How to Hire Writers in a Tight Economy and on a Tight Budget

I’ve been having a lot of people ask me lately what it is like to hire and manage a team of 18, 13, 15 writers. To put it bluntly, it is a Big. Challenge. Not only does every blog require a unique strategy to build, but each blogger takes a unique strategy to motivate & compensate. Sometimes, everything I do and they do click together, and their presence on my team and on my network becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes…. not so much so.

After losing and gaining several key people along the way, I can say that the hardest thing isn’t losing a blogger. The hardest thing is when the commitment level of a blogger changes – and something I thought I could count on isn’t there anymore. It’s not anyone’s fault per se; life and business change, and their role in my company needs to change along with it. I get that. But it doesn’t make it any easier to go through the process of rebuilding something that you thought you had already built.

It’s not just ‘life and business’ that is changing, too – the online advertising world is very nervous right now about where our economy is headed. We really don’t know if there will be ads to run in 2009. And I am watching with interest as I see a lot of other blog networks reorganize and refocus under the pressure of our current economy. Know More Media went out of business. Gawker cut pay three times this year and now just laid off 19 people. b5media just restructured their payment model and has lost writers in the process.

What I find most interesting of all, is that even though each of these networks are structured quite differently from my own and from each other, all seem to be facing the same challenge that I am = quality content creation costs are leaving little room for profit. And worst of all, we don’t know if there will be a profit at all 6 months from now.

Which brings me back to my bloggers, who I would pay 3 times the amount I am paying them if it were up to me. But I can’t. Even so, most of them are not only sticking with me, but are recommitting to writing for Sparkplugging for longer periods of time, even if they sometimes aren’t making as much as either of us would like them to make.

So how can you motivate and compensate your staff when the budget is tight?

Understand what makes them tick

Money isn’t the only reason people work. Good god, I didn’t make a cent off of this site in my first year, and I never stopped moving forward. When I’ve hired people, I have long conversations with them about what they want to get out of writing for Sparkplugging. I’ll even try to talk them out of it, just to ensure they are in for reasons that support their own businesses as well as my own.

Hire the ones that want it the most

I’ve turned down more writers than I have hired on. Having 50 people writing for me would be great, but what I don’t want is to have to replace 10 of them every 2 months. Do things like probationary periods to test the waters with writers. And I can absolutely guarantee you that if they drop the ball in the hiring process, they will drop the ball when they are working for you. Be ruthless in who you eliminate, and also be quick to hire the people that make it clear they want the job more than anyone else.

Show off their rock-stardom

Show off your writers as rock stars

It’s likely that if you have hired a writer, you probably think pretty highly of their work. I think all of my writers were rock stars before they ever started writing for me. But I don’t think that a lot of other people knew that my writers were rock stars. Darren Rowse says that it is important to make your blog readers rock stars – it is doubly true for your writers. Make sure you are showing the world the ‘rock-stardom’ of your team, and make sure people are considering hiring know that you will pimp the heck out of them every chance you get.

Open doors for them

One of the best things I’ve ever been able to do for my team was to find a sponsor, Epson, to bring all of us to BlogWorld. Most of them had never been to a tech conference before, and all of them were able to meet some incredible contacts they would have never met without being there. Another great example is that Marla Tabaka from the Ask the Coach blog recently landed a gig writing for Inc.com because of her work on Sparkplugging. Since she’s being featured on the flipping front page of Inc today, I’d say that’s a nice door to have opened!

Tie compensation to performance

If you pay people on a per-post basis, you will be on the losing end of the equation most of the time. Some posts will never give you a ROI, some will do well. But if the writer thinks their job is done once the post is published, you are doomed. It is critical in blogging that the writers develop a relationship with their readers, and promote their own content. It’s crucial that you pay on some kind of tiered basis so that your writers have a vested interest in their blog being successful.

Ultimately, I can’t guarantee that anyone on my team will be around 5 years from now. But I’m very focused on doing everything within my power to keep my team around, especially knowing there could be hard times ahead. I’ve been very proactive lately in being creative and innovative in finding ways to give my team incentives to be involved with Sparkplugging. We’ve tossed around ideas about giving them shares of the company, me giving them business consulting, and expanding their roles in the development and promotion of SparkplugU.

It all comes back to one of the most important lessons I’ve learned while (accidentally) becoming a professional blogger: take whatever you’ve got and leverage it into bigger opportunities. And once you hire writers, you have to do it for everyone on your team, not just for yourself.