Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Problogging

Problogging - what is it exactly? It is a means of supporting yourself financially with a bit of pocket money each month doing something some of us like to do - Blog.

I do multiple work at home jobs - why? Because I can. I am tired of the corporate bureaucracy out there and I just don't fit into their "piece of the puzzle." I am a hippie, tried and true, a granola geek dyke who is trying to make her way through college - again - and trying to figure out how to send her kid to college. Am I a problogger? Yes I am!

I started blogging back in 2002 when P&G wanted to start an internal blog for employees. I did it as a side project with my regular job and found it to be quite to my liking. I am a verbal kind of girl. The written word fascinates me in more ways than one. I am well versed and well read. I am always looking at copywriter positions out on Craig's list and I have pimped myself out to many a places. I was tired of the ads that were all the scam ads. I look for part time jobs around here to support my income and I am told, "Sorry you are too qualified and you will get bored." Being bored has nothing to do with paying the rent and making sure my kid has food on the table.

So I started looking around for pay per blog sites. You write a few blogs a week, or more, and the typical payout is around $20 per blog. If you put out 2 blogs per day in a five day period, that is $200 in your pocket. Not too shabby for writing a few paragraphs about something you would probably already write about anyway. Why not get paid for it!

There are so many problogging sites out there now. You have problogging.net and problogging.com and Kelly's new site Professional Female Probloggers. It doesn't take much to do this job. Only a little creativity, some time and an interest in writing. Sounds simple enough, right?

On Problogger.net, Darren Rowse was asked, "How much money can a blog earn?" Darren stated that was a difficult question to answer because there are so many facotrs to take into consideration and it depends on the site that is paying you. He brings up the following:

  1. Traffic Levels
  2. Source of Traffic
  3. Loyal Readers
  4. Web Readers
  5. Income Stream
  6. Topic
  7. Time Invested
So you can see that there are a lot of different things to consider when becoming a professional blogger. Is it right for everyone? No, I don't think it is. But it is right for me.

No comments: