Blogging Fool

After my little adventure with Mechanical Turk and my exploration of other crowd sourcing sites, I decided to head over to one of the very first and perhaps best portals for finding work and / or hiring workers to do the things online that others can’t do or are willing to pay for: Elance.com.

Elance has earned writers and IT types earnings in the hundreds of millions of dollars since its inception.  After pluggin in some basic information about my skillset, I set out to look for job opportunities and see how I stacked up.  Almost instantly I found a huge variety of employers looking for people to write html, implement a blog into their site, or simple write content for their developing blogs.  I submitted to a pair of these (the free version allows you up to three per month) and shortly after, based on the existing blogs I have developed, landed a gig as a guest writer.

In case you are wondering what happened to my RSS feed and why it has been so quiet – I have been busy helping a terrific new WordPress-centric site populate its database with fresh new content as they prepare to launch.  So in fact, I never left, I was just publishing elsewhere for a little while.  Check out my latest WordPress articles at WP-Blogger.com

The reasons I mention this here at my own blogging site, are twofold:

1. You may still feel like a novice at this blogging thing, but chances are you know more than a lot of people out there.  By having attempted, failed, learned from your mistakes and continued onward, you have, in fact, developed a new skillset for which others are willing to pay.  You can make money doing what you love.  Elance is a good place to find such work.

2. Becoming a guest writer for another blog is an excellent way to promote yourself, your abilities, expose your work and brand to a new, but targeted audience, to build new relationships, expand your network, and hone your craft.  Lest that nagging voice of self-defeat in the back of your mind chime in to tell you that you don’t have what it takes – remember too that by guest writing for another site, you are also helping them; ProBlogger.net, easily one of the greatr success stories of the Blogosphere does so well not only because of its creator Darren Rowse, but because Rowse constantly features content by guest bloggers who may specialize in topics even he doesn’t have command over.

So lift up your head, walk out the virtual front door of your little corner of the Internet and see who else is in the neighborhood, and before long you too may be able to tell people that you are a blogger by trade and who knows, before long it may be paying your rent.