And all you need is a blog with an RSS feed. Amazon has opened their platform to bloggers with a US bank account. Defining yet another way to make money through blogging, Amazon allows blog publishers to keep 30% of the income generated from blog subscriptions on their Kindle reader. That’s roughly USD 0.60 cents per subscriber per month if it costs USD 1.99 to subscribe your blog.

To sign up, you will need a separate account from your regular Amazon account. This service is still in Beta, so we’re bound to see some changes in the rates in the future. Of course, subscribing to feeds should be free (because it is free everywhere else), yet we’re also interested to see how this new business model develops for Amazon and bloggers.

We do wish that this service opens up to the rest of the world, as it alienates non-US based bloggers who want a hack at monetizing this new platform. It is indeed a sad reality that the Kindle isn’t available outside the USA in the same way that buying intellectual properties such as audiobooks, eBooks and music from Amazon (and iTunes) is very much restricted. Maybe it is time for a second version of the Florence Agreement?

Dave Winer wrote a rebuttal to Daniel Lyons’ piece on the latter’s hanging of the blogging pajamas. “There’s no money in blogs.” says Lyons. Winer on the other hand says there is — he just made 2 million:

So when I told you I made over $2 million with this blog, why did you immediately look for ads? I can save you the trouble — there aren’t any. And in the 12 years this blog has been here there has never been an ad on this blog. With a caveat, unless you count me talking about my products. Because I do talk about my products here. I try to stay as balanced as I can, but of course I tilt toward the positive. I have a bias — I wouldn’t have made the products if I didn’t think they were good. But like all people with real products I know they’re not perfect, sometimes they’re imperfect, and I try to be honest about that. [quote]

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As we continue with this series on blogging jobs, it’s time to look at the income a blogger can make by blogging for pay.

The skills and qualities a company or blog owner is looking for from a blogger are extensive, far beyond just writing abilities. As with any freelance job, determining how to put a value on the time it really takes, and the costs associated with the time and production, is really hard when the real cost is in time, not materials. Bloggers should be paid for the time as well as their expertise and abilities. Are they? This is a problem that has been around for a very long time. How much is your time worth?

For many decades, professional editorial writers found a compromise on the time/value issue with payment by the word with a restriction on word count. I often was told, “We’ll pay you a dollar a word up to 1,000 words maximum.”

This meant the magazine, newspaper, newsletter, or other print publication had space for one thousand words that needed to be filled. Going over meant changing their magazine or newspaper design structure. Giving them less meant I’d be paid less, but somewhere in the middle was a compromise for both of us, usually in the form of me setting a minimum fee I was to be paid, no matter the word count, such as “I want $500 minimum for 700 words and a dollar a word thereafter.” If the article came it at 400 words, I would still be paid my minimum. If it crossed the 700 word mark, at which point I should have been paid $700 for a dollar a word, that’s when they have to start paying me the dollar a word rate. It wasn’t the best, but the companies felt like they were getting a deal and for the most part, I covered the minimum I needed to pay my rent and eat.

Here is a chart for the various traditional writer’s pay scale based upon a dollar amount per word. The more experience and expertise, the higher the fee per word.
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In “Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?” we talked about what jobs are out there and what blog owners and companies are looking for when they hire a blogger. Blogger Jobs: How to Apply For a Blogger Job? covered how to apply for a job as a blogger, with some good tips on what to do – and not to do. Today, I want to look at a very serious issue: How much are they paying bloggers to blog?

The issue of the blogging pay scale is very important, not just because I’m one of the workers in this new industry who expects to be able to pay the rent or meet a mortgage, but also because I represent the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people who want to make money blogging.

In a NY Times article on the blogging sweatshops by Matt Richtel (Print Version) the description of people of one of the hottest jobs in the world has writers churning out mass volumes of content working around-the-clock to make enough money to survive. It’s called blogging.
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Google Adsense is retiring their referral program and launching a new affiliate based program using software and tools acquired from their acquisition of internet advertising firm Doubleclick last year.

On the Inside AdSense blog, the AdSense team writes:

As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.

For more information, see this informative post by Darren Rowse over at Problogger.