There's been a fair bit of discussion around lately on the rise of multi-author blogs. Single author blogs remain the bread and butter of the blogosphere, but if you're considering a new blog, or even looking at boosting an existing blog, bringing in additional bloggers should definitely be on your radar.

Single vs Multi: letting go and achieving goals.

If you've been a solo-blogger for a long time, like I have been previously, moving into multi-author blogging can be a big step. The thing that held me back for a long time was control; I can tend to be a control freak and I hated the idea of handing over the keys to someone new, someone who may not write posts I totally agree on, or as the truth may have secretly been, someone who would compete with me for attention on my own blog. There's no easy solution for your fears in this regard, the only thing you can do is look at the bigger picture: what can you achieve with additional authors.

Like any marketing plan or business you should have goals in mind for any blog, be it new or existing. Brining on additional writers is a way of helping you achieve those goals, perhaps more quickly.

Content is the Key

I've always held the belief that quality always wins out over quantity when it comes to blogging, but you'll achieve a lot more if you can increase your quantity whilst maintaining quality. A solo blogger only has so much time in a day and producing more content often results in a reduction of quality, where as spread over multiple writers quality doesn't suffer as much, if at all. You'll also find that more quality content builds upon itself, bring in not only more traffic, but more repeat visitors; by having something good and fresh to read, your blog becomes a lot more sticky.

Different viewpoints to your own is also a positive, even if your natural reaction is to turn your back to it. Marketing a blog is about providing a product to as broad an audience as possible, even within niche verticals. Sometimes the best blog conversations occur between different writers on the same blog!

Labor is Cheap

The perhaps dirty little secret of paid blogging is the cheapness of labor. I once described it on a podcast a slave labor, which part of me says is true, yet on the other hand the market ultimately dictates the going price for blog writing based on supply and demand. There are a lot of people out there who want to make part or full time incomes out of blogging, and despite any number of people telling you how easy it is to make money from blogging yourself (it is if you know what you are doing) the vast majority of bloggers never make more that $100 a month (I'd say 99.9%). Even presuming that only a small number of those 99.9% care, out of hundreds of millions of bloggers world wide that's a massive pool of people looking for ways to make money from blogging, people who will happily take a part-time, low paid blogging job to bring in additional income.

Going rates for bloggers vary from site to site. A rough guide for a reasonable blogging position (ie a blogger with some experience) would be around $3-$6 per post or $500 a month, although you'll find a lot cheaper out there. Revenue share models are also popular as they don't require funding up front, but it's not a good way to keep a blogger writing for you in the long term. For example the split might be 50%/50% or the first $100 in revenue per month goes to the blogger then 40% after that. CPM models are also an option, for example a blogger might be paid $1-$2 CPM, a model that rewards good content as measured by traffic.

All up hiring a blogger to co-write a blog is not an expensive exercise. Consider the potential gains a blog could have by hiring an additional blogger, in particular the revenue gains the blog could earn. In some respects you're paying money to make more money.

Summary

I'm not going to tell you to go out and hire bloggers tomorrow, everyone is different and you may be already getting a lot out of blogging solo. However, consider that the vast majority of blogs on Techmeme's Leaderboard List are multi-author blogs; if you want to build a high ranking, high traffic blog bringing in extra writers is fast becoming a must do.