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You enjoy blogging, and you’re looking for a new source of income, so you decide to go blog job hunting.
Not so fast. Do a little groundwork first, and you’ll thank yourself in the end. Blog jobs are plentiful, but for best results you need a blog job which suits your expertise, your experience, and the way you like to work.
So here we are, five tips on how to get hired as a blogger:
1. Decide on your areas of expertise - what do you know?
Start by making a list of your areas of expertise. What do you know that someone might be willing to pay for? The experience which you have can come from a job, or from your interests and hobbies.
For example, perhaps you work in a bank, so you’re reasonably aware of financial topics - that’s one item for your expertise-list. You’re in college, so that’s another area of expertise. You love cars - yet another area.
Think about movies you enjoy, video games that you play, activities you like - sometimes we’re so close to an area that we stop thinking about it, it’s just something we know about, and that we do.
Keep going, aim for ten to 20 items in which you’re more knowledgeable that the average person.
2. Create your blogging portfolio
Your next step is to create a blogging portfolio. This may be one blog, or it may be two or three. These are work samples. You can direct potential buyers of your blogging skills to this blog or these blogs as work samples.
3. Decide how much you want to be paid per blog post or per week
This is the big one. Decide how much your skills, dedication, and reliability are worth on the open market. Especially decide how much a blog will help the businesses for which you want to blog.
If you’re a new blogger, without blogging experience, price your skills a little lower. If you’ve been blogging successfully for six months or a year, you’re worth considerably more. You’ll find that as you continue to blog in an area, people come to you and offer you blogging gigs.
Bottom line, YOU decide how much you want to be paid. You can always negotiate, but you must know how much you’re willing to work for, and how much each blog post you create is worth.
4. Blog for self-promotion
Your next step is to begin to promote yourself as a blogger-for-hire. You do that on your own blog. Just place a banner on the top of your blog, in the sidebar, or in the footer, to make it clear that people can hire you, and then start adding blog posts.
5. Scout out-sourcing sites and the Web for blog jobs
Now you’re all set to get hired, it’s time to scout the out-sourcing sites and the Web for blogger jobs. You’ll notice that many of the jobs on the out-sourcing sites are priced too low for your consideration. Ignore them. There are plenty of businesses which are willing to pay bloggers well, so keep looking until you find them.
6. (Bonus) Think local - local businesses love to hire locals to blog
Don’t forget your local companies. As companies wake up to the power of blogging, it may be on their radar screen, but they need a push to do something about it.
Get on the phone. Talk to the marketing managers of companies in your city and state, and show them what a blog can do for them.
So, there you have it - the basics in how to get hired as a blogger.
Blog job resources
* Blogging for Dollars: How to become a career blogger - ebook/ coaching package
Technorati Tags: pro blogger, blog jobs, blogging, get hired to blog, promotion, portfolio
