According to a post by Marshal Kirkpatrick, hiring bloggers is becoming more popular.  So much so, he is getting cold calls from companies looking to hire a blogger.

I’ve been getting so many inquiries lately from companies looking to hire bloggers, and so many responses to messages I send out about them over twitter, that I’m losing track.

This is not an anomaly, as Tris and I get calls regularly and emails from people wanting to hire a blogger.  They are very excited at the idea until its time to pay the bill.  They feel it’s a nothing job for nothing pay.  My response is usually the same, hire a full time employee and let me know your bottom line at the end of the month or do the daily blogging yourself and let me know the amount of time, energy and difficulty you feel the job entails.  They tend to hire a blogger right away when they have done this comparison.  Marshall is an evangelist when he writes:

I believe that top-tier bloggers that will be tied closely to your brand should be paid between $5k and $8k per month. Pay your blogger well, communicate with them clearly about expectations and if it doesn’t seem worth it after some time then fire them and find a new one.

If you are going to pay a blogger $500-$1000/month, it had better not take very much time or that blog had better be a great way for said blogger to gain visibility and move onto a better gig. That’s what AOL Weblogs Inc. paid me for a whole lot of posts, but the blog was great for my career.

I wish all of my clients have been referred by Marshall because then they may know the sticker shock coming in to the game.  Send them my way Marshall and I promise they will be put in very capable and good hands.

WebProNews highlights a growing theme in the business blogging space: leveraging RSS for your competitive intelligence.  The discussion uses Monitor110 as an example for the financial industry, but the model works for all businesses.

By receiving RSS feeds on the searches for your company, products, competitors, and industry you can get a jump on the competition.  Think of it this way, wouldn’t you like to know first when hot news is breaking?  When someone loves your product or hates your competitor’s?

This is a technique only getting attention recently, but is something that the minds behind BloggersForHire have been perfecting for about two years now.

If you want to start getting the edge, get in touch with us.

Tags: Bloggers For Hire, B4H, RSS monitoring, competitive intelligence

Usually when you think of shipping you think of shipping contents from one place to another.  Well we here at Bloggers For Hire, when we hear about shipping we think of blogging content.  Our most recent client has hired us to provide professional blogging to create content and help them with their new blogging campaign.  They truly understand the power of blogs and they were not able to staff their blog with a blogger of their own so they turned to us for their needs.  This company has a small staff working around the clock on their business, but did not have a person that knew how to support their blog nor did they have someone that could provide quality content or understand the ins and outs of the blogging world.  This didn’t stop them from their vision of what a blog could do for their marketing efforts.  They hired a professional blogger and began to send their message regarding the freight and shipping business.  Congrats to Freight and Shipping, Inc. as they enter the next big thing in online marketing through the blogosphere.

I’m late to the party recently discussed in numerous blogs about the actions of  bloggers that write and freelance for a number of blogging networks.  I don’t personally write for any of the blogging networks so I don’t have a stake in the argument other than an outside view of a business owner that hires bloggers for companies to use to their benefit.  I use the word benefit not because I lack the ability to find a better word in the nearest Thesaurus, but because of the word “beneficiary”.  The company is the beneficiary of the blogger’s knowledge, expertise, writing, and ability.  For that benefit they pay to the blogger money.  This creates a fiduciary duty between the company and the blogger.  Wikipedia states the fiduciary duty clearly:

“A fiduciary duty is the highest standard of care imposed at either equity or law. A fiduciary is expected to be extremely loyal to the person they owe the duty (the “principal”): they must not put their personal interests before the duty, and must not profit from their position as a fiduciary, unless the principal consents.”

The principal’s consent here is an important factor in the equation.  In the arguments and debate I have read, the principals in the discussion are the owners of the blog networks.  Some of the principals require the blogger to uphold a fiduciary duty and others not, therein lies the distinction.

Wikipedia also discusses the the elements of a “Fiduciary Duty”. 

I want now to apply the duty of the professional blogger to the principal or network owner.  I don’t mean to be too simplistic and I don’t know exactly any of the business models at bar, but for purposes of the discussion I will hypothesize.  The blogger provides quality (we hope) content on the network blog within a certain niche, i.e. a gadget blog.  For this content, the network owner pays the blogger a sum of money, be it a revenue share, a salary or by the piecemeal post. 

The professional blogger may be a blogger for more than one network.  The network owner is aware of the fact and consents to the blogger having a relationship with other networks.  The fiduciary duty has been waived by the principal by their knowledge and consent. We can consider this Blogger A.  In the case of a network owner that has no knowledge of the blogger’s other freelance positions is the flip side and the blogger owes that network owner a fiduciary duty. This is Blogger B.

Using the example of a gadget blogger, that blogger acquires some breaking news or inside scoop about a gadget that is going to be launched by a company.  The blogger quickly pounds out a post to reveal this exciting news, and will probably be the first to write about the gadget and will benefit greatly from the traffic and notoriety of the post.  In addition the network he blogs for will also benefit greatly from the blogger they pay to break this news, in traffic and in stature as having knowledgeable writers.

