The problem with this scenario is that in most cases the reputable blog networks will only allow those who are already pretty well know in their niche to guest post. Because of this you either have to look for a lesser known blog network that is more lenient in their guest poster criteria, or join huge networks that accepts blog posts from all their members but only chooses to move up a few (Think SEOmoz’s YouMoz section).

Whichever kind of blog network you decide to latch on, what your primary concern should be that the blog network you join is in the niche you specialize in or are interested in. Remember, if your goal is personal brand building it is more than the links that goes with blog networks that you are after. It won’t do you any good to guest post in blogs where your lack of expertise will shine a bad light on you. Not only that, but it’ll be a waste of your time because the audience is not your target audience anyway.

Image via TechTipsforCatholics

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Fortunately, there are some good suggestions and ideas that you can glean from the blogs of other people. The most common start would be to just a small greeting or introduction. This probably one of the most popular ways of starting a blog. A simple “hi, this is my blog!” post is one of the most common you’ll see on the internet. It’s a no-nonsense way of kicking off a blog. But some bloggers may not want to start off their blogs in this manner. Fortunately, there are also “fancier” ways of starting a blog.

You can start a blog by introducing yourself. Since most blogs are personal in nature, giving a backgrounder on yourself will give your readers a fair idea of why you have a particular perspective about certain topics that you’ll eventually discuss in your blog. You don’t need an exhaustive biography, just touch on the important facts that will help readers get to know you more.

You can also decide to give the raison d’etre of your blog. Write about why you started it, and what motivated you to do so. Personally, I think this is the best way of starting a blog. It gives the readers the lay of the land, so to speak. They’ll already know beforehand what to expect from your blog, which could pull in more like-minded readers. For example, if you say that your blog will be about your perspective as non-US citizen on the Obama Administration’s policies, it will surely attract people who are looking to read about what your thoughts will be on future issues.

An ingenious way of starting a blog is picking out one of those memes that are all over the net. Try to find a meme that is related to the topic of your blog, this will be a great way of giving a bird’s eye view of your views and also what to expect in future blog posts.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

First, Once you begin working for a blog network the first post you have to do is for that blog network. It is a commitment you do after signing on. So plan your posts ahead of everything else. Even during holidays and vacations.

Second, After writing and fullfilling your commitment to the blog network write your post for your blog. There is saying that there is no such thing as an everlasting Banquet in the Sun. And one day your stint at a blog network might reach its end and you will be left with nothing but your blog. So do not give it up.

For me these two things are probably the most important things to remember when working for a blog network. Of course there are things that one should also consider – the contract and terms of agreements to name one. Always keep your back covered.

Anyway, Once you begin working for a blog network enjoy your stint but do not forget to keep on blogging on a personal level and keep your roots intact. If you know what I mean.

There is no such thing as an Everlasting Banquet Under the Sun.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

1. Spend time developing your staff’s skills

As things continue to change, so will your blogs, and thus your business. Making sure your staff continues to use and develop their skills will allow you to keep a step ahead of your competition. This doesn’t mean you need to send them on courses, but giving time for independent study to learn something new, be it advertising, search engine optimization, or copyrighting, could greatly help your business in the long run.

2. Get to know what your staff actually does

One of the hardest things to do as a manager is pin down what your staff are actually doing. You have to remember though that what they produce or don’t produce greatly effects your bottom line. Making sure you keep tabs on their progress will create a better work environment and help your employees have proper expectations for what you would like done.

3. Get to know what your employees are really passionate about

Great blogs require passion, but many bloggers are just looking for a pay check and as such, they won’t be able to keep up a high level of energy about a subject. Positioning your assets correctly will lead to better growth in your company, or new avenues for growth you hadn’t originally considered. At Bloggy Network, we have created certain blogs because there was a niche that a writer really wanted to cover.

4. Provide regular feedback

Bloggers that work from home can feel very disconnected from the world, and thus their task. By providing regular feedback, you are helping them remain focused and setting certain expectations once again. This will increase their productivity or let them know where they have gone wrong, so they can do better next time. There aren’t really any true experts in the problogging world, as the career choice has not even been around long enough for anyone to claim that title. Problogging is a constantly evolving profession and so for every blogger, there is something new to be learned every day.

