“The laborer is worthy of his hire.” ~Luke 10:7
There has a lot of conversation in the past few months about blogging as a business and what bloggers can charge for various things. Whether they SHOULD charge for things. How much they should charge. Why some bloggers don’t make money and whether bloggers who “work for free” will impact the ability of other bloggers to make money. Oiy!
So what is my philosophy about it all? There are two main points that I think this verse highlights and I agree with.
A Blogger Can Have Value and Worth for a Company and Deserves to be Paid for That
Yes! When a blogger is performing a duty or task for a company, whether advertising, outreach, writing copy, putting together video ads or other public relations and marketing promotions, a blogger deserves to be paid for those efforts.
I will be honest with you…while I absolutely LOVE writing, website creation, etc. I love being home with my children even more than that. Which requires enough money to keep them out of daycare. 🙂 Pure and simple.
Having said that, there is another implication in this verse that I think bloggers need to be willing to examine and truly OWN. An implication which I wholeheartedly agree with.
A Blogger Should be WORTH the Hiring
In this verse we hear about a laborer who’s work was worthy of hire. If you are not a good writer, you will never be hired to write copy. And you cannot be upset about that.
If you only have 15 followers on Twitter, you are probably not WORTHY of the hiring for a Twitter Party. If you only write on your blog once a year, don’t be angry that advertisers aren’t knocking down your door (or inbox).
So the idea is a two-fold look at the same coin. Have something of value. And then no one will complain about paying the price of that value.
Take my big “Making Money” ebook for example – it is priced at $25. Rather pricy for an ebook. Yet in all the copies I’ve sold since it’s release in December, I have never had a single person say it wasn’t worth the price. In fact, the number one comment I’ve heard back was “It was worth every single cent.” The laborer was worthy of the hire.
Have an excellent “product”. Expect a quality price. Deliver above expectations as much as you are able.
Being WORTH hiring is the part I think a lot of people don’t get. There are so many people who do nothing but giveaways. While they get a lot of traffic, and may be worth it for a company to give some product to for a giveaway they aren’t likely to be hired to create content, manage communities, or provide social media consulting because honestly, they aren’t worthy of hire. Not that what they do is wrong by any means, it’s just not what the company is looking for, therefore, it’s not worth it to them to hire.
People who get upset about certain bloggers getting all the opportunities need to step back and check their own writing, blogging, and networking. Are they worthy of hire? Just because you blog every day doesn’t mean you’re worthy.
You said something at Blissdom about the difference between being hired for content creation/freelance work which should be paid for, and promoting a product on your blog which may be done for free/product.