Has the Economy Impacted Blogger Job Listings?

In August 2006 I realized that I was regularly getting two types of email requests:

1. Companies looking to hire bloggers
2. Bloggers looking to be hired by companies

As a result I decided to start a Job Board for Bloggers.

The concept was simple. Those looking to hire bloggers could place an ad for 30 days for $50. Those looking to find a blog job could subscribe to the job board RSS feed to be notified of new jobs.

It has been 34 months since I launched the job boards. In that time we’ve seen 720 paid listings for jobs on the board.

As I was doing some analysis of the job listings over this period I realized that the data might be interesting to others also as an indicator of how the current economic climate has impacted the job hiring scene.

While I wouldn’t read too much into the data as the sample size is relatively small I found the following chart interesting.

A few notes on the chart:

1. the first month (Aug 06) was a partial month - we launched the job boards late that month
2. the last month (May 09) is an estimate. We’re on track for 31 listings this month.
3. the line is a moving average based upon the last 4 months/quarter of listings

A few observations:

1. there are some definite cyclical trends to be observed - the most notable is that December has been a low month in each of the three years. November has also been a low month and October has been the highest month in each of the three years.
2. looking at the moving average - the end of 2008 and start of 2009 saw a definite dip in job listings. Interestingly there’s been a definite upswing over the last 3 months with a new job being added each day.
3. I don’t have a chart to show it but the RSS subscriber numbers for the job board are on the rise. The growth in those numbers has been quite steadily on the increase since the job board has been launched.

Again - I wouldn’t read too much into these figures due to the size of the sample and the natural growth of the site as it has become more well known but I do at least take a little comfort from the fact that there does seem to be hiring going on in the blogging industry despite what’s happening in the wider economy.

3 Money-Making Magazine Strategies for Blogging Success

In this post Rodricus Kirby shares some strategies of making money blogging by looking at strategies used in the Magazine world.

Magazines have been a medium to contend with for years because of their influence over readers, large subscription bases, and their power to generate big advertising dollars. By maximizing these 3 advertising strategies you’ll begin the profitable transformation of weblog into web property;

Seek Featured Advertisers

Strategy: Think of it as a “one advertiser to rule them all” type of deal. A featured advertiser should be one main company or brand that can get their message across effectively through every opportunity available on your site. This includes; a written featured article about the company, its products and services, a 1-on-1 interview to coincide with the article, a product or service review, and banner ads across high traffic areas of your site. Essentially you’ll come out from behind the desk as a blogger and into the arena of journalism and entrepreneurship. It’ll take some work, a little networking, and some sales tactics, but once you land that first account it’s all money from there.

Why is it a win for you? – You’re able to charge a premium advertising fee depending on your site’s traffic, your online social status, and how much targeted content you can generate for the advertiser.

Why is it a win for the advertiser? – It’s simple, less competition for your readers’ attention on your site = more traffic and profitability for them.

Note: Create different advertising packages with different price points. Depending on what the advertiser spends will depend on how much, “content coverage,” he or she receives. (Don’t go overboard with the pricing, if you’re a new blogger then you probably haven’t built up a large enough audience to entice big dollars from a major advertiser. Be strategic!)

Tools: When you write the featured article, use tools such as twitter search (real-time conversations) and yelp.com (community reviews) to find out what others are saying (only the good comments) about your featured advertiser. Also, try out Blogtalkradio.com (internet radio show hosting) for conducting your interviews, and possibly shooting video for the product or service review. The more dynamic the content the more engaged your readers will be which = an epic win for your advertiser.

Get Sponsors for Featured Content

Strategy: When I say featured content I don’t mean your life tips or opinion piece typed articles. The post has have a certain level of marketability. Something that will resonate with readers and be a perfect fit for a sponsor. For example; “Black Enterprise’s Top 100 Entrepreneurs under 40 Sponsored by Bank of America.” Or, “50 Greatest Gadgets of all time Sponsored by Microsoft.” Get it? This featured content becomes less of an article and more of a multimedia presentation as you should incorporate video, audio, and written pieces to drive your main points of view home. It’s a more targeted piece of content than that of the first tip. Where as the latter is kind of spread around with a focus on the advertiser, here, the advertiser focuses on a particular topic.

Why is it a win for you? – When you have a Featured advertiser as mentioned above, they will take up all the attention of your readers. However, having sponsors for your featured content easily allows you to sign as many advertisers as you would like since they’ll be attached to specific pieces of content on your blog. Say it with me together kids, “M-O-N-E-Y!”

Why is it a win for the advertiser/sponsor? – The first thing sponsoring featured content does is; it gets the advertiser closer to their target market. Trust me; Pepsi’s not going to sponsor a list of the “50 Greatest Kool-Aid Flavors of All Time.” The second thing it does is; it positions the advertiser’s brand as a participant in their market. It shows market engagement and a form of connection to who they want to buy their products or services.

Note: Brainstorm and come up with lists or featured stories that would resonate within your blog community. Select a few companies (online or off) who target the same kind of market, put together sponsorship proposals, and be persistent in pursing them. It might also be a good idea to partner with different bloggers and come together for a huge collaborative feature and seek sponsors together. The greater the “market basket” for a potential sponsor, the easier it is to seal the deal for the sponsor seeker.

Create a classified Ads Section

Strategy: Every magazine I flipped through had a classifieds section toward the back of their books. It listed every company under the sun that offered just about every kind of opportunity, service, or product. No doubt, this was the last line of offense for generating revenue for a magazine. Why can’t it work for bloggers as well if it’s done in a tasteful way?

Note: Keep your ads specific towards a certain market and you’ll attract more relevant advertisers. That means if you’re running a Christian blog then there shouldn’t be any Viagra ads on your site. Consider having a “free” classifieds section and run ad sense or other affiliate ads of your own for “traffic generating money.” Also, as mentioned above, you might pool your resources with other bloggers and split the costs, workload, and revenue of this marketing technique.

These are just a few examples that magazines give us as bloggers on effective advertising for our blogs. While ad sense, affiliate links, and text links are great ways to generate income, these techniques will take your blog to new heights. I would love to hear your feedback on this topic in the comments below.

How to Make Money (Passively) With Your Blog

Trying to get the most “bang for your buck” has been behind the invention of the wheel, light-bulb, the Internet and pretty much every other major technological advancement in history.

True to this desire for efficient productivity, in the online business world one of the most popular quests for someone who is just starting out in their blogging business journey is to make money passively.

In this post we’ll talk about the nature of a “passive” income, how to avoid the short-sighted “greedy” tactics that can destroy one’s entire blogging income, and how this all relates to value-oriented blogging.

Passive Income: Short-Sighted or Good Business?

A passive income is, according to Investopedia:

“Earnings an individual derives from a rental property, limited partnership or other enterprise in which he or she is not actively involved.”

If you make money without actively working at the time to earn that money, then that’s part of your passive income. Rental earnings, dividends — both are often considered to be part of a passive income, though whether any income is “passive” is always debated.

Tragically, thousands of get-rich schemers have latched onto the desirability of a passive income, luring desperate consumers into their traps with promises of “unstoppable systems” that can just be “turned on” to make money forever. In a sense, these schemers have given a bad name to passive income, making it feel (to some, at least) almost like it’s cheating.

Of course, the schemers are wrong — as are those who reject passive income streams out of a (reactionary) principle. Building a passive income isn’t about “get rich quick”; it often takes longer, usually takes more work, and almost always takes much, much more planning.

Before we move on to the exact tactics you can use to make money passively, let me reiterate what should be one of the most important concepts here: trying to make a passive income doesn’t mean that you try to stop writing valuable content, or that your goal is to make money online so you can “stop working.”

The exact opposite is true.

Writing valuable content and maintaining community is not at odds with developing a passive income. You can do both at the exact same time. Even more than that, developing both a passive and an active income with your blog leads to more success, more financial security, and a stronger income.

The best passive income strategy is multiplied by blogging with valuable content. Every single tactic listed below is simply deadly effective if mixed with value blogging.

How to Make Money Passively With Your Blog

By definition, a passive income from your blog is any money that you make if you completely stopped working. Not income without work — but income that continues to come in indefinitely after work.

The 3 tactics listed below are just to get you started — there are tons of different ways. If you have an idea, be sure to share it in the comments section.

• Search-Engine Marketing.

Search-engine marketing is a little different than just writing “for the search engines.” For example, Brian Clark over at Copyblogger has one of the best “user oriented” websites around. He’s the copywriting guru of blogging.

Yet if you look at his left sidebar, you’ll see a collection of links to pages, including one to Copywriting Courses. On the page he lists two reviews of affiliate products that can help you master your own copywriting. Of course, that page is the first result for “copywriting courses” on Google, and will continue to stay there.

To build a passive search-engine marketing income stream from your blog, just write enough valuable content that gives your main domain a great amount of authority because of “real links” from other bloggers. Then write an SEO page for the sidebar. I’ve done this with topics like “online savings account” and it certainly does make money.

• Subscription Marketing.

The best affiliate programs out there are those that offer residual returns. In other words, if you are an affiliate for a magazine, it’s better to make $2 per month the person signs up than it is to make $20 one-time… the reason should be fairly obvious.

If only 1/5th of the subscribers stay on for several years, then that 1/5th of the buyers alone will earn you more than getting paid one-time from all of the buyers combined. Plus, you also make money from the 4/5ths who didn’t stay on for several years — all-in-all, you can double your income by earning on a subscription/residual level.

Also, if something happens to you and/or your blog, building a residual income will provide a “safety cushion” for your income.

Bonus tip: mixing subscription marketing with search engine marketing is simply deadly. Then you have a passive income that is growing passively. Win-win!

• Project Outsourcing.

Of all of the tactics listed here, this is probably the least “passive,” given that you still need to oversee the projects, and aren’t making the entire blogging process passive — still, you can increase the “passiveness” of your entire online business in this manner.

Outsourcing is when you hire someone to do some of your work. That’s it.

Outsourcing is something all of us need to do, at least on some level. Unless you have your own server, design your own blogs, write all your own content and registered your domain without spending a dim to anyone else… you’ve outsourced to somebody somewhere.

Some people, like Timothy Ferriss, are famous for trying to outsource their entire business. Others, like Jon Morrow and Brian Clark, reject the idea that outsourcing is always the best call.

So what should you outsource? I’ve experimented with hiring people to design my projects, host my designs, write some of my content (all of it for some websites), build links and market my content. So far, I have not found the perfect formula for deciding what to outsource.

For smaller blogs with less competition, I usually outsource the content. For my “flagship” blogs, I almost always write my own content.

By writing my own content, I can make sure that I’m building a relationship with my readers on a personal level, that the integrity of my content is never compromised, and that the posts are optimized for humans and search engines with just the right balance.

Help Us Out

This is just the beginning, of course. This post is more of an introduction than it is a comprehensive guide. There are tens of thousands of different ways you can make money passively, and I’m sure you’ve stumbled across several of the methods, or are even using some yourself.

Of course, almost all of the tactics and tips completely depend on your blogging business model. Still, finding out new strategies allows you to customize your blogging plan to be perfect for your own personal blogging style.

What do you think about building a passive income? Overrated? Under-discussed? If you had to build your blog in a manner that the entire income had to become passive, what would you do? Which of the above tactics do you find the most helpful? The most risky? Let us know in the comments!