Forming a staff on an amateur blog

Quick recap: Project B-2 Bomber started as a hobby, a place for me to spout off about some things. To my surprise, other authors wanted to contribute posts regularly. That site now has a number of regular authors and some occasional contributors.

I recently announced to my regular authors that I want to make us into more of a staff and start accepting article submissions from far and wide. Some of them will act as “slush editors”, reading submissions and either rejecting them or passing them onto me with notes. I will then edit and post them, or reject them. Those authors who don’t want to do anymore than they’re doing will just remain contributors.

I’m doing this for several reasons:

• To bring up the quality of the content so we can begin to compete with blogs that have been around for ages and have semi-pro and pro authors posting on them.
• To enable us to publish a lot more articles from a variety of sources, which means more content and generally more links in (people tend to post links to their posts on other sites in their Facebooks and so on).
• To delegate some of the work that’s bogging me down.
• To have a sort of corporate structure for when we get to the point of actually being able to pay people something. Then it will be clear who’s been contributing what, and who deserves more compensation than someone else, and so on.

If things continue as they’re going, paying people $3 per article might soon be realistic. I’d like to pay my assistant editors something additional as well, but anything beyond a gift certificate might be unrealistic for now. And of course I need to keep something for myself. But at the moment, if paying for submissions proves to bring in more and better content, I don’t mind only keeping $3 per article for myself.

I can admit now that I’ve always had some kind of fear of success. Maybe a fear of not knowing what to do with it, since money was always a struggle in my life. Now that things are getting official, I’m not scared at all; I’m excited.

1. Managing staff and launching new blogs
2. Developing a blog audience that’s hungry for your content
3. Building a Blog Community
4. Coming up with new blog posts

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