You Can Learn How To Get Paid To Blog

A Twitter friend recently asked me how to get paid to blog. I ended up sending her 4 or 5 DMs filled to the limit with information. I still felt as though there was so much more to tell her about getting paid to blog, and yet, I’d already sent 4 DMs!

So, now I’m covering all the basics of what I know on how to get paid to blog all in one, easily linkable spot. I’m aiming for single tweet info, here! As I add more detailed information to individual posts, I’ll link from here to those posts to give you all the information that I can.

How To Get Paid To Blog:

There are several ways that one can get paid to blog.

1. You could get paid to blog professionally as the blogger for one specific company. This would be a regular J-O-B, but has all the benefits of a regular job, and yet is a bit more enjoyable.

The easiest way to get paid to blog for a particular company would be if you are already an employee there and know all the ins and outs of the company and its product. At this point, you simply need to convince your boss that the company needs a blog, and then wow them with all of your knowledge on blogging.  Of course, if the company already has a professional blogger, this won’t be quite as simple.

2. You could get paid to blog as a freelance blogger. In this case, your goal would be to have multiple companies that you blog for. Sometimes companies search out professional bloggers (I’ll show you where to find these blogging jobs below), and sometimes you can convince companies to hire you.

An important first step when planning to become a freelance blogger is to either start a blog of your own that you write as though it were a professional blog (stories about your cat usually won’t help you here) or to offer to write a company’s blog for free for a certain amount of time (say 1-3 months) to be used as a sample for potential clients.

Blogging, even when you’re paid to blog, is a highly personal act, and a company will want to know that your style works for them.

Where To Find Blogging Jobs:

If you want to get paid to blog, you’ll need to find blogging jobs. As I said above, you may be able to get hired to blog for one company, or you’ll want to go freelance.

Luckily, as a freelancer, there are a lot of blogging jobs available.  Here are some of the best places to find blogging jobs:

Freelance Writing Jobs: FWJ is a (usually) daily blog with listings of freelance writing work that has been gathered from across the web. In addition to all of the jobs they find (and cull out the low pay positions), sometimes clients will contact them directly to have their gigs listed to Freelance Writing Jobs exclusively.  A lot of these freelance writing jobs are blogging jobs.

ProBlogger Job Board: Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger instituted this job board as a place for people to advertise blogging jobs. There’s always quite a few blogging jobs listed here, though sometimes a scam or two will pop up. Darren is quick to remove those as soon as he’s notified about them, but you’ll still need to be careful, especially of new opportunities. This is also where all of B5 Media’s blogging job openings are listed.

Craigslist: Craigslist may be scam city when it comes to finding a blogging job, but it also seems to have the most opportunities around. It’ll take a lot of searching to find something, but every legitimate blogging job adds to your resume, and one good blogging job that lasts is well worth the effort. Be wary of anyone who says things like “should be quick work for someone who’s knowledgeable on the subject” or “this is a start up”. Those generally mean that they expect free labor, or labor that’s so cheap it may as well be free.  And if you’re not up to culling through the thousands of ads that pop up every day, Craigslist is one of the sources that Freelance Writing Jobs (see above) culls through every day.

Of course, there are many more places to find blogging jobs, but those are the best sources in my opinion, or one stop (or two stop) shopping.

Freelance Writing Bidding Sites:

You can often find blogging jobs on freelance writing bidding sites.

What this means, is that the jobs are listed, but instead of simply responding to an ad as you would on Craigslist, you actually put in a bid price. For example, the ad may say “Wanted: Professional Organic Manure Writer/Blogger” with the stipulation that they want 3, 400 word articles every week on organic manure.  You decide what you would charge to do the job, any experience you bring to the position, and anything else that’s relevant.  For example, say you charge $0.05 a word for keyword articles, and you have a part time job in a nursery.  You would then bid something like $60 a week, or $20 per article, or just give them your per word rate (follow the client’s instructions- if they say to tell them your weekly rate, that’s the rate you give them), and let them know that as a worker in a nursery you know all about organic manure including all the top brands and what makes them unique (actually give examples if you’re trying to wow them), and then list your experience as a blogger if it’s relevant (have been blogging professionally since Al Gore invented the internet, etc).

Among the most popular of these bidding sites are:

RentACoder: Despite the name, Rent A Coder has quite a few freelance writing jobs available, including blogging jobs.

iFreelance: I don’t know as much about iFreelance, but I know an SEO firm who uses them regularly to find writers, and I know several freelance writers who get the majority of their jobs there. The best part of iFreelance, in my opinion, is that you can set up a free profile.

GetAFreelancer: Get A Freelancer or GAF is another popular bidding site. Like RentACoder (see above), GAF focuses on freelance coders, but also has a decent amount of freelance writing jobs and freelance blogging jobs. But because there is no “writing” section, you’ll find most of these listed under “Data Entry” and “Copywriting” and sometimes under “SEO”.

eLance: Despite a bit of controversy over eLance’s price structure last year, it still remains one of the most popular freelance bidding sites on the internet, at least among clients. Many people who now get paid to blog professionally got their start at eLance, though may have moved on to steadier work since then.

