The Truth Behind Making A Living as A Full-Time Blogger

I have been a Blogger for more than 5 years now and i know i can advice/teach someone blogging business so stay with me

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I think the best way to start is to explain what goes into a typical brand collaboration (a VERY small part of the full-time blogger puzzle honestly but a start).

That begins either one of two ways, the brand pitching to the blogger or the other way around. Some brands have a high level idea of what they want out of the campaign, some have no idea at all. Many times the blogger will give the brand a “pitch” or “concept” that they think will resonate well with their audience and at the same time be relevant for the brand. After agreeing on a concept, the deliverables, the fee and the timeline, the blogger goes to work.

Some bloggers have managers do some or most of this work, I have someone who helps me on an as-needed basis for bigger campaigns, but I do most of this myself.

After deciding on a concept, there’s styling, picking out product, getting props, location scouting, and shooting the look. If a brand were to hire a production company for a shoot there would be multiple people doing all of these tasks. As someone who modeled for a brief time as a teenager I saw what went into photoshoots: a lot of time, money and people. Bloggers are creating this kind of content often single-handedly with their photographer.

After the shoot comes editing the imagery. Depending on the scope of the shoot and campaign this can be anywhere from 100-400 images (or more if it’s a lookbook or seasonal campaign

Images are edited and now comes the blog post. This includes making sure the content is interesting enough for people to want to read, optimizing for SEO, using proper keywords, properly using ALT tags and meta descriptions for imagery, finding and linking to all the items in the post, creating appropriate widgets and then finally laying out the post in WordPress (or other content management system).

It’s important to note that a lot of the content we put out there is NOT sponsored. So the same effort that goes into a collaboration with a brand that is paid, goes into a post or video that we do for free, which is a large majority of content. Essentially the content that’s sponsored helps pay for all of the other content we create throughout the year, a lot of which comes at an expense to us (whether it’s purchasing product to test, clothes, props to style, etc.).

We may make some commission from the use of affiliate links, we may not.

Social Media Manager

Before creating content can even begin we come up with ideas and concepts which make up our editorial calendar each month. This is a combination of blog posts, email newsletters, videos and more. And once the content has been created, it has to be seen. Bloggers are also essentially social media managers, a job that many companies pay someone with a college degree a very generous salary to do. We manage creating and posting unique content for our social media channels, in addition to growing them (which if you’re still doing it organically and not buying followers has become increasingly difficult). From Instagram to Youtube to Pinterest to Facebook, each channel has it’s own unique needs, and an algorithm that’s constantly changing (and working against those that aren’t cheating the system with bots). We have to understand our unique audiences for each channel and create content that speaks to each one. And once we’ve created that content we have to connect with our readers and followers on those channels. That means responding to blog post comments, direct messages, tweets, Facebook messages, etc. On any given day I receive anywhere from 50-200 direct messages from Instagram alone (and I respond to every message which can some days take hours).

Staying engaged with readers and followers is a crucial part of maintaining and growing the community we’ve created.
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