I’m wondering if you have any advice about how to determine the percentage that is appropriate. For instance, my “partner” will be posting once a week. I will be posting twice, and at this point, I have fronted all the startup costs. She suggested a 75-25 split, which is fine by me.

But if we hire other writers, how do we divy up the percentages then? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

2 Cedrick Reese: try other resources, like your local college’s English majors. Maybe you could find some luck there.

@Patrick: About whether we have an editor, we do sort of. We have one person in charge of each site who acts as editor/manager/writer.

@Andrew: You’re probably right about a $50 minimum being quite high, the thing to bear in mind is that our posts are generally a bit longer and more substantial than say a site that just comments or reports news. Additionally we’ve raised it because I believe we *should* be paying writers more, even this is probably a bit low still, but the economy of it all doesn’t work much higher (for us anyway)

@Peter: Yeah that’s very true about post sizes, the articles on FSw are reasonably long, some more than others. And certainly the tutorials on PSDTUTS are quite involved and take (me) up to 5-6 hours to write and produce. Our article pricing was *very* loosely based on $.10 – $.20 a word, but writers are left to themselves on post length, so it’s loose as i say.

@ Peter – There are distinct differences between a blog post and an article: Style, format, tone, presentation and personality. A blog post is not really an article under another name. While the same information may be covered, the tone is generally snappier, faster to read, more succinct and has an expert “tang” to it. It’s broken up for fast screen reading, has its headers formatted to stand out, and uses snappy headlines and fast-paced writing. Articles are far more bland and less geared to those who read blogs but rather oriented towards those who want a good dose of information on related subjects under a topic umbrella. Paragraphs are a little longer and there isn’t much personality involved.

At least, that’s my experience :)

Traditionally, blog posts have been far shorter than the average posts seen on the two referenced sites, and on many blogs it’s still common for posts to be mere digests and links to other places. You know.. in the 150-400 word range, a picture perhaps, a paragraph of witty insight. In many cases, such a post might not pay as well as a 1500 word “article” post, but someone writing 150 words and getting $10 is doing better than someone writing and researching an entire article / tutorial and getting $100 for 1500 words when you compare the time demands.

I hope no one minds if I ask another question:

Is it ok to hire a freelancer to ghost write a post? I would guess so, since it’s still respectable paid work, I just want to be sure so I don’t offend any freelancers.

Guest posting is when we blog for free and is usually done to increase awareness, drive traffic, build credibility and basically make a good, solid name for ourselves.

I’ve been struggling with this lately. It’s one of my goals for 2008: to increase posts by other authors. I do have quite a few no, but there haven’t been many lately and it’s my fault: I need to find better ways to compensate people.

I was paying a revenue share, but it was artificially high – I really could not justify what I was paying. I’m thinking of going to one time payments such as you suggest, plus a vanity bio page that their post will link to where they can put links back to themselves, promote themselves a bit, maybe even run ad code if they want to.. I’m still fleshing out ideas, but this certainly adds to my pile.

Are most Freelance blog posts one-off things, or do the bloggers you hire expect to be hired for more than one post?

Also, is Freelancing different from Guest Posting? I would guess that Freelancing is paid while Guest Posting is not paid (because Skellie suggested volunteering to do so), but I’m not sure as I’ve never done either.

This is good because many multi-author blogs can’t afford to pay flat fees from the start and even better – it gives your contributors a performance incentive. The more posts they can write and visitors/pageviews they can drive to their posts, the better off they are.

Another thing you can do is to have friendly authors cross-post their content from their blogs to yours. All of your readers don’t necessarily follow the other blogs as religiously as they follow your blog, so it’s an easy way to get extra, free content. Your cross-posting friends get an extra link for their site. As to the duplication of content, so long as the blog doesn’t only have cross-posted material, you’ll be fine.

If not, I’m getting robbed blind! ;-)

Thanks for the tips!