How To Make Money Blogging:

Even with all of the blogging jobs that are available, you may decide that you would rather make money blogging by blogging for yourself.

There are a number of ways to do this. You could become an affiliate marketer, a niche blog builder, write on community sites that pay per page views, take pay per post opportunities on your own personal blog, sell links, or build a following and create ebooks and other products to sell to your followers.

More information on some of these will be coming at a later date, but here’s information on the simpler options right now.

Paid To Blog Community Sites:

A paid to blog community site generally works one of two ways. 1.) they pay you for page views to your blog, or 2.) they display AdSense or other advertising for you and pay you for the clicks.

An example of the first type of paid to blog community sites is Today.com, which pays you per number of page views. They also have affiliate products that you can add the links to your blog and earn a portion of the commission. The pay is low, but guaranteed, unlike the other kind of paid to blog communities. (for more information on Today.com, follow the above link)

An example of the second kind of paid to blog communities would be Communati.com, which rotates your AdSense links with its own. Your ads show up the majority of the time, but there’s no guarantee that anyone will click your ads, let alone click any of the ads at all.

In both cases, you can make money, but it may not be much. However, if you’re new to blogging, they’re a great way to get started as you not only don’t have to worry about setting up and maintaining your blog, but you get paid as you learn, and become part of a community that can help you break that learning curve faster than you would on your own.

Pay Per Post Opportunities:

There are a lot of paid to post sites out there, and there seem to be more every day!  A pay per post company basically works as a mediator between advertisers and bloggers. The advertiser puts up an ad asking for a post of a certain number of words, about a certain subject, that pays a certain amount of cash for you to write the post on your own personal blog. They will also require a certain number of links of which they will provide you with.

For example: Advertiser A wants a 200 word post that contains 3 links about doowhistles. Blogger B has a personal blog that qualifies (based on traffic, page rank, or some other system), and takes the opportunity. Blogger B then writes a 200+ word post on Blogger B’s own blog on the subject of doowhistles, inserts the links, and submits the post to the Pay Per Post company. The company approves the post, and a month later, the blogger’s account is credited with the offered amount of pay.

PayPerPost: PPP is one of the most popular of the paid to post websites. While the offers have lowered in pay, they seem to have increased in opportunity. Click the link to find out more. (Note: I’ve written another post on getting paid for blog posting with PayPerPost- just click the link)

Smorty: Smorty tends to pay a bit higher than PayPerPost, but doesn’t have the same number of available opportunities. Still, when I was first learning to get paid to blog, I signed up with anyone and everyone, and Smorty was one of my favorites.

Blogsvertise: I liked Blogsvertise’s layout for finding posting opportunities, but, again, the opps were never as plentiful as at PPP, though they were usually simpler (instead of looking at the advertiser’s website, Blogsvertise usually had press releases right below the opp) and paid better.

LoudLaunch: LoudLaunch pays decently, but their layout is awkward for choosing an opportunity, and since you can’t reserve an opp, you can spend an hour crafting a great post, only to find that they’ve all been fulfilled before you could submit your own.

ReviewMe: By far and away, ReviewMe has the highest pay to post opportunities. The lowest ReviewMe pays is $20 for a post. The only difficulty here is that they’re quite picky about who is admitted to their program. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It never hurts to apply.

I’ve also used Blogitive and Bloggerwave. The first I never had much luck with. The second never had many opportunities, but the pay was good, and the owners were super helpful. One of their updates lost my login information, but not only did they work quickly to rectify the situation, but they paid me a bonus for my trouble!

Get Paid To Blog With Niche and Affiliate Marketing Blogs:

If you know even a little about how to rank well on search engines (or, if you happen to luck into it often), you may want to consider starting one or more blogs with the purpose of making money.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have their own forms of advertising that you can sign up for, and Chitika and a few others have similar forms of advertising (they show appropriate ads to the subject you’re writing about).

Or, you can pick a few appropriate stores or products to display on your site. Commission Junction, ClickBank, and Pepperjam, among others, all offer plenty of products and advertisers to choose from (note: ClickBank is e-books and other downloadable products). Using these methods, you make money when someone clicks from your link and purchases an item. Amazon and eBay each have their own affiliate programs that can be quite lucrative, and Build A Niche Store exists to sort of auto-build an eBay affiliate store. I’ve had quite a bit of success with them, but you still have to provide content if you want your eBay affiliate store to get indexed well.

The quickest way to learn about how to make money blogging on a niche site is to follow that link to Griz’s blogger blog. On the right hand side, about 3/4 of the way down, you’ll see links under the section “Make Money Blogging”. It’s a set of 5 articles that will jumpstart your niche knowlege like no other free resource can. And more than most paid information.

If you want to get paid to blog for other people, and you’ve exhausted all of the resources here, feel free to visit my Freelance Writers For Hire directory blog and sign up to be a featured freelancer. Please follow the instructions found there for the best chance of success.

If you’ve found this post on how to get paid to blog and where to find blogging jobs useful, please check out the rest of Make Money Online Reality.