As a professional blogger sometimes it requires that you have a very thick skin.  A large portion of blogging is of course the written word.  This written word is your voice it is the style of your writing and it defines you as a blogger.  I have been putting bloggers together with companies for a while now and one of the toughest parts of that is matching a company and their mission and message with a blogger that fits with the personality of the blog.  Some bloggers are great technical writers and do a great job with describing technical terms and processes.  Other bloggers are pithy and have great sense of style and humor.  Companies sometimes are demanding both.  As you can see it’s tough to put the proper voice of the blogger with the company blog.  It’s not to dissimilar from matchmaking.  Not every match is one made in heaven.

As a person that manages many bloggers it is very rewarding to tell a blogger that a company has chosen their voice and blogging style to head up their blog campaign.  It is equally devastating for me to tell a blogger that the company has decided to go in a different direction with the voice of the blog.  Bloggers tend to take ownership of a blog and adopt it making it their very own, and to tell them they have to turn that over to another is a difficult process.  This is why it is necessary to be a thick skinned individual.  Business is business to the company and they see it from a different perspective from their end, no matter how attached a blogger has become to the blog.  This is not something that happens often but it does occasionally happen so bloggers need to be prepared.  For now, I need to go to a blogger and make the “It’s not you it’s me” speech. 

[photo via  DeclanTM]

I have been telling lots of bloggers that they too can become professionals and be paid a wage for their blogging.  As a hobbyist blogger, what is it that you are doing to be a blogger?  Are you just putting words on a page and hoping people will show up?  Believe it or not, many companies are doing just that, putting a blog on their site and waiting to get rich off the process.  If you are a blogger and you believe in that doctrine I am the first to call you out.  There is no quick way to stardom as it relates to blogging.  Putting words on a page are a part to the overall picture but I can scrape content and call it good.  That is not the case when wanting to be successful.

Bloggers are a special breed.  They know how to be successful as a community builder and as a marketer, advertiser and PR person for their blog.  They wear all those hats and more.  They are in effect, the CEO, CFO, CTO and all other C level employees of thir blogs.  This is invaluable to companies.  A person that knows social media and can implement that knowledge into a use that benefits the blog, the company and its future.  This is a skill that cannot be passed down to the communication department, the PR department, or to that intern in the mail room with a MySpace account.  A blogger or a professional blogger must wear many hats.  I call them social media managers as they wear any hats and have many functions.  What do you consider your job description as a professional blogger?

It has been a very busy time here at Bloggers For Hire as we have been working hard on getting some blogging campaigns underway for clients.  These companies show the type of diversity we have in the work that we perform and each company had a special request when filling their needs.

Our first company I wanted to showcase was a long time client and forward thinker as it relates to blogging and business.  Omar Solis has always appreciated the hard work it takes to be a blogger and looks to Bloggers For Hire for help and assistance.  This week we launch the content for Fronteras.org.  This blog was a difficult proposition as it requires a blogger that can be bi-lingual and understand the issues related to immigration. 

Our next company is another client that understands the power of blogging and how it can increase sales and traffic to a site.  David Krug, and Log Homes Journal has joined on as a client of Bloggers For Hire and the blogger here will be discussing items related to the log home industry and other issues related to home ownership of log homes.

Finally, our last client is a completely new campaign and a very exciting one because of what they are going to allow us to do with their site, the blog and its campaign and goal.  Conventions.net is a company launched today with a brand new website and One By One Media and Bloggers For Hire will be the voice for the company behind Convention Insider.  I myself will take on the responsibilities of blogging and the best part is I get to discuss the ins and outs of that experience here on Bloggers For Hire.  You can follow along in real time as I chronicle the experience of being a professional blogger and running a blogging campaign for a client. I would like to personally thank Randy Goldberg the vision behind Conventions.net for the opportunity to share the experience with you here on our company blog.

Be sure to subscribe here and there for great examples of companies that understand the power of blogging and have given us the opportunity to represent them in their venture. As you can see we can fulfill a very diverse base of companies.

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.

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. 

This morning on Techmeme, I noticed that the New York Times posted an article by Barbara Whitaker entitled “Can Blogs Become a Source of Jobs?” The article is a cursory look at best at the emerging market of professional bloggers and people being hired as bloggers within companies. We here at Bloggers For Hire have seen this emerge since we began a few years ago.

More and more companies are looking to experts in the area of social media. Communication departments are hiring bloggers to coordinate with advertising, PR and marketing departments to relay the corporate message to their customers, clients and other consumers.

The article relates this to other areas of job hunting and hiring practices:

If pursuing a job as a blogger seems financially precarious, having blogging skills doesn’t hurt when it comes to looking for work — particularly in publishing, marketing, public relations and the news media.

Many friends were quoted in the article and they are also out there evangelizing the idea that hiring bloggers or employing bloggers is a new way of looking at key aspects of the online world where companies are eager to join.

Tags: advertising, Bloggers For Hire, Blogging Jobs, Blogs, Hiring Bloggers, marketing, PR, Professional Bloggers, Social Media, Techmeme

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