There is also the problem of those bloggers who have become celebrity bloggers – eg. Shoemoney. How would readers react to others writing in his place? Of course, he could pretend that it was still himself writing, but that would be a bit unethical, and also, it may be difficult for someone else to copy his writing style. Would people even keep reading if others were writing the blog?

I think this depends on the type of blog. I think that on an internet marketing type blog, many people are only reading/commenting to get backlinks and traffic, so they may carry on visiting a high traffic blog, regardless of whether the celebrity blogger is still writing.

Take the John Chow blog, for example. He often gets people to write for him in his absence. Some of the posts are complete garbage, yet they still get truckloads of comments. So maybe Darren Rowse could develop his blogging as an actual business. The question is, will he want to, or be able to give up being the technician, in order to run a successful business? Not everyone can.

I can take a skill I have (writing) and get paid for it. But at the same time, I can avoid all the time and energy munching tasks of managing a business (or multiple blogs).

My blog exists to explore my thoughts around leading an easier (and less cluttered) life, and to improve my writing skills/reputation. It’s not there for income. I’ll let someone else deal with that and just get paid for writing.

I like your model Yaro of paying the writers a set amount. I am really reluctant to work for the blog networks that pay only based on ad-clicks. If I wanted to do that I’d add advertising on my own site.

Thanks for the series – has snapped me out of the insular blogging habit I’d fallen into.

Alex

I don’t see myself as a professional blogger although I make a nice income from affiliate programs, but I am afraid that someone else write on my blog!

I don’t know why. I think I am not the only blogger in this case.

I will have to do partner as well since I have too many blogs and I can’t post regularly on most of them now.

Darren is always talking about this on his blog. I am waiting for your last article. Your serie is a goldmine.

Can you provide us with some good places when we can hire bloggers?

It would be a good resource for our future projects.

But Im glad you answered my other question which is “Why would that person be willing to work for a standard wage when I could be earning way more than him?”

I now realise that not everyone has the site potential – thanks a lot Yaro for reaffirming certain goals that I’ve set for myself.

I see you’ve already taken advantage of this with SBB and I don’t doubt that you’ll be using that in your example!

Allen.H

I was wondering when you were going to publish your next post… And was really looking forward to it.

What can I say? Very interesting approach… However, I feel that hiring people to do the writing for you could have some down sides.

One of them, would be that even people that are looking for a stable income and don’t want to venture on their own would eventually come to the conclusion (after the illusion of stability -nicely put, btw- fades away) that they could also do it on their own, since they are already attracting traffic with their content. They will probably start doing it while still working for you, but within a period of time, they will put more and more energy into their personal project and pay less attention to your blog.

You may say that you can always hire another one to take his place, but as you know, everybody has a unique style, and the style of the person that you hired may have attracted your audience in the first place, so hiring another blogger could have a negative impact on your audience.

Another thing that started to ring my bells is that I belive what you said above is basically outsourcing. I am not saying that I have something against it, but I don’t feel that blogging is really a domain where outsourcing could work, unless the topic of the blog in question is strongly related to tech stuff, were less creativity will be involved. Even in this case, people that really know their stuff and are also fluent in English may charge you more than you can afford. However, this may turn out all right if you already have successful blog on that topic (like Darren’s photo blog, for example), and you want to concentrate on starting another project.

If I think more and more about it, if you are very popular blogger you can obtain a lot better results from people that are willing to write on your blog as guests, because they will earn than you could pay them… they will earn exposure, and on the long run they can benefit from it a lot; This would probably motivate them a lot more than money. But you should not over do it, because again, the blog will loose your personal touch.

The idea, in my opinion of course, is that blogging is all about sharing your personal take on things, and the success of the blog depends a lot on your style (the most sucesfull blogs I know, -Steve Pavlina’s, Techcrunch, Problogger, and your’s- are based on this principle) so passing ALL your duties to someone else, may be a risky thing to do.