Reading links for Tuesday.
- Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have both just announced their book, ProBlogger – Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Darren says it’s the worst kept secret, but I’ve been trying to collaborate with Chris as well and I didn’t even know what he was up to. The book is published by Wiley – so it’s in print – and is available for pre-ordering through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (By the way, Chris, if you didn’t know, is one of the original founders of Performancing.) Sounds very exciting, though I’m guessing they didn’t get $300,000 for their book.
- Darren and Chris aren’t the only ones with a book deal. Hugh MacLeod, creator of the highly entertaining net comic strip Gaping Void has landed a deal for his How to be Creative series.
- Loren Baker, editor and owner of Search Engine Journal, has just announced a guest blogging competition. There are over US$9,000 in prizes from a number of vendors. If you have an understanding of search marketing and related topics, go check out the rules asap, as the contest only runs for one week, starting today. [via DailyBlogTips]
- Earlier I summarized the new features in WordPress 2.5. Not everyone wants to upgrade, and I don’t blame them. However, due to deliberate efforts to hack blogs, Technorati has announced that they won’t index hacked or vulnerable blogs. That means that if you don’t upgrade to some safe platform and version, you might lose any benefits of being indexed by Technorati. Even if you feel uncomfortable upgrading to WP 2.5 (I hate the new admin panel), at the very least, start changing your blog admin password regularly – even weekly. And check for any unusual outbound links on your site. Just because someone has hacked you doesn’t mean they’ve changed your password.
- I wrote about what’s wrong with the blogosphere, and the health issues and deaths of some bloggers. My colleague David Peralty has a different take on the issue, which I only partly agree with. It is NOT as easy to make a living blogging as he seems to suggest, but that doesn’t mean some people aren’t doing it. Though I’m actually suprised that David said, “you don’t need to do a million posts a day to bring in a reasonable income,” because I know how hard he works. My point is that most bloggers are not making a living and for that reason might be spending more time in front of computer, gaining weight and burning the midnight oil.
- One other problem with earning below your potential income is setting your rates too low. Neal Shaffer writes at Copyblogger about how to price freelance writing. (Though be warned that not every blogging client will negotiate. They don’t have to – not yet anyway.)
4 thoughts on “Performancing Stream of Consciousness – Tues Apr 8, 2008”
David: That’s just my point though. Who can seriously do 20 posts a day consistently, with any quality. If a blogger (and the buying publisher) don’t care about quality, ok. But it’s still tough to write 20 posts a day, even for veteran writers. I try, but I end up exhausted and more jaded.
Thanks Raj for the mention
its always nice to see whats going on with other bloggers and recent news lets us know! thanks for keeping us all up to date
I never said blogging was easy… I just said that you don’t need to do a million posts a day to make a livable income. If you did two posts an hour, for ten hours a day, that would be a twenty post day, and should be able to get you to around 400 posts a month, and if you get ten dollars a post, you are doing better than me earning $4000 a month.
I don’t think that’s really an easily sustainable level of posting of course, and I think that if you did around 12 posts a day (6 hours if you can do two an hour), or 240 a month at $10 per post, you will still be bringing in $2400 a month. A reasonable income for blogging from home.
If you are feature length writer, you can further reduce your daily posting schedule to even less. If you do 5 posts per day at $20 a post, that’s 100 posts a month, for $2000 in income. If each of those five posts took you an hour to research, write, edit and publish, you’d only be working a 5 hour day!
Blogging can be insanely difficult, time consuming and at points low paying for the type of work that is required. I would never say that blogging is easy to make a living from, just possible, and easier when you are backed by a network like Splashpress.
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