Given the two examples above, blogger A has no duty to post his hot story on the network owners site and could choose to post his money maker on any of the networks he chooses.  In my mind he would post it to the network where he would benefit most with the gem he has written.

Blogger B may have other writing contracts, but he is now placed in a dilemma.  He cannot benefit from this post as can Blogger A.  He must post this news on the network blog of his principal or he breaches that fiduciary duty and risks damages to his principal.

Herein seems to be the heart of the debate.  Should a blogger be allowed to write on as many networks as possible to his own benefit or should he or she be limited to one network?

I for one encourage my bloggers to put their own interests first.  I would love to be able to employ all of them with a huge salary, but in today’s market that is not the case.  Bloggers are left to do whatever they can to pay the mortgage, and I am a champion of paying the mortgage.  In fact my own partners are bloggers for other companies and networks.  I have consented to this and have waived that portion of the fiduciary duty.  Has it been detrimental to me?  That question remains a mystery, but if it has been a detriment it was by my own choice. 

Each network owner can choose which path to take and one model is not better than another unless you are the principal or the blogger.  Each has its benefits as stated above. 

For more information on the debate, please visit these sites as well for the discussion:

Technosailor

b5Media

9 Rules

Business Blogwire

Ping Six

White and Wright Chat

Jeremy Wright

Is e-mail Marketing a thing of the past?  With spam on the rise and spam filters blocking a large amount of content, many would say "yes", but what, then, is the answer?  RSS or Real Simple Syndication can be.  RSS has been popularized by its use on blogs, but has recently been seen as having a more universal use - to online retailers especially.  I was forwarded an article this morning from InternetRetailer.com that expounds on this thought.

In a recent study by Jupiter Research said that "60% of marketers believed that spam filters were reducing the effectiveness of their e-mail marketing campaigns."  In comes RSS with the appeal of content delivery of channels that are 100% spam free being that RSS is a subscription-only model.  With RSS delivery is guaranteed and it is guaranteed that the receiver wants what is contained in the delivery.  Most importantly RSS arrives almost instantly to the readers.  On time delivery one of the keys to marketing on the internet.

What is so great RSS is relatively inexpensive to implement and is fast.  Also, with the upcoming release of IE 7, RSS may become a service that is ubiquitous to all users. 

I believe that RSS is here to stay and so does InternetRetailer, but what worries me is the last sentence of the article:

Blogs are not for everyone. Podcasting definitely isn’t.  But RSS is one of those no-brainer technologies that everyone should be experimenting with.

While I do agree that RSS is a technology everyone can use, I fear that the author too quickly dismisses blogs.  Certainly blogs are not for everyone, but when used in conjunction with RSS, your company would, I feel, benefit greatly from both the real-time notifications and the personal touch of a blog to go with it.

Powered by Qumana

This is a nice way to end 2005.  To give you some personal context, this is biggest blogad buy ever — 800 blogs.  This is more ads than Blogads.com sold in the entirety of 2003.  (The previous record was held by Audi, which ordered ads on 286 blogs last spring.)  I’ll leave it to the media mavens among you to figure out the larger ramifications, but for me this is just a darn pleasant way to end a good year.

 

Finally, I’m fuzzy on the details of this, but there may be some opportunity for bloggers to interact with one of the NBCites (Keith Obermann on online viral weirdness, Rita Cosby on porn and Joe Scarborough on internet addiction) as they pull together the shows. If you are interested, write me and I’ll try to put you in touch with the NBC person who floated this idea.

In a recent blog of my own, “Your Blog Will Be Investigated Soon”, I said: “If anyone thinks that ‘bloggers’ will remain beyond Congress’ campaign finance speech regulation just because they invoke ‘the Internet’, they are probably kidding themselves.” In a piece on Tech Central Station entitled “Campaign Money for Bloggers”, James D. Miller offers the politically astute observation that “a partisan millionaire should set aside, say, $20 million to give to politically useful bloggers.”

Obviously, even if we largely do now, we won’t live long in a world without “bloggers for hire”. Trying to ferret out those working for a living and those who are “hobbyists” will prove well-nigh impossible. And to have the Government try to enforce a “not-for-hire” regime is wrong anyway as a matter of principle.

I also discussed the issue with the upcoming elections in 2006, that bloggers will play a pivotal role in candidates delivering their message via blogs.  I would like to see bloggers in the political arena have a place where they can be sought out and contracted to be an influence for politicians on the campaign trail.  Many in Washington will be hard pressed to find the bloggers with the skills to be both a good writer, and a person with the skills to blog.  It will be the blogger that understands rules and regulations related to working and reporting for campaigns that has a leg up on taking a bite out of that $20,000,000 pie.

Technorati Tags : Elections, Campaign, Blogging+Politics, 2006+Elections, Blogger+For+Hire