Introducing good bloggers and companies to hire them
Update: Response to this post has been extensive - it's going to take me some time to deal with all the replies! That's great. — I've been getting so many inquiries lately from companies looking to hire bloggers …
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2007 the demand side of the blog economy had matured enough that companies were approaching individual writers directly: Marshall Kirkpatrick reports so many inquiries from firms wanting to hire bloggers that he is informally brokering matches between them and writers he can recommend. That sits on an arc already visible a year earlier — Darren Rowse documented how fast ProBlogger's new job board filled after launch in August 2006, and BizDev 2.0 framed lightweight, ad-hoc deals between startups and independents as a rising mode of doing business.
The signal here is that hiring a blogger had become common enough to generate unsolicited inbound volume for a single well-known writer — but the matching still ran through personal networks rather than any structured marketplace, which is exactly the gap Jobster raised money in July 2006 to attack on the broader job-search side.
First-order effects
- Companies seeking blogger hires get a curated shortlist without posting to a general job board, and recommended bloggers receive paid-gig offers they would not otherwise see.
Second-order effects
- Demand this diffuse pressures informal brokers like Kirkpatrick toward scalable formats — job boards, directories, agency-style intermediaries — validating the model ProBlogger launched into in 2006.
Third-order effects
- If corporate blogging budgets keep growing through personal-network matching, blogging consolidates into a recognized freelance profession with pricing norms and dedicated hiring infrastructure rather than one-off arrangements.
The trend: Hiring for blogs is shifting from personal-network favors toward structured intermediaries — job boards and brokerages — as corporate demand for bloggers outgrows informal matchmaking.