazy as that seems, once you start multi-tasking and putting in time with IM, Skype, email, blogging, and the rest of the social media, it doesn’t seem like we can type fast enough.

Tags: Professional Blogging, Professional Blogger, Typing, Social Media, You Tube

As I indicated in a comment in a post  I read today over at Kian’s blog,  I had to make my own sound in the echosphere. Yeah, I called an "echosphere" for a reason because Kian is experiencing something I have also experienced and continue to deal with like the feeling of having my eyes pried open with toothpicks and forced to watch I Love Lucy 24/7. I can only read Scoble’s take on a topic, or Winer’s thoughts about this and that, and what Doc told me today, so many times before I start to think about jumping out my office window.  In this case only 3 feet off the ground but nonetheless, totally whacked.

**Please note that I am completely  hypocritical in that statement 1. because I am envious of their traffic readership, and 2. the reason they are so easy to link to is because all I have to do is Google there last names, or in Doc’s case the word "Doc" and I get a first page search response.  This is a result of the echo chamber I complain of and using blogs to my preached point about SEO.**

With that said, let me explain the blogging echo chamber dilemma.  Blogs are real time.  As fast as something can be typed and the publish button pushed, words can be transmitted to readers all over the world.  When you have people that are gurus as I have mentioned above, everyone is excited to report what exciting thing they read today over at this popular blog.  If they are excited to report it, and you are also excited, and both of you blog it and make me click to go read it, you can see where you get caught up in that echo chamber or the "blogging fissure" (my phrase).

Now throw into that recipe a dash of RSS.  Many of these gurus and leaders in their respective industries, all like to get their message read and have many vehicles to publish within.  I’m going to single out specifically a site I have had this problem with, not necessarily to pick a fight but because they may actually read this and take it as feedback. WebProNews is the vehicle of which I speak.  I have nearly every single author or columnist they have in their stable in my feed reader.  Meaning I can read what Scoble (I’m not picking on you Robert it’s just your name’s easy to type and to remember) said in my feeds in the morning with coffee.  I really don’t need to read that same article in the afternoon published word for word on WPN.  I’m afraid it does not end there.  For whatever reason, Bloglines (my main feed reader) picks up this feed again and again, publishing the same feed again, with possibly a new feed thrown in once they have cut and pasted an article from another WPN author. This can go on throughout the day, causing a dozen "unread" feeds.  I’m sorry, it still does not end there.  Now throw in that bowl and fold, the fact that I have search feeds with search strings I follow related to the industry, and for clients, and for metrics.  Due to having these feeds, a search tag may be related to "Business Blogging", which means that every article that is tagged business blogging ends up sent to me as "new content".  In reality it was that same Scoble article I read in the morning.  We professional bloggers that like to stay on the lunatic fringe of blog consulting, blog marketing and blog advertising (oh man this is a keyword feast!) have now read 20 articles written by 50 different authors, sent to us 5 times, and thrown on our windshield again by our own need for information.  You can see how the echo chamber is suddenly a recipe of disaster.

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When I was a young child I was diagnosed with ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder.  The doctors and specialists wanted to put me on Ritalin, but my mother stood firm, no child of hers would be taking drugs.  She would manage my disorder and make me a overcome the problem.  She allowed me to be enrolled in a special class of others with the same problem and by the end of the school year I think we had clearly trained our second grade teacher in the ways of ADD.  She could not hold her attention to her classroom duties long enough between recess sessions.  I guess I should someday apologize to that poor woman.  My point is not to discuss the issues of ADD or to discuss how to overcome the disorder.  I know after 30+ years I still….oh look something shiny…where was I?  Oh yes, keeping your reader’s attention.

When I recently attended the Blog Business Summit, John Furrier of Podtech mentioned a quip about the length of podcasts:

"You should do ‘Stair Master podcasts’ as a rule"

What I hope he meant rather than exercise while listening to podcasts, is to keep it short and to the point.  You only have so much time to get your message across then your audience begins to drift and they begin to want to move on to the next shiny thing.  The same goes for posting an article or item on your blogs.  If I want to read War and Peace, I will make sure to run to the nearest bookstore, but then again the last time I did that I had to stop and look at the swimsuit calendars…see what happens?  When you are blogging and posting items stay within these simple rules:

Keep it simple: Nobody likes to have to work, that’s why they don’t call it play.

Keep it short:  If you go on too long, you may lose that reader and a lost reader might be a reader never to return.

