High Paying Jobs For All Experienced Bloggers

Imagine having fun making money with your blog. You enjoy interacting with your community, responding to comments, writing posts, and highlighting products you think will help your readership. It’s rewarding to have your little slice of the internet universe.

Now imagine making money from your hobby and leaving a job you no longer enjoy for a high paying job that totally fits your blogging interests! So many people are stuck working at jobs they do not not enjoy – some even hate their jobs, but can’t break free due to all their financial responsibilities.

After 15 months of working with several companies in their respective marketing departments, I’m here to tell you that there is a world of fantastic, high-paying jobs out there that every blogger with at least a couple years of experience can have.

We bloggers are creatives and business people in one. We are the CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, COOs of our respective sites. There’s no better way to learn than to learn by actually building something from nothing. We’ve all built something from nothing, and that’s something we should all be very proud of.

I realize that not every blogger can generate hundreds of thousands of page views a month or make a hefty online salary. Some give up when they realize they could be making more at McDonald’s flipping burgers than blogging. But the biggest irony is that most of the successful bloggers who do end up making a lot of money don’t have the sole goal of making a lot of money in the first place. Their primary goal is to write, connect, and share their creativity.

Besides the lucrative Chief Content Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, or VP of Marketing officer positions, here are five more relatively high paying jobs for bloggers to pursue. 

FIVE HIGH PAYING JOBS FOR ALL EXPERIENCED BLOGGERS

1) Director of Public Relations ($70,000 – $130,000) – Your mission is to sell your company’s story to as many big media outlets as possible. You want to get your CEO or Founders on TV, interviewed on the radio, and featured in major newspapers. This job is all about hustle and relationship building.

2) Director of Analytics ($70,000 – $135,000) – Your job is to analyze all the paid marketing spend to see what the best ROI is. You are constantly testing various marketing avenues and reporting back data in order to optimize spend.

3) Marketing Communications Manager ($60,000 – $110,000) – You are a jack of all trades. The main mission is to either manage a creative agency or create amazing imagery, advertising, and copy yourself to market and test. As a manager, you’ll have a vision of what’s great and you’ll hire a bunch of freelances to do your bidding.

4) Director of Content & SEO ($70,000 – $180,000) – Instead of being the Chief Content Officer, you can be the Director of Content & SEO. You’re getting more in the weeds with producing content, managing a team of writers, and optimizing your content for SEO.

5) Director of Email and Affiliate Marketing ($70,000 – $130,000) – As the community engagement manager, you reach out to your existing subscribers and clients through e-mail. You also build relationships with individual influencers who are champions of your product to develop a win-win relationship.

HOW TO GET A WELL-PAYING JOB WITH YOUR BLOG

1) Search your affiliates. If you go to any ad network, there are literally hundreds of affiliates in travel, sports, financial products, athletic gear, health products, you name it. An affiliate network literally represents every single industry out there. The key is to not pick any affiliate, but an affiliate you use, love, and have actively marketed for a good amount of time.

2) Use the product. I first heard of Motif Investing in the Spring of 2014 when they won Finovate’s best in show. I was intrigued by their value proposition and met up with them at a conference. One thing led to another and I was introduced to the VP of Marketing 30 minutes south of San Francisco in San Mateo. One thing led to another and I’m helping them develop their content marketing strategy. I asked all the questions face-to-face that any new user of Motif Investing would ask, and finally figured out the value proposition: you can build a diversified investment portfolio of up to 30 stocks and ETFs for way less than the competition.

3) Write a review about the product. If you like the product so much, you might as well write a review about the product. You’ll likely earn affiliate revenue at the very lease. After meeting about 50 people in the Motif Investing office – research, marketing, engineering, and the CEO – I wrote a 2,000 word Motif Investing Review post. The review is unique because nobody else is a personal finance blogger who lives close by who can gain the insights of working in their office for 10 hours a week.

4) Produce stellar independent content. Publish articles with good structure, a good voice, and as free from grammatical and spelling mistakes as possible. Blogging is an incredible medium to demonstrate your persuadability, humor, and personality. You probably don’t want to veer too far off the deep end, like I have done many times, if you want a job.

