Today is the 12th week of the Weekly Tech Blog Topic Series.
If you’re confused about what exactly this is, go here to read the first post ever and the guidelines…
Ok, today’s Tech Blog Topic is:
How much would you be willing to “pay” for blogging “support”?
Although I am generally curious about this (because some people do this for a living) I’m also just “thinking” about it for myself.
I love blogging. I love blogs. I love hanging out with people who blog. I like using blogs for Kingdom building. I love supporting people who are interested in the same thing.
What are your thoughts?
I don't think I would pay for blogging support. I am still a novice (only one year into blogging), but I think I have learned basically by doing. There is a place for a support role to help non-techy people get up and running but that is probably the extent that I can see the support being necessary.
As a marketing guy, I have been involved in the integration of blogging strategy and implementation into a church's overall marketing and communications strategy as part of my consulting for church clients but that is a broader thing than strictly blogging support. My 2-cents.
Cool! thanks for this!
Yes, I'd be interested. Just concentrating on content is time consuming enough. There are a ton of tools I'm interested in (i.e. locking down my WP blog to keep it from being hacked) that you've posted about. But I have no time to implement. Optimizing my site for loading time, bulk recategorizing etc…
I think I'd like a maintenance menu. Buy 3 hours for x… So maybe I buy 15 hours – then a timesheet is kept as hours are spent.
Does that make sense?
What are you selling? I'll buy it. Depending on who it was.
I think possibly more effective would be a community of bloggers (forum?) where newbs can ask the old stodgy bloggers for help. I remember most of my beginner questions when I started blogging were solved by an afternoon of google search and lots of fiddling, though I'm certainly not "there" by any means.
I'm not against paying for support, especially in areas where I know I'm weak. When you throw into that the knowledge that I come from a tech support background you might see that it'd be very two faced of me to charge for my services and then to expect 'something for nothing' in return.
But one really needs to quantify or qualify what one would be paying for. In my case, I'd happily pay for a re-design of my blog but I honestly can't afford the fees that the designers deserve. Could I then be a showcase for their talents as a way or repaying them? I guess that'd depend on the designer and their attitude.
This is one of those very open ended questions that (as an old teacher used to say) don't give enough to make a value judgement on.
Stu, thanks for this.
good point… been looking into this as well…
I would happily pay a reasonable monthly fee for a level of support greater than forums. As a business owner, you don't have time to figure all this stuff out. Time = money. Therefore, give some money to someone who has the time to figure it out on your behalf.
thanks for weighing in david1
I've been blogging for about four months now, and everything that I learned and implemented came because I googled it, and also because it saw it in use in good blogs (like this one). So for simple stuff like adding widgets and such, I wouldn't pay. I remember a few weeks ago, when I customized the header in my blog, though, it wouldn't line up correctly. So a really kind blogger actually went into the "guts" of the code to make sure it would line up correctly. For that kind of stuff I would actually pay some money. I would pay for advanced customization like that. How much would I pay? I think it took her about 10 minutes to do, so I would be willing to pay about $15 for it. Also, I've thought about the possibility of moving my blog to wordpress. So for big things like that I would also pay.
Thanks for sharing and dropping your experience…! Google is great.
If you've got the skills to pay the bills, why not utilize it?
(All that coming from a network engineer who is still struggling to strike out on his own and stop working for the man.)
thanks for the words dude.!