Make it informative:  People don’t want to have wasted their time reading something only to get to the end to find out you have not allowed them to learn something or to get informed.

Make it fun:  We all receive those funny emails we forward. Perhaps your post will be forwarded if you make your reader smile.

Make it controversial:  I don’t often go this route because I hate to get into flame wars with people because it takes to much time.  When people get into a heated discussion their attention is captured.

Send them away with your blog in mind:  Link them to another post they might enjoy as they feed their attention, or merely create something shiny or distracting that…

Did you guys know that Reese Witherspoon and Britney Spears are about to be on the singles list?

Tags: ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, Blog Business Summit, BBS06, John Furrier, Podtech, Reese Witherspoon, Britney Spears

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One of the toughest things about being a blogger, much less a professional blogger, is finding great topics and content for posts.  Personally I follow the fire-hose of RSS feeds (don’t ask how many, I don’t know anymore, but a lot) model.  This is where you subscribe to so many feeds that something is bound to catch your eye everyday (usually several somethings).  Still, especially when writing for a new client or niche area, it’s tough getting a really killer post together.  Patsi Krakoff has 17 great tips that can jump start your post writing and because the content of the post is just the tips, you’re just going to have to click over and read them over on her blog, don’t worry I don’t mind.

I’ll catch you again on my next post.

Hat tip: 17 Sources for Content Inspiration

Tags: blogging, professional blogging, post inspiration, content inspiration

How do you handle the traffic that comes to your blog?  How do you know what is traffic and what is not traffic?  One of the most asked questions among bloggers is "How much traffic do you get?"  Part of this is an egotistical measure and part of it is relative to where you end up on the food chain of blogs.  We have recently made a template change and are making similar changes to our site.  We have a new logo, colors, and layout.  All of this is fine and good, but when I went back to looking at my traffic, I couldn’t figure out where to go.  I had a little link before that I clicked and it took me to my nice magic metrics reader where I could spin an algorithm in my head and tell if I need to tweak content or number of posts or other things.  Suddenly, after our change, my button went away.  It’s as if they took my eyes from my head.  I can’t see a thing.  Sure, I can read comments and I can look at server stats, but the tool I was using showed me who was coming, and what they were reading and I could tell if it was Google or Yahoo that was delivering all of those search queries and what the search was they used to get to my site.

Traffic is an important thing in the blogosphere.  I rely upon it as though it were air or food or water.  Without it for very long, and I am dead in the water.  I’m sure we will have this plugin and the other information back on the forefront of my blogging metrics but for now, can somebody spare a glass of water and some bread?

Tags: blog traffic, hits, Google, Yahoo, blog metrics

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I read an interesting article today by Roland Piquepaille at ITToolbox. He check in with a company called Indeed. This company is a search engine for jobs available in the U.S. Roland refers to a piece written by Erick Schonfeld that discloses Bloggers are making higher salaries that are journalists and reporters.

Roland was not satisfied with the graph and he went a step further:

A graph is nice, but what it is based upon? I decided to go further and here are the results. Indeed has today offers for 226 blogger jobs, 1,225 journalist jobs and 4,973 reporter jobs.

Obviously there are more opportunities in the other areas of writing as blogging jobs don’t seem to be coming out of the woodwork. In fact, many of the blogging positions I have found are based on some type of revenue share with a parent network. The professional bloggers that I encounter own their own blogs and consent and are making their money from advertising space on their blogs as well as PPC campaigns through Google Adsense and other revenue streams.

At Bloggers for Hire we offer a salary based on the negotiation between our service , the company and the blogger. We merely offer a way for smaller businesses that don;t have huge marketing budgets to enter the online world of blogging and getting exposure and buzz about their company. I don’t know of any permanent salaried positions that would allow Indeed to come up with their figure of $39,000.00 annually, but I know bloggers that make much more than that, and I know bloggers that don’t make 10% of that figure. This is still a new profession, and it is a little different that your everyday journalist or reporter, and it even differs from a freelance copy writer that is paid by the word. This is a special position of people that know how to use a blog, know how to write, can engage with readers, and at the same time provide a message for the company that has contracted them. A blogger carries many hats and is asked to a number of things that your everyday journalist or reporter does not do. This could explain the difference in salary, but I would venture to say that the figure given by Indeed is somewhat skewed.

Tags: Blogger Salaries, Blogger Pay, Professional Bloggers, Indeed, Roland Piquepaille, Erick Shonfeld, Hiring Bloggers

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