5) Create a “resume” post. It’s important to create a “best of X” post once a year of your outstanding content. Include in your “best of” not only your best quality of writing, but also posts that have a ton of comments, or a large amount of social media shares. Your “best of” post is a quick and easy reference for any employer to assess your work. The strategy I went with to wrap up 2014 was to create a theme: The Rise Of The Chief Content Officer, which argues the next hot job of the decade, and also highlights the most popular posts on Financial Samurai. In the past, I would just write, “The Best Financial Samurai Posts Of 2014.”

6) Show longevity and endurance. Nobody wants to do business with someone who is here today and gone tomorrow. The longer you can last online, the higher your conversion rates, the stickier your traffic, and the more authority you will gain. If you want to become an influencer online, you can’t just build a great site, sell it, and then still expect anybody to give you the same influencer status. With influencer status comes great responsibility to keep up with your community and only highlight products you use and/or truly believe in. Advertisers will flock to your website if you show a track record of consistency in content.

7) Show people how you use the product. The main strategy I’ve employed in generating affiliate income is by not selling the product. Instead, I just try and show people how I’m using the product to help me. This way, readers don’t feel put off. Readers have a choice of following my lead or not. It’s entirely up to them. So far, the results based on CTR have been great. But what I plan to do is also effectively compete in the “product review” post category. By having a 1-2 punch, you will be able to really dominate the search engines.

8) Leverage your community. One of the great things about the Yakezie Network is that when someone experiences some type of hardship, the rest of us tend to rally around this person to offer financial help in terms of writing or advertising opportunities. I saw many examples of the network helping out fellow bloggers back in 2010 when the economy was still going through a very difficult time. The important thing is to reach out and make your desires public so people can help you. The Yakezie Forum or other forums are easy to use.

9) Create a value proposition. If you really want to work somewhere, don’t take no for an answer. Even if you’ve been rejected the first time around, try contacting other people at the organization or the same person with a new value proposition. If you can put together a simple five page Powerpoint presentation on how you can help them, you will be far ahead of 95% of your competitors who don’t have such a presentation. You want to thoroughly understand their needs and problems and come up with ways in which to solve their problems. Have you written your own site’s value proposition yet? I recently updated the Financial Samurai value proposition for 2015 and beyond.

10) Highlight your metrics. Depending on what type of job you are looking for, your blog’s metrics and your social media metrics can have terrific value. Whenever I meet with prospective clients they will have already done their research on what I’ve done. By including my site’s metrics in my About page on Financial Samurai, I provide transparency and evidence that I can do what I say. Definitely highlight your metrics somewhere on your site.

CONTINUE TO CREATE AND FLOURISH

Professional or experienced bloggers do ALL FIVE functions to varying degrees already. Depending on the size of the company, there are specific jobs for each function that certainly pay these salary amounts. Not only can you extricate yourself from a day job that you dislike if you grow big enough, you can parlay your experience into many wonderful new roles!

I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever be able to support a family through a blog. But after constantly writing online almost six years, that dream is now a reality. I never imaged I could make more consulting than my last year’s salary as a Director in investment banking. But after 16 months consulting with various financial technology companies, it’s so clear to me about the present opportunities. The X Factor has a funny way of showing itself if you stick with things long enough.

I believe with all my heart that there is a robust job market for all bloggers who want to make the move into doing something career-related with their sites. Don’t sell yourself short. Know your worth and keep fighting until you find that perfect fit.

If you can develop multiple income streams online, you can potentially make a full-time living as a professional blogger. The best combo is making money online plus working on some consulting income for an extra boost. Many bloggers make more than bankers, techies, doctors, and lawyers!

STARTING A MONEY MAKING BLOG

I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, creating, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, learn how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes like this one. 

Leverage the 3+ billion internet users and build your brand online. There are professional bloggers now who make way more than bankers, doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs while having much more fun, much more freedom, and doing less work. Get started. You never know where the journey will take you!

Updated for 2017 and beyond.