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Are You Ready To Become A Blogger For Hire?
Author: Alyice Edrich
Are you ready to begin your mornings as a paid blogger? The first step towards locating that paid blogging assignment is to become familiar with the world of blogging. Start a blog of your own. Visit blogs and leave relevant comments. Discover how to spread the word about your blog, then once you feel comfortable, design a web page offering your services as a blog ghostwriter.
The key, to earning a living as a ghost blog writer, is to understand the industry you're blogging for.
Background Information
Ask the company for any marketing materials, brochures, newspaper clippings, and press releases it can mail (USPS not email) to help you get a better understanding of the industry.Industry News
Ask the company to pay for magazine or newsletter subscriptions that will keep you up-to-date on industry news.Company News
Ask the company to put you on the list for the company newsletter.Employee Insight
Ask who you must go through to conduct employee interviews.Customer Insight
Ask who you must go through to conduct customer interviews or if the PR department can provide the interviews for you if you provide a list of questions.Purpose of Blog
Ask what style the company wants you to blog in. Are you posting to help educate people about your industry? Are you posting to entertain and bring a bit of lightheartedness to your company's image? Are you posting to expand on the products and/or services the company sells?
Once you have a better understanding of how the company operates, what others have to say about the company’s products or services, and what’s going on in the industry itself, it’s time to tackle the blog posts.
Your very first post should set up the blog.
What’s the blog about? What audience is it going to reach? Why should readers come back? (That post should then be linked on the side bar as a “Learn more about this blog” link.)Long topics should be broken down into a series of posts.
A post is ideally 250 words, but no more than 500 words. Bloggers are skimmers and jump from blog to blog looking for relevant information that jumps out at them. Make it easy for them to read your blog and they’ll be back—even if they never leave a comment. (Make sure to link the series together at the end of each blog post. That means you’ll have to edit the previous day’s post to update it with the new link. This makes it easier for newcomers to move through the series.)Clean up your grammar, punctuation and formatting.
Business blogs need to show professionalism, even if the blogging style is conversational. While it’s okay to have a typo or misspelled word in the comment area of a blog, it’s not okay for your blog posts to be riddled with errors. Make your post clean to read and understand.Stick to one point.
Unlike the ramblings of a person venting or ranting in a personal blog, business blogs must stay on topic. Each post should stick to one topic. Other topics could and should be brought up at later times.Find a topic to blog about.
Finding topics to blog about may be difficult at times. When this happens, spend a little time reading industry blogs, websites, and magazines. What’s going on? What’s being talked about the most? In there will be your next blog post. (Sometimes a post may require a bit of research to get the facts straight, interviewing someone in the industry, or referencing another blog's point of view.)
Other things to consider when blogging as a paid blogger are:
Links
Are you allowed to include a blog roll on the sidebar or should the sidebar only be used for linking back to the company?Images
What images, from the company’s main website, are you allowed to use in your blog and will the company pay for relevant images from a stock photo agency? (There are several available for $1 an image with no royalties.)Contract
How long with the contract be for and will the company extend the length of the contract if you offer a discount on your blogging service?Duties
Will you be paid to simply write and post to the blog, or will the company pay more to have you visit like-minded blogs and post relevant comments, leaving the blog's URL behind in the process? And will the company’s marketing and advertising team actively work towards promoting the blog?Payment
How will you be paid? Quality blogs take time to write and often require a bit of search engine optimization knowledge. Being paid in clicks, ad revenue, or percentage of sales is not enough to write for someone else. Get paid a set fee, a month in advance. Remember, your time is just as valuable as the person hiring you to write the blog. The person hiring you gets paid a salary and so should you.
So what are you waiting for?
Get out there and start blogging!
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