Bringing Home the Bacon, Links

By Melanie Blodgett. Graphic by Nicole Balch.

Here are a handful of great links explain the ins and outs of bringing home the bacon as a blogger - no matter how big your site may be.

• Learn how Nicole’s blog went from a hobby to a job that supports her family (pretty pie charts included!)
• Liz shares a bit about how she’s created a job she loves, that earns an income at the same time
• If you want to get started with offering advertising on your site, here's for the basics
• Want to land your dream sponsor? Bri and Katie give you tips on how to do just that
• Perfecting the pitch is the first step into landing sponsors and contributor positions
• We all want to turn our passion into a paycheck, here’s 5 steps that will help you get there

(re)DISCOVERING YOUR VOICE WITH VIDEO

By Jenner Brown.

When you begin making videos to enhance your blog, you are adding a unique dimension to your online persona. It's a valuable medium that offers a great way to re-introduce yourself to your readers; those who have followed your blog for a while will learn new things about you. It's an exciting prospect really. Suddenly your speaking and making jaunty crafts and dancing outlandishly (looking at you Girls With Glasses). Utilizing video gives you new opportunities to grow your following.

You shouldn't be afraid to make the leap to video, even if you are a hopeless introvert like me. It's time to hop on the video bandwagon! Remembering the first rule of blogging with video will keep you out of trouble: Be yourself! Trite, I know - and probably cliché - but it's absolutely the truth. The best video bloggers keep it real.

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Contributing to Other Sites Without Giving Up Your Content

By Melanie Blodgett. Photography by Simple Desks.

When I share that a majority of my income comes from contributing to other sites the two questions I get asked the most are:

1. How did you get your contributing positions?
2. How do you come up with content for several sites?

In this post I’ll address the latter.

I get it, coming up with fresh content five days a week (or however often you blog) is a lot of work and nobody is immune to the blogger blocks. We've all sat staring blankly at a screen searching for anything to post about. If you’re contributing to other sites where you’re accountable to your employer to publish content, how do you avoid the block? And how do you avoid giving up the best content that you want to save for your blog? My advice is to:

1) Seek out contributor positions where you can blog about topics that interest you, but ones that you aren’t currently covering on your own blog

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Your Blog is Your Resume

By Melanie Blodgett. Photography by Jimmy Marble.

I’ve shared here before, that the key to making money online (especially if your blog isn't huge) is to diversify and make money from numerous sources. Personally, over half of my income comes from contributing to other sites. If you feel that landing contributing gigs is what you’d like to do next, then pay attention as I detail the first step today.

The first step to landing a contributor position is to polish your own blog. In the blogging world, the traditional paper resume that you perfected in college is obsolete: your blog your resume. That means, in order to land that dream position, it’s got to look polished. And since we all want to land a dream position - let’s get to work!

These 5 steps will put you on the right track:

1. Imagine being a potential employer and seeing your site for the first time. Go in with fresh eyes and only look at it for a very short time. What’s the impression that you get? Are there blaring mistakes that need to be fixed right away? Would you get a sense of your personality and blogging style right away?
2. Have a few friends do the same exercise listed above and provide constructive criticism.
3. Make the suggested changes that you believe will make your site better. Whether that means hiring a designer to make it more aesthetically pleasing, hiring a programmer to clean up the backend, or purchasing your own domain--you may have to spend some money to make some money.

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Resource Guide for Photography Copyright

By Susan and Willian Brinson. Photography by Willian Brinson for The House of Brinson.

Copyright law is confusing! Once you think you have an understanding, a new situation presents itself. The changing media landscape we are in provides a lot of challenges. Blogs are quickly changing as well. Today, blogs are not much different from traditional media publishers. Blogs are funded, having advertising and sponsors. As a blogger, I prefer the term publisher. Since that is essentially what we are doing; publishing content online for an audience (I really liked this article on Man Repeller discussing this topic).

Why is all of this relevant to photography copyright? Photographers are noticing the change as well. Blogs are publishers, and will be treated like publishers in traditional media when it comes to using photography. Here are some resource links and some interesting facts that apply to blogs:

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