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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Notes on being a paid blogger from Jess McGuire

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Jess McGuire, Paid Blogger, Defamer LINK http://www.defamer.com.au

 

Info on how Jess started can be read in my blog post here: http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3087922/blog/?p=153

Jess McGuire, is a blogger on  Defamer which is a pop culture blog. This was after she started her OzCulture blog she set up herself.  She started get attention by writing about ‘Big Brother’ when all of the production company from the show was reading it. When she was writing about the infamous ‘Turkey Slap’…and BB shut all their chat sites down so a lot of people went to her site to read about the incident. Since this she was offered a job writing blogs for Defamer and the benefits highlighted by Jess were the fact that she is paid per post, she can work from home and she has delayed publishing rights so she can write a post and have it published the next day and she gets bonuses for ‘hits’. Some other points that Jess made were:


•    Twitter is the only social networking site that works for her
• She gets hits because she sends out stuff all day that links back to her site, which she makes money from because she gets more hits and the advertisers pay her more
• She writes about ‘hot issues’ i.e. Kyle and JackeO / Master Chef etc which gets 6 million hits
• How does she write?
She writes the way she thinks. She believes her first writing on the “archived crap on Oz Culture is bad”. She started by writing for 3 years solid every day and through this process she found her individual voice, which makes her writing attractive to employers

TIPS: write how you think and talk / this brings people back / if people like you or hate you – they will come back / practice writing / Mariek Hardy has been writing since she was 14 – she was never trained / and Jess says that maintaining a blog is the best training you can get – it creates a disciplined approach, summarizing clear, succinct thoughts / analyse media sites/news sites: find angle or funny spin on ‘current events’
• Jess’s gossip writing differs from Perez Hilton’s blog (/ http://perezhilton.com) who is the biggest blogger in the world and makes tons of money heckling people and outing people. However it is reported that Perez has at least one ghostwriter that helps out. Jess has a different voice and does not hurtfully gossip about people / her readers appreciate her piss taking without making derogatory commentary
• Copyright issues?
(Money ends up coming from Murdoch) so have to be careful /have accounts with photo places / find pictures can use / can download thumbnails 150 x 150 pixels can use without copyright / if steal image: need to credit it and provide link? /
• Other considerations
: Jess likes long titles that are funny / but you need short titles that attract people and make them click / you need RSS feeds / tags / and linking within your own blog – to previous blogs on the same or different subjects = more hits /you also need to link to referenced material /
• Diablo Cody’s (Juno/United States of Tara) blog is a good example and you can see where it can lead some people!

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