5. Give incentives

I know this seems a little strange, but even most real companies have incentives in place, and there is a reason. People need goals. We want to aim for something, and it makes us feel great to achieve it. By providing incentives, you open up a system where your employees feel rewarded for working harder, and if they attain such goals, it helps your companies bottom line. It is usually a win-win situation.

Understanding what it takes to be a manager can be of great importance to a new or established blog network, as it is a difficult job, and done incorrectly, blogs can fail. Of course, just like blogging, managing blogs, bloggers or a blog network is a learning experience, but these tips should help you down the right path.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

With Grand Effect, I am part of a group of very exciting, very prominent blogs that talk about technology and the web. The hard part, building the sites, is basically done. The new issue for Grand Effect is to help these blogs promote themselves, and help find ways to monetize them more effectively. I am also trying to make sure I give each member some of my time, so that they can get help with anything technical, and I would love to help them all with hosting needs in the near future.

With Digital Life News, I am building blogs from scratch and paying through the nose for writers. Because I was once a blogger myself, I feel bad if I am paying my writers too little, but I also realize that this is a bad business practice, as the sites aren’t making enough to be sustainable, and the sustainable level of income versus payments is still a very long ways away. With this type of system, I am spreading myself too thin. I am working on setting up a managing editor for the network who deals with promotion, basic WordPress administration and helps manage the writers, and content produced, but this means more money, and that is something I don’t really have a lot of at this point.

With Grand Effect, I could quickly and easily make a part time income by spending four hours a day marketing the member blogs, working on advertising, and developing new features for the network site, but in order to do this, I will have to slow down on other projects.

With Digital Life News, I own a blog network, but the amount of time and money I have to put into it before it repays me is huge, and the repayment date is measured in years rather than months.

Blog networks are expensive to build, whether you are devoting just time or time and money towards building them. Never underestimate this fact, or you are doomed to frustration, if not failure.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

I wish there were other popular services that I could use. Luckily, some of the people I work with live in the same country as I do, and as such, I can e-mail money to them through an e-mail money transfer system that all of the banks in Canada participate in.

Why not just use advertising revenue, and have companies pay the freelancers directly? Well, the sites I run outside of this one, don’t make enough to do that. Hopefully, at some point that will change, but for now, it is definitely helping me realize how much work I have to do on the ad sales side to make this business of mine break even.

Are there better services than Paypal? Are there better ways to pay bloggers? Let me know in the comments below.

The biggest concern currently is money. It costs money to register a domain, pay for hosting, designing a WordPress theme, and developing a brand and logo. It also costs money to get a great writer to spend their time in producing content for the site.

The other thing it costs is time. I have been spending so much time developing the site, working on WordPress, integrating plugins, finding the right themes to use as a basis until I can hire someone to do a better job that by the end of the day, I feel completely exhausted.

I have given up on blogs in the past, either because my financial situation has changed, I have run out of time, or I haven’t seen the results I was expecting, and while I don’t think there should be a hard line that helps people decide if their blogging efforts should continue, I do think that there are a few indicators that it might be time to give up on a blog that you are trying to build into a business.

If by the third month, you aren’t getting more than five hundred unique visitors a month, it is probably time to move on.

If by six months, you haven’t earned back ten percent of what you have put into the site, it might be time to call it quits before you invest too much more into the site.

This means that if you haven’t found a way to monetize it that it earns ten percent on the money you are putting into it, you are probably not going to be able to get the blog to the point where it pays for itself.

If you are paying $500 a month on writers and other blog related expenses, and the blog isn’t earning $50 each month by its sixth month. Then this should be a huge concern for you.

If by the sixth month the blog is providing you with more stress than reward, then take a break from it, and shut it down. It isn’t worth pouring your heart into a project that isn’t rewarding you how you hoped. The reward could be RSS subscribers, advertisers, traffic growth or just a good feeling that you get when someone “gets” your idea.

My Current Situation

Currently, I am running three blogs, not including this one, that are using up upwards of $800 a month of my financial resources. These blogs have until October to get to the point where they are paying for upwards of thirty percent of my monthly expenditures or I will have to shut them down or sell them off.

