Abe Olandres has a comprehensive post about blogger compensation schemes at the Blog Herald. It’s not your usual post detailing how bloggers can earn from blogging (which includes network blogging), but this is about how to best give bloggers in your network the incentive to keep on writing, to write the great posts, and to stay on long. Abe notes that the retention rate of network bloggers is not really high, and this is perhaps because bloggers tend to jump at each good online earning opportunity they see.

Each blogger will look at it differently. The closest, I believe you can come up with is to mix a whole bunch of them. All the points I mentioned above are part of the the salary package. So, a base pay plus traffic benefits, plus performance benefits, plus coverage, plus others will more or less hit the sweet spot for a nice blogger payout.

For starters, Abe suggests offering a higher compensation package than the competition. this will especially be useful in attracting experienced bloggers, and bloggