This is a reprint of a partial post in the Izea Boards that you can find here.    If you didn’t see it in the boards, you can read it in context.
OK, so here are some of the lessons I learned that you can take to the bank in 2009 and make money on
1. If you are a blogger and write a lot, you better get your ass in gear and learn how to do some form of video(YouTube video, ScreenCam, screen cast, slide presentation, viral animation) I don’t care what, you better learn how to do it, because you are going to need this skill set if you want to earn more money, gain more audience and keep your visitors on your site. You can start this for free, you don’t have to buy software, you don’t have to take expensive classes. There are no excuses, don’t delay go learn now! (If you need help, come to my site and ask questions. I became an IzeaInsider to help. Join my group if you like, or even if you are a member of a different group, I could care less. Ask me and I will help, because you need it and I need you to have that skill set and so do many other advertisers and your readers want that type of content. If they haven’t told you already, then they have likely gone somewhere else already.)
2. There is a brand new area in our industry for good bloggers and writers to earn money. All those articles that I wrote that were then published as guest articles, I would have been happy to pay one of you to do those! I chose myself because, I’m one of the most experienced Dragon bloggers out there, and in part because I didn’t have the time. But if I were covering a different topic, I would have readily turned to Drew on the BenSpark or Owen Cutajar or Cass Knits or soooo many of you that I know can cover some cool stuff on many many topics far better than I can. I would have gone to the specialists and then we would have ’syndicated’ those blog articles through our powerful little social media network.
3. Izea needs to reorganize its TOS significantly. Bloggers in some stages definitely were part of the problem, but many of those problems were created by Izea and some of their competitors (I won’t go into the long history of sourcing the network for this job originally otherwise this would be a ‘really’ long post in this forum.) Izea first and foremost needs to get bloggers to collaborate on their blogs.
Say it with me and all together at home: Bloggers need to collaborate with each other. We need to collaborate with each other. We need to work together. We need to leverage our strengths. We need to leverage our specialties. We can’t do everything all by ourselves. We can be greater than the sum of our parts. We can like each other (again).
The current Izea TOS PREVENTS/STOPS/DOESN’T ALLOW bloggers to work together. That is just wrong and backwards on so many levels. Way back when this company was started, I think it evolved out of the mistaken notion that ALL blogs were personal diaries or something. Well in fact some very good blogs and some very successful blogs are not diaries and not personal and written by staffs of people.
That is our growth model. That is YOUR growth model. That is the thing that will make YOU successful and help you get out of the rut of chasing $5 opportunities for 200 words, or even doing batches of piecework at $5 an article for a keyword. If you want to make $50k per year, $80k per year, have a health plan, take vacation, yada yada yada, you have to GROW your web business and you need more than one person to do it.
Well guess what?
We all need more people and your biggest assets are your friends and the people you have networked right HERE in PayPerPost, Izea and all over the web. Its all well and good to get some free help or a favor from a friend from time to time to fix your theme or add a widget or help you get your website unhacked or even push around a plug or two about an article or a DIGG.
But at some point we have to work together, seriously. By seriously, I mean you have to offer to PAY your friendly neighborhood blogger to DO something for you, and they have to DO it. We need to de-fragment our blogs where we each have 10 blogs about the same niches so that we can each qualify for the same 10 ops and we each fight for those ops and we each fail to get the ops we really want and then we scramble and repeat and the articles that do get written kind of SUCK. We’ve got to bring more focus to this thing. Seriously.
We need people to help proof read, and edit, and co write. We need people to design, and do illustrations and artwork, and subcontract video, and direct and produce music. We have within our reach a number of great things and YOU (I’m talking about YOU, the person that read this far, because if you didn’t care enough to improve what you do, you wouldn’t have read this far, but since you did, YOU are exactly who I’m talking to), YOU have some great potential to do this and be successful, because you care, you are creative, you have talent, and you have this great big fat powerful voice called a BLOG that can reach influence people all around the world.
You don’t want to get out on the stage and croak out a tone deaf noise and have the American Idol judges laugh you off the stage because you sucked on that one day, you want to improve and show them that you can be a star yourself. The really amazing thing about this social media industry, is that is a perfectly realistic vision. You can do exactly that!
But you can’t do it alone. You need help, and WE all of us, have to find the things that enable us to get help from the people that can help us and WE need to pay them for their services, and when the tables are flipped and they need help, they have to PAY US too! (This same process enabled cottage industries to evolve out of feudalism and eventually grow into the industrial age. We need to specialize, not in yet another niche, but in our own best talents!)
OK, so that was number 3. (in case you are keeping count!)
4. We bloggers need to learn how to tip the scales. There are going to be very many times in the future where we are going to have to combine our toned and trained voices together into a choir and hook it up to a sound system and insure that our voices are heard. We are going to need to be able to mobilize and achieve a goal or result. (I’m not talking about advertising here, but that could be a smaller outlet.) We live in a world that is flat, where we all (and this is everyone not just bloggers) compete with each other at a fairly equal level. Well, here’s a big news flash for everyone. We all have a great deal of power with our voices and our reach. There will be times when we can make this work to our advantage and give us the ability to do something useful. (like any tool it has the power to be abused as well, and we need to become more sensitive too that potential abuse so that we can fend it off) but even in those areas where things are grey or where some of us agree with the goal and others do not, we are going to have to learn how to pick our battles as bloggers. Our credibility, reputations, our industry and livelihood will rest on our abilities to pull this off.
So YOU need to start asking yourself where and how can I make things happen using my blog? What do I want to happen? How can I help to see that it does happen>? What do I want to stop or prevent? How can I stop it?
You do have this power and you need to learn how to use it effectively and appropriately (and without sticking your foot in your mouth or shooting your foot off with you blog for that matter!)
Summing UP
There’s more to add (more points) but for that you’ll have to check in with me again here or over at http://thelivewriterz.com or http://softduit.com or keep up with me on these magical inter-tubes somewhere.
This is a very important start for all of us. I know that if you are coming to these boards, you are here because you want to improve what you are doing and you want to see those improvements translate into real money (among many other things). I want to see that for you as well and for myself also. As a blogger and an advertiser, I know that this thing works best, hums, sings and break dances when we are all earning money hand over foot. We can earn money hand over foot, but we have to improve what we are doing one more time (continuously actually). Working on the internet means that we all have to change constantly and we all have to keep improving almost religiously.
I can definitely help you improve in a few of these areas, and as a person that loves to learn things ( have more degrees than I need and love learning new things), as a person that loves to learn things, I’m VERY interested in what each of you can teach me, because I certainly can’t specialize in everything either!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 am and is filed under Big Picture, Things to Focus On. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.