The Great Benefits of Blogging for a Company, Part One

by Hava Lyon | More from this Blogger

13 Jul 2007 09:15 AM

I have talked about the great benefits of having a personal blog and now I wanted to talk about the upside to working for a company as a blogger.

*You know how much you're going to make with each blog entry. When you have a personal blog, you may only end up making pennies each month, literally. When I write a blog for Families, on the other hand, I know exactly how much I am going to make from each blog. I can calculate how much my paycheck will be before it is even cut and sent to me, and I can budget for the income very easily. If I have more bills to pay, I write more blogs. There is a direct correlation in place there that simply doesn't exist with a personal blog.

Also, with Families, we receive bonuses every three months based on how much traffic we received, so we get paychecks for the blogs themselves, and bonuses for the traffic. Sadly enough, this isn't the way that every blogging company works, and in fact, there are some blogging companies who try to hire people by saying, "We'll pay you X percent of the ad income from your blog, but we will not pay you a flat fee per blog written." There are very few cases where this works out well for the blogger. To all of my readers who are looking to become paid bloggers by working for a company, I want to strongly urge you: Don't agree to this kind of arrangement!

My thoughts are, if all you're going to get is a percentage of the income, then why not just start your own blog, where you will get all of the income, and can have control over the advertising, etc, for the blog? If you are going to write for someone else and give up control over your blog, at least make it worth your while by making sure you're going to make money doing it. I read on a forum where a company told potential bloggers that they were going to drive a lot of traffic to the blogs, that they were going to get steady readers so that the ad income would be high, etc, and so bloggers signed up with them. After several months, almost everyone had quit, because their monthly "income" from the blogs ran about $0.50 or less. Always make sure you are going to make a flat fee per blog written, and (in most cases) that you will also receive bonuses or a percentage of the ad revenue on top of that.

There are more pluses to blogging for a company though - make sure to read on to my next blog, where I outline the other benefits derived from blogging for a company!

This was part of a series on blogging. If you haven't read the other entries in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all blogging articles. Comments and feedback are always welcome - feel free to leave them below or send me an e-mail at Hava L {at} Families dot com. Thanks for reading!

Learn more about Hava Lyon

Hello, my name is Hava or Havs (depending on my mood and yours!) I am a freelance writer who writes for several blogs, both paid ones such as this one, and personal blogs.

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