This is the goal I have set for myself partially because of the upcoming addition of a new family member in November, and also because at that point, all of the blogs will be past their six month mark.

I truly believe that a blogs potential or lack there of can be seen long before the six month mark, but giving it half a year to mature will really tell me if it is something worth pursuing.

Being a blogger backed by a network can be a great experience, but sometimes it can also be very frustrating.

My days are filled with posting quotas that I didn’t set myself, with posting requirements on sites that I don’t particularly enjoy, writing content that I don’t control, and hoping that it does well enough that the company keeps me on.

All the while dealing with the fact that I don’t control how the site functions or the advertising that goes next to the words I write. I consider it to be very similar to working as a reporter for a newspaper.

Blogging for myself, I get to chose how often I post, and where I post. I get to chose how the sites function, and how they are monetized and promoted.

It is a very different feeling, but you can also see the advantages of blogging for a network. I never have to worry about servers, advertising, monetization, WordPress upgrades, design, branding, or promotion. My key focus is content, and everything else is someone else’s problem. It allows me to create more, and worry less, all the while knowing I will get paid for the effort I put in.

I don’t know many bloggers working for themselves that after a month can expect the type of pay checks that network backed bloggers will receive.

As the web gets more competitive, and more blogs are added, I feel like I can recommend blogging as a business on your own, less and less. While there are many sacrifices being made as a blog network backed blogger, I don’t know if I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for Darren Rowse, Paul Scrivens, Jacob Gower, and Mark Saunders.

If you want more details on what it is like to be a network backed blogger, I suggest you check out Jennifer Chait’s and Deborah Ng’s Network Blogging Tips.

The issue is that I’ve never taken on too many blogs that were totally outside the gadget, geek mindset that I have. I am not fashionable, nor have I ever tried to be. I don’t even know colours, beyond the ones you learn as a child in school, but here I am trying to run a blog focusing on fashion.

For the most part, many of the things I have done before I will be repeating, except that I will be looking for things related to the topic at hand. Something like Digg probably wouldn’t work for promoting such stories, but maybe Sk*rt would be.

I won’t be signing up for geeky advertisements, instead looking at places where celebrity and fashion are more important as those are the new groups of people I am going to be trying to appeal to, and draw into the site.

Thankfully, I am not working on the content, as I know it would be dreadful, so I owe a lot to the wonderful writer I have working on the site. Thanks Michelle!

If you have any tips on promoting blogs outside your normal comfort zome, please let me know as transitioning from something I live each day, to building something that is like voodoo to me might just be one of the more difficult things I have done recently. Check out The IT Fashion if you want to watch my progress and are interested in the fashion world.

I always secretly hope that a competitor to 9rules would stand up. With the new 9rules coming shortly there will be more defined targets for us to keep an eye on. Chawlk goes head-to-head with plenty of other sites and if we don’t do better than the competition we die. Grand Effect is very similar to 9rules and I like to monitor what is going on over there to see what we can steal or do better. That is why you want enemies and although I have no problem with David Peralty or Sarah Perez I am going to put their network on my enemy list. “Enemy” may be too strong of the word, but I hope you can understand where I am going with this.

I haven’t yet figured out if I should be excited, or worried, as Scrivs has always done well when he gets competitive. And the support team he has in 9rules with Mike Rundle (a talent set that Grand Effect could sorely use), and Tyme White (we could use a person like her as well) make Grand Effect look rather small. The flip side though is that Sarah, myself and the rest of the Grand Effect members are getting very excited over the attention we have been receiving from all the wonderful blogs that are taking interest in what we are trying to build.

Much like I thought 9rules original intentions were, we have decided to keep things small, leveraging the power of the group and helping members with things they don’t have time to become experts on, namely advertising and promotion.

I never saw Grand Effect as competition to any other network out there, as none of our membership belongs to a network and they are all self-established brands, but if Scrivs needs to have a business enemy to remain competitive, then I look forward to helping increase that competitive spirit to really see how far he can go, while still attending to the needs of the people around me.

Do we really need business enemies to remain competitive?