Bringing In The Boys
Because of my little time problem, I’m seriously considering hiring a blogger. Nothing major, I’ll just be looking to paying someone x amount a week to write 3-5 posts a week here or x amount a week to track down suitable websites and publish them over at CMSNerd. I don’t think my blogs, especially Funk13 are appealing enough yet to guest bloggers so it’s going to have to be paid help. But Before I start throwing my cash around, I need to work out the pros and cons of this idea. So, here they are.

Pros

• I could strike it lucky and hire a God like content creator or a person with amazing hunting skills. This superhuman! Should give my blogs what they need, that all important traffic boost.
• With another person on board I’ll be able to ask their opinions about new ideas I have for the blogs.
• Hopefully my new blogger will already have a fan base, so hopefully their readers will stop by and check out this place and the others.
• I’ll be giving myself what I need most. Time!
• Hopefully my new friend will be able to teach me a trick or two about blogging and traffic building.

Cons

• I’ll be loosing out on precious blogging experience. The hardest task on a blog is content creation, if I’m not doing that part my skills and knowledge won’t grow.
• Bloggers cost money. If I start asking for their opinions and advice too, they’re probably going to want more of it.
• Readers might be put off by the bloggers content or choice of websites, because I’ll be busy working away on other things, I might not realize this until it’s to late.
• The new guy could be a total ass and start flame wars with other bloggers I like.
• I don’t want to come across as something I’m not. I can’t really afford to be paying people to blog for me, hiring people might give people the impression that I’m trying to look like a blog making $100’s.

So that’s really all I can think of. I’m all for trying new things so I’ll probably give this thing a try. I’ll start of slowly see how it goes. If it works, great! If it doesn’t. You’re Fired!!

If you’re interested, drop me an email via the contant page. I’ll need examples of your work, whether you want to write for funk13 or CMSNerd and what your rates are.

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I guess the biggest attraction of becoming a full time blogger is it gives you option of working from home and working the hours you want. Plus, there’s no one to moan at you or tell you what to do. You control everything. All very well, but what a lot of people don’t realize is working for yourself is a very, very risky. I’ve often imagined myself quitting my job just so I can give my projects and blogs my full attention. But when I look deeper in to the idea, I realize that becoming a full time blogger/online money maker just isn’t an option. The way things are at the moment it just isn’t possible to support my self with my blogs and projects. I’m not even making enough money with my online projects to cover my monthly food expenses. This leads me back to the risk factor. If you don’t work you don’t get paid. Even if you work your butt off there’s a chance you wont make enough money to support yourself.

I think the people who tell you that becoming a full time blogger/affiliate marketer/whatever are talking out of their back sides. Yeah, you might make a fortune one month, but what about the month after when you make peanuts? Just because your working online for yourself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will lead a fantastic life and eventually you’ll make 30k a month from your blog. Stupidly, even with all of the doubts running through my mind, I still want to try and eventually give up my job and get out there and work full time on my blogs and other schemes. I’m going to set my target date, this time next year I hope to be working full time on the internet. This will mean I’m going to have to start saving money for rainy days, putting as much time as possible in to my work and I’m going to have to cut down on my social life. Bye Bye pub every weekend

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If I’m honest, i guess I was getting a bit pissed off with a couple of my customers too. Once you’ve created something for them and they’ve paid you, they automatically think that they should get priority. On Saturday I created a logo for some guy, he liked what I had created for him and he very kindly paid me. He then asked for 3 or 4 more designs. I agreed. About 2 hours later I received an email off this person telling me to hurry up and if I didn’t, he would tell everyone how bad my service was. I tried to explain that I have other people waiting and that his new banners and logos should be complete within 24hrs. His reply started with ”but I just paid you”. Yes you did, but only for the 1st banner I’d created. Anyway, I’d had enough after reading those five words and I simply deleted and blocked his email address.

I don’t think I was been harsh, I work on a first come first serve basis. Not ”you will get what you want when you want just because you’ve paid me” Anyway, as from today I will only be doing custom graphics if people contact me directly through this blog. I’ve asked for all of the posts I’ve created on different forums to be deleted or blocked. It’s nice to be able to concentrate solely on blogging again. I think my biggest mistake was running around promoting my services on as many forums as possible, I really thought I could cope running 2 very demanding projects. I think maybe if I had the time it would be quite possible, but I’m not making enough money to be able to quit my day job. Actually, I probably would struggle even if I didn’t have to work, promoting a freelance site and actually completing the jobs is probably more time consuming than running your blog. There wouldn’t be enough time in the day to give both 100%

Maybe some people are able to do both things? If you can? I would appreciate some tips.

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I never planned to try freelance blogging, I was just casually browsing the internet, and I happened to come across www.bloggerjobs.biz. I thought this site would be packed full off bloggers hustling and under cutting each other for the best jobs. There was nothing of the sort, it was very quiet. It’s almost as if nobody is interested in freelancing. One opportunity that looked quite good was writing for a blog about tea. You know, tea bags, tea leaves etc. You would be paid $400 a month and all they wanted in return was 8 posts a month. So that works out at about $50 a post. Being a Brit, I know quite a lot about tea. But still, blogging about tea didn’t really interest me so I let that one pass by.

I’ve also been checking out the problogger.net job board daily and there’s some great opportunities on there too. A lot of the jobs on there though require a full time commitment, that’s something I’m not interested in. If you are interested in long term commitments, the great thing is, you can use your blog as your resume. There was a blogging/social networking type Job available just the other day. If you got the job you would get your own office area, you would be paid a salary of £18,000 that’s about $36-40,000 and there was lots of chances for promotion. They preferred people with a college education or something similar, but they were mostly concerned about your blogging experience. Have you run a blog before? have you ever writ articles for websites? That sort of thing. I thought that was brilliant opportunity for someone who’s just left school or someone with lots of experience in blogging.

I think Freelance blogging is definitely something I’m going to be paying a lot of attention to over the next few weeks. I’ve applied for 3 jobs so far. One is for a web trends blog, the second is for a mobile phone review blog and the third is a gadget review blog. These blogs aren’t asking for any major commitment, that’s why I’ve applied. I want to test the water before I jump in.

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