This week, we look at pimping out your hard-earned blogging skills.
Up until now, the focus has been on how to earn money via your blog. But you could also hang out your shingle and make money writing for other people’s blogs.
As a blogger, you already have the skills for this. You understand research, how to craft a compelling post, keyword optimization, and the technical aspects of the back end. These are skills you can market.
Businesses often don’t have the time, technical expertise, or human resources to create original content, but they are also aware of how powerful original content can be in terms of maximizing their SEO. So they will sometimes hire content creators, or bloggers, to do the work for them.
I have one client that pays me a monthly fee, and, in exchange, I generate Facebook posts, tweets, and a monthly e-newsletter (they don’t have a blog).
How much should you charge for blog posts? I asked a friend of mine who used to do this, and she quoted $150 for a 500-word blog post, for which the client would have to provide the title and all the research and images. You could charge more if the client does not provide those things, as it would mean you’d have to do more research.
How do you go about finding this kind of work? First of all, your work is going to speak for itself, so make sure your blog is up-to-date and top-notch. Your blog is going to act like a kind of portfolio. Next, you may want to do some guest posts on other blogs for free, just to get started. This will allow you to link to a couple of different examples of your work on different blogs, to show you are well-rounded.
The biggest challenge to finding a paid blogging job is that there are tons of people out there who will do it for free. I get 1-3 pitches every day from people offering to guest-post on my blog. I’ve even been offered money to have someone write a guest post!
The only way to work around this is to show that you are a professional blogger, that you are quality, and you deserve to be paid accordingly. Again, I think it’s fine to do some for free at the beginning to get portfolio pieces, and you may want to start at say, $50 or $75 per article, and then work your way up as demand builds.
Blogger job listings: The top ones are: Problogger, Freelance Switch Writing Jobs, and Craigslist. Here’s a more comprehensive list.