Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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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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Denise from The Blog Squad emailed me to let me know about a free live interview with Darren Rowse and I wanted to share the news with you.

The Blog Squad is pleased to have snagged busy pro-blogger Darren Rowse for an interview about what makes his blog so successful with nearly 48,000 subscribers!

Darren of course is Mr ProBlogger (and my partner in crime on the ProBlogger Book) and what he doesn’t know about blog monetization isn’t worth knowing.

The call is free (registration required) and takes place Thursday, June 26 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Not sure if there will be a recording made available for anyone who misses it.

More details and registration are here.

Glamorati is having a headline writing contest, announced in the News from the Glamorati blog. In June, all you have to do is submit stories to Glamorati, and you’ll receive $5 for each published story. Here’s how it works:

Participants will receive $5 for each published submission and the grand prize is $500 which goes to the contestant with the most number of points (published submissions = 10 points and comments on the site = 1 point)

So what you need to do is find a funny, interesting, or weird pop culture story to submit, which shouldn’t be so hard since pop culture is all that by itself. You’ll need a Glamorati account, but that’s no biggie.

So that’s it? Find a story, submit, it gets published, you get $5 and the chance of the $500 grand prize? Ryan Caldwell of Glamorati, won’t this be expensive?

Yes, but probably not as expensive as developing the site in the first place. ;-)

Ouch. Or not. On a more serious note, Ryan explained:

Since headline writing is so important to blogging, I thought this contest would be a natural fit for the blogging community.

Good luck on the contest, Ryan. Be sure to check out Glamorati and the contest post in the News from the Glamorati blog.

Disclosure: I did the Glamorati design.

JC Hutchins has been breaking rules even before he started his blog in an attempt to give away his science fiction novel, 7th Son, which publishers didn’t want, as a free podiobook, one of the first audio books published as a weekly series of podcasts. He has come up with a variety of interesting viral campaigns to promote his book, blog, podcasts, and writings, turning his unpublished book into the most popular podiobook series in history, and becoming a specialist in the true sense of social networking and marketing. His innovative online self-marketing techniques attracted St. Martin’s Press, and his book will finally be published in 2009.

Tapping the creativity of his fan-base, Hutchins is breaking rules again by asking people to become victims and make history.
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Recently, I got the following comment on Lorelle on WordPress:

I just set up my blog and I am still trying to get everything in line. When I write original content, does it have to be about the subject of my blog? Will it hurt to have content not related to the title and keywords of my blog? Any input would be greatly appreciated!

My first thought was “whose going to hurt whom?” Honestly, who are you hurting if you don’t blog right? You.

If you don’t care about monetization, getting found, establishing a reputation or expertise, and your blog is not your resume, then who cares? No one is hurt because your blog is all for you and no one else that influences your ability to pay your rent.

If your blog’s purpose is to make money and establish your professional online reputation, by not blogging with search term, keyword-rich content in a consistent form within your blog’s purpose and intent that puts the reader first, you are the only one hurting you.

There are two answers I can give to this person.
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I am frequently asked about how to make money on the web, especially how to make money with your blog. I find a wide variety of answers around the web, some of them get rich quick schemes, PageRank games, and SEO illusions, but there is only one answer that I want to shout to the roofs, but few people listen.

Blogging as a business is business. It takes business training and skills to make money with your blog.

That’s it. That’s the secret. John Chow, Guy Kawawasaki, Darren Rowse, Seth Godin, these princes of blogging didn’t get rich with their blogs by just having blogs. They used their business sense and know how to make their blogs work for them. They understood that a blog is just another tool in the business arsenal, a business card and resume all wrapped up in one, offering a business a powerful communications tool. In order to make your blog work for you, you have to understand how business works.

To have a “successful” blog and to make your blog work for you, you have to have skills and training in advertising, marketing, economics, finance, writing ability and language skills, public relations, networking, everything any business needs. These are the skills you bring it to your blog to make it a success, earning the money you deserve.
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Tony Hung, former editor here at The Blog Herald, believes that there is. He writes:

Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.

Tony has been able to use the “river of news” feature on memetracking site Tailrank to find a number of blogs that appear to have been hacked in this method.

I have seen something similar occur on my company’s website over at Bryghtpath LLC. We were contacted last month by Google informing us that links to spyware/malware were detected on our company blog - and then we were being delisted until we had notified them that it had been removed. We’d been hacked.

I’m sure this news will evolve throughout the day - I suggest that you ensure that your sites are clean and fully patched with the latest versions of your blogging software of choice.

Blogging is about writing. That is a fact. You can video blog, podcast, and do all kinds of fun things with your blog, but it is the writing that makes or breaks a blog. What you say in the blog posts, descriptions of visual and audio elements, and what words you offer search engines for their indexing to help people find your blog.

However, blogging is not just about the writing, albeit it is a large part. Blogging today is about so much more. Are you ready? Do you know all the things you have to know about blogging before you start blogging? Or after?

Whether you are a new blogger or long time blogger, these are the things you are going to have to learn about in order to blog in today’s world.
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