Today, I had a great conversation with a friend of mine who was frustrated with their job a little bit. See, they had decided they wanted to make good money from blogging, but they were letting the blog owners make all of the decisions on how much their time, effort, and writing was worth, and my advice was that this person take back control over their blogging.

Blogging is a skill, not a commodity, and bloggers are not soda machines where you can insert a dollar to get what you want. Great bloggers are creative and capture attention and the imagination of their readers and blog owners have to realize that they are paying for more than just a few words that they can slap advertising around or else they aren’t worth working for.

So many blog owners that I have dealt with expect blogs to blossom overnight, going from a simple blog with little to no content into an amazing resource that everyone links to and wants to comment on, but this isn’t how it really is, and as such, expectations aren’t met and issues begin.

What about the guy that can do ‘insert crazy number here’ posts per day, and always gets a dozen comments on each post? How can I compete?

It isn’t a competition, and most of those bloggers that can outpace an experienced blogger do so only until their burn themselves out. Sure, there are faster writers, or bloggers that are able to come up with a winning formula or two that they repeat time and time again, but what usually ends up happening is that they burn out, pretty much never to be heard from again, or they have to slow down and fight the hard battle of raising their rates in a very competitive world.

When I was a full time blogger, I didn’t set my rates high enough, and I did this at my own detriment. Yes, you have to understand that blog networks can only pay so much for every post, but you shouldn’t undervalue your time. The best bloggers are artists, editors, marketers, and more, and deserve to be compensated accordingly.

When it comes to setting your per post rate, make sure you make your own rules, or you will always find yourself being controlled by one individual or another, and isn’t part of the whole problogging idea to take your destiny in your own hands, and work for yourself?

Originally posted on June 4, 2008 @ 10:23 pm