Blogging for Garden Centers

**S* H* <h*@erols.com>**

Happy Spring, everyone!

I'm writing to invite you to learn more about a new source of income for 
garden writers -- blogging for local garden centers. I'm doing it myself 
and love it -- getting paid to promote a company I actually like while 
producing a valuable service to their customers. The most interesting 
facet of it is how to use the blog to create an online regional 
gardening community (e.g., writing about local greening and gardening 
nonprofits is one great networking tool.)

Lots more to say another time and place. My point here is to say if this 
sounds like the kind of work you'd enjoy, please let us know so that we 
can point any garden centers, landscapers, etc in your area to you as a 
possible contract blogger for them. The "us" is myself, Katie 
Elzer-Peters and a few other gardenbloggers working for indie garden 
centers over at www.gardencenterblogger.com 
<http://www.gardencenterblogger.com/> Check it out and send us your ideas!

Know a garden center? You could be an ambassador for this cause, and 
hopefully then get hired as their local blogger, so send us the leads 
and we'll follow up. We're working on a juicy and convincing hand-out 
you can download in PDF, print and hand them to help carry the message. 
And if they need blog design, set-up or any of number of other services, 
we hope they'll hire us or our partners, but we're not asking for a 
referral fee or anything like that.  This is all by friendly referral of 
trusted professionals doing complementary work. Relationships and all 
that. Everyone stands to gain -- us AND the garden centers.

About pay -- the hiring of bloggers by the magazine publishers and now 
by Lowes is great news, especially since they're paying their bloggers 
well. So good for Lowes!  We hope this spurs more of the locals to get 
on board the blogtrain. The kind of pay I'm recommending is from $500 to 
$1,000/month for a local blogger (depending mainly on whether they're 
also managing, editing and promoting it), and $100 for guest posts by 
professional garden writers. (Others, and even garden writers when 
they're in book promotion mode, will guest-post just for the exposure, 
to promote a good cause, etc.) The relationship between a local company 
and its primary (and always local) blogger is important and the pay 
needs to reflect that. Their blogger is telling the company story, 
reporting on their events, and acting as their ambassador to the online 
gardening community in their region. Sound good to you?
Susan

_______________________________________________
gardenwriters mailing list
gardenwriters@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/gardenwriters

GWL has searchable archives at:
http://www.hort.net/lists/gardenwriters

Send photos for GWL to gwlphotos@hort.net to be posted
at: http://www.hort.net/lists/gwlphotos

Post gardening questions/threads to
&quot;Gardenwriters on Gardening&quot; &lt;gwl-g@lists.ibiblio.org&gt;

For GWL website and Wiki, go to
http://www.ibiblio.org/gardenwriters