I have been getting ready for attending the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this week and have suddenly been bombarded with new calls and emails from companies looking to hire a professional blogger.  Seems word got out that we help companies hire bloggers to help them with the social media needs.  Either that or a few years of hard work have finally paid off.  Nonetheless, if you have called or emailed me and I haven’t been able to get back to you and discuss your needs, please be patient and I will make sure you get a call or return email as soon as I have a moment or two to put together.

I am actually typing this post using Windows Live Writer as I zip through the clouds at 37,000 feet.  The application allows me to save a local draft and once I find that wifi connection or get to the Internet access I need I can post as much as I want.  Well that is if this battery will give me just a little more life.

Those of you that are looking to be hired as a blogger and have contacted me or called, I too will be getting back to you as soon as I can.  Seems they don’t allow me to call yo back while whisking through the clouds.  Those of you that would like to get on our windshield for opportunities to blog, please feel free to contact me via email or use the number on the contact page.  I will try to get to you as soon as i am able.  After all, there are plenty of companies out there looking for your services.

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.

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

There were a few times on my trip to Seattle recently that made those days of hard work all worth it. What hard work? That’s another story, when my wife’s not reading. I can honestly say that the life of a billionaire is not the hard work it is described by those poor souls required to live the life of the rich and famous. How do I know this? I was given a small glimpse, a mere tasting, of what it is like to have more money that you can spend in a lifetime.

Robert Scoble has posted his video on the Scoble Show about the trip aptly named “Grapes On A Plane”, put on by the hard working conference experts at the Blog Business Summit. I was not invited because I’m a famous blogger the likes of which Robert describes, but because I happened to be at the right place at the right time and my plane was leaving and nobody really wanted to drive the three hour trip to Seattle’s airport early in the morning after a night of wine tasting. Actually, Bloggers Fore Hire was a sponsor of the event, meaning they let us show up and pay for some drinks. Actually I stand behind the money well spent comments I made. These people know how to treat a sponsor!

If you want to see how the other half, although that is a misnomer because “half” implies there are as many billionaires as poor people like me, go to The Scoble Show and download the podcast. Robert said there were no edits to the video. I’m sure there was one edit when it came to seeing the bill for the evening of fun. I think my expense account may have been stretched had I picked up the tab.

I want to thank again the wonderful hosts at Greenpoint Technologies for their hospitality in allowing me to experience what I probably won’t get to experience again. If I do they are on the must call list to outfit my own private jet! Jon Buccola, CEO of Greenpoint (Jon, you still need that blog!) and Matt Mullenweg (soon to be billionaire) the founder of Wordpress let me sit an enjoy the comforts of style while enjoying their company on the trip home.

I’m the one that looks like I don’t belong! (Jim, Jon, Matt)

Robin Leach photo via corporateartists.com

Tags: Robert Scoble, The Scoble Show, Blog Business Summit, Greenpoint Technologies, Jon Buccoloa, Matt Mullenweg, Jim Turner, Grapes On A Plane

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Okay, since that is not actually the case, we can eliminate one possibility of the big shakeup in the Yahoo camp.  TechCrunch is reporting in real time and nearly from the boardroom itself.  I hope that if they are laying off all of their bloggers or employees with a blog, that they consider outsourcing to Bloggers For Hire.  I wonder if a guy could hire some talent out of that pool?

Speaking of hiring, it appears that Jason Calacanis has found a new day job. Calacanis will be joining Sequoia Capital as an “Entrepreneur in Residence”.  Jason has no comment about the above headline, but if you ask him to give you some money for your startup, give us a mention.

ClickZNews reports that there seems to be a heat up in what we here at Bloggers For Hire deem Collaborative Intelligence™.  It seems more and more companies are positioning themselves in this market.  Is your company hooked up in the intelligence community?  If you wanted to know about Jason’s job before your competitor, now is the time to find out about how we provide that Collaborative Intelligence™.

Tags: Yahoo, TechCrunch, Bloggers For Hire, ClickZ, Jason Calacanis, Sequoia Capital, Collaborative Intelligence

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A classic example of a service we provide as professional bloggers.  A very influential blogger is asking for recommendations for a new office chair.  As I read through the post and the comments I began to wonder whether someone at Herman Miller or any of its competitors was reading the same thing.  Do they know what is going on and the conversation that is taking place?  I ran off to the Herman Miller site to see what I could find.  The first thing that was obvious, is they did not have a blog.  Okay perhaps I am somewhat biased in that respect, but nonetheless, they should have one. 

They have a media page with some contacts, but what about their company news?  Okay, they seem to have a form I have to spend time to fill out and then they have all of this information about me I was not wanting to give.  A nice RSS feed for their press releases would be a dynamite addition without of course having a blog to discuss news. I searched their site hoping to find a blog mention.  Actually, they offered to allow me to speak to a human which I add in the plus column.

