Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As you know I’ve started Blogtown Press and have been looking to hire a few bloggers. I posted over on the network blog about the need and received one response from that and I also was able to talk to a friend of mine who I hired on as a blogger as well. We’re working on a one month trial basis, but so far so good.

The main reason for hiring bloggers is because I can’t blog on 12 different blogs, organize advertising for the blogs, promote the blogs, and launch other products and sites all at the same time. It’s just not possible for someone who also holds down a full-time job. So finally, I’ve been able to make enough money to tryout employing bloggers of my own. I’m making just enough money on my Internet endeavours to pay for a couple 2, 3 bloggers (yeah I’m from Wisconsin if you caught that).

Some people around me have asked, “Why hire bloggers if you’re only making enough money to pay them. Don’t you want to make money?”

I do, and that’s precisely why I’m hiring bloggers. See building blogs is a long term thing. You can get super lucky have a bunch of big name blogs think your the cats meow and you’re set. As long as you provide interesting content on an almost daily basis you won’t have any trouble. But if you’re trying to lay the foundation of a blog network, meaning multiple blogs, you need to put in a lot of time creating content, gaining readers, and moving up the search engine results pages.

By hiring bloggers, I can gain more pages, more content, more consistency, and do it faster.

I’m currently working on the payment terms which is why I say trial run. I’m not sure what how lucrative having full time bloggers on several of my blogs will be. My current plan is to increase the base pay that I pay bloggers over the next few months with the opportunity to make even more through percentage based payments. Of course, we’ll see how it goes.

The good thing about hiring bloggers now, is that I’ll always have the content they produce, so while I’m paying to see gains in the short term, there is also the possibility for long term gains by having the content always there.

And that’s why I’m hiring bloggers while Blogtown Press will make only a small amount.

The first winning coconut went out in the mail and here’s a sneak peak at the beauty. Straight from Hawaii to your doorstep, you could win it. All you gotta do is enter the contest! (PS all you have to do is write one post with a few links)