Many have caught onto the fact that blogging is a great way to make a living. You can work from virtually anywhere, you are your own boss so you make the rules, and you get to do what you love. For this reason, many try to break into the blogging world in one of two ways. First, they might start their own blog for money (bloggers). Second, they might start to contribute articles to other blogs for money (freelance writers).
The reason bloggers can afford to pay freelance writers is because they charge for advertisements on their blog. They want freelance writers to produce great content to help the blog grow, which will in turn help drive traffic and peak the interest of advertisers. In other words, the financial aspects of blogging can get a bit blurry. For the best SEO, it’s important you have your blog taken care of with quality content.
Content and Advertisements in Dollars and Cents
Consider some of the ways you can determine how much your blog should charge for great content that keeps SEO in mind:
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Bloggers Content
A blog will likely not improve its PageRank (PR) or SEO (natural links primarily) if it doesn’t have great content. For this reason, paying for freelance writing is probably the first step in the financial plan of a blog. So how much should you pay a freelance writer? There are a few different ways to decide how much you should pay. Some blogs pay a flat fee for a certain number of words, while others worry more about the type of content and the deadline. Generally blogs will pay between $40-75 per article, but once again that number can vary. Most of the time, freelance writers actually set the rate and then the blogs will negotiate.
The website Freelance Writing Jobs offers great advice about the kind of money a freelancer should make. While the site agrees that the rates can vary from site to site, the blog featured one article that gave this sound advice:
# of hours it will take you to complete the project X $ you need to make per hour to live = Project Rate
I think this not only works well for freelance writers setting a rate, but for blog owners who want to put a standard payment on their blogs for interested writers. Consider the time it should take someone to do the writing, and pay them the hourly rate that someone would need to live (generally around$25,000/year).
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Bloggers Advertisements
Blog owners typically make their money through advertisements. However, it’s tough to know how much you should charge for the ads on your blog because there are so many different types of ads. You will need to charge more for larger ads and more for ads placed in a prime location. The price will also depend on the authority of your site. If your blog is rated a PR 5, you can charge more than if your blog is rated a PR 3. Because there are so many choices, it can be difficult to put a price on what you should be charging.
Although it may seem as though no one knows what to charge when it comes to blogging, that’s really all part of the beauty. You get to decide how much something is worth. If a freelance writer doesn’t like your offer, they can go somewhere else. If you don’t like a writer’s rate, you can go with a different writer. Once you get the content under control, advertisements will seem like the easy part.