Bloggers getting jobs : Sunday NY Times article

The New York Times’ Barbara Whitaker reports in Sunday’s paper that being a passionate blogger can lead to full time employment for a blogger or those who help run blogs.

As blogs gain in popularity, demand is growing for employees who can write them or have the technical expertise to support them. A few Web sites, including ProBlogger and Performancing, cater to bloggers and include job opportunities.

The pay?

According to information provided by Indeed, The average salary for jobs with some version of ‘blog’ in the job title averages $53,000. But for writers trying to eke out an existence as a blogger for a business, pay is typically much more modest……At b5media, a global blog network out of Toronto with about 200 blogs on subjects ranging from sports and entertainment to news and technology, writers work on a contract basis. They are paid a fee of only $100 to $250 a month, based on their experience and the quality of their work. The real money can come from bonuses that are tied to the traffic their blogs receive.

Including bonuses, one popular entertainment writer, who is also an editor, makes in the neighborhood of six figures a year, said Jeremy Wright, chief executive of the network. The writer’s Lindsay Lohan site is consistently among the most popular, pulling in about 500,000 visitors a month.

Mr. Wright said that it was far more common for full-time bloggers on the site to make $40,000 to $60,000 a year. But even that kind of pay may be hard for other bloggers to achieve.

Raj Dash, a Toronto blogger who hires bloggers and posts opportunities for them on his RajDash site, has five jobs listed. For his own blog, Chameleon Integration, which covers technology and the Internet, bloggers who write two posts a day, with up to 40 posts a month of 150 to 250 words each, receive $220 a month, or $5.50 a posting.

Even if not looking for a job as a blogger, having blogging skills is a good resume enhancer – “particularly in publishing, marketing, public relations and the news media,” Whitaker reports.