Technorati produced over 5,000 posts about the "Aeron Chair", and "Herman Miller" produced a whopping 10K+ in results.  This is just scratching the surface of what I could gather given the proper time and motivation.  I’ll keep an eye on Darren’s post to see if perhaps a Herman Miller employee or a PR representative might make comment.  Perhaps a competitor will show up to provide their input.  In any respect, this is a good case study for businesses thinking about what might be happening in the blogosphere.  It just so happens we do offer this Collaborative Intelligence™ to our clients.  If you happen to find this and are from Herman Miller, kudos to you.  If not, perhaps we need to talk to you about your Collaborative Intelligence™ campaign.

Tags: professional blogger, problogger.net, Darren Rowse, Blog Marketing, RSS, Herman Miller, office chairs, Technorati, PR, Collaborative Intelligence

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I woke up from a bout with the flu that I have been battling since Sunday, and looking through my RSS feeds I came upon an article written by Kevin O’Keefe, the guru of law blogging, and I had to jump into the comment section and leave my 2 cents. Kevin is talking about a article he read about blogs being a passing fad, and I address this with my comment:

I felt so passionate about my position I had to post it here as well. When I see pronouncements about blogs from marketing experts, it sometimes amazes me their ignorance and the lack of knowledge about the power of blogging. My friend Dave Taylor coined the phrase “Findability,” although I would argue that I used it first I just didn’t publish it like he did, and in the future of marketing for any business will be whether your customer or client can find your business and can engage your business. If they can’t find you, your business is not going to survive. Blogging will help you not only survive but will put you out front of the rest of the competition. Is your competition blogging? If not, get a head start and beat them to the punch..

Tags: Kevin O’Keefe, Law Blogs, Blog Marketing, Hiring Bloggers, Dave Taylor, Findability

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Anil Dash recently had an excellent post about CEO’s not needing to write their own blogs, called “Another Sacred Cow Debunked: You Don’t Have To Write All Your Posts.”  All I can say to this is Amen Brother….Preach!

His discussion is about Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and his blog post about an open letter to Michael Pollen.  Mr. Mackey has an entry with a notation:

I want to acknowledge that the following letter was not written by me alone but was a joint product of several people, including valuable contributions from Margaret Wittenberg, A.C. Gallo, Edmund Lamacchia, Jim Speirs, Kate Lowery and Anna Madrona. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Anil states:

Hey, what do you know? Busy CEOs don’t always have time to do all the homework and writing for a blog all by themselves. If you acknowledge the team that helps write a blog post, just like you’d acknowledge people who help do research for a presentation or a business meeting, it’s completely okay to have people contribute to a blog that’s “by” a CEO.

He goes on to say in a bullet point:

It’s okay to get help in writing a blog. Some executives aren’t natural writers/bloggers, and even the ones who are will have busy schedules that might preclude extensive research or copy editing. Just make it clear that there’s a team effort involved, and readers will be happy just to see you engaging in a dialogue.

This is an excellent example of why perhaps a CEO would want to retain a professional blogger.  He’s correct, I hear all the time that CEO or other C level employees would never have the time to sit down and post everyday about the philosophy of the company or the day to day operations.  Even columnists have editors that help with fact checking and the occasional grammar problem. 

Our professional bloggers can be an online assistant to any of the CEO’s that cannot fathom writing a blog.  All it would take is a small statement that the blog is written by CEO so and so with the assistance of Professional Blogger so and so.  This is a perfectly acceptable practice.

Thanks for the post Anil, and I hope you can help me shout the message from the mountain tops.

Are you a procrastinator? I am, and always will be, doing things the last minute, be it my taxes, or mowing the lawn. I came across a website that can help cure the procrastination bug through hypnosis. Don’t laugh, it seems like a perfectly plausible idea. I know that people have quit smoking through hypnosis, got their eating under control, and even there are even gamblers that have been cured by this method. Why not procrastination?

Wendi Friesen, CHT, at www.iamsolazy.com has already started down the path of a blog, but she may need an extra little shove. She has an audio post similar to a podcast, she has a daily specials, although this may be the daily special everyday, and all the other essentials of a basic blog except the actual blog itself. She could do wonders for her search engine results, and educate and communicate with potential clients everyday. Wendi, now is the time to set up that blog please don’t procrastinate any longer! I think I’ll contact Wendi and let her in on the secret. Perhaps I’ll do that tomorrow.

Now that you are here don’t you feel the sudden need to blog? When I snap my fingers, you will contact me right away to get your business up and blogging!

*SNAP*

UPDATE:  I was emailed by Wendi and she let me know that in fact she has a blog and is going to rise to the challenge to blog regularly.  I’m going to keep an eye on this one because she will soon need to synch this with her statis business site and start driving custmers and traffic right into her store front!  Good job Wendi and keep up that blogging! Go over and check out  Hypnotically Enhanced!

Technorati Tags : Business+Blogging, Wendi, +Friesen