Guest editor Zach Neal.
Okay. So I’m blogging, or rather re-blogging for aclient. I’m charging fifteen bucks an hour.
(That’s my minimum rate.) This
involves reading the news, looking for stories that fit into a certain niche.
That niche is a simple one. We’re looking for stories of a positive social,
economic, cultural or political nature about Sarnia, Ontario, Sarnia-Lambton
and surrounding environs. My clients are interested in income properties, and anything
they can do to both learn about the local market, and publicize that to a
greater audience, can only be a good thing. It’s a promotional tool.
It’s simple on the one hand and yet there is scope for
some interpretation of what makes a good story and why we might want it. For a
quick little re-blog of one story, with a link or two and a quick image, from
the files or from a public-domain source on the internet, I charge one-quarter
of an hour. Actually posting the story doesn’t take that long. Reading the news
might take a lot longer than that, but I would normally be doing it anyways. I
read all the local and other papers. What the client is paying for, to some
extent, is my expertise—the fact that I’ve got a pretty good brain, and that I
have some experience.
I’ve been doing the re-posting of stories for a long
time, with my own agenda and for my own reasons. I’m bringing something unique
to the table to begin with. I was already good at it.
Finding an image can take a few minutes. To go and
take an original photograph can take fifteen minutes, an hour, perhaps longer
depending on how far that location is. I can’t really charge the client for
this, as the cost would be prohibitive and we wouldn’t be able to do some of
the stories that we really want on the blog. Fifteen bucks an hour just for driving somewhere is out of the question.
For that, I rely on the $0.40/kilometre mileage rate
for the Ontario Disability Support Program’s allowable
deductions for business and employment. Let’s be honest, it helps to have a
bit of business experience and with some good reading skills, I’ve learned the
guidelines as best I can. As a former editor of a local newspaper once told me,
not exactly unkindly, my mind tends
to jump around a bit.
The mileage tends to offset excess income, which means
I get to keep it dollar-for-dollar, rather than losing it at a claw-back rate
of fifty cents on every dollar earned. And I have no doubt that I earned it.
When I take original photos, give up an hour of my
time, do something for the client that takes a minute and I mark it ‘no charge’,
on the old tab-sheet, that represents something, let’s call it commitment. When
I monitor an ad on Kijiji, for crying out loud, bumping it up again for a
nominal fee when the thing drops down a page or two, well, guess what.
The customer doesn’t have time for this. They have no
time, nor the interest, in doing it themselves—and while Kijiji is happy enough
to bump an ad, for quite a bit more than I charge, (incidentally), they’re
still not monitoring that ad. They don’t know or really care what page it has
dropped down to. All their bots know, is that it has been superseded by x-number of subsequent ads and that therefore
it is now on page 33.
When I add links into someone else’s story, or link to
additional coverage, that represents some kind of value added to what was originally
just a re-blog from our local paper.
If you were willing to go around to people’s houses,
take pictures of the boat, the car, the old washing machine, take down the
information, set up the ads and set up an account for them, charge some nominal
fee, this might be an interesting little sideline business. For me, it is a
revenue stream related to my writing skills. It really doesn’t depend on anyone
else except the clients.
Sell their stuff for them and they are more than happy
to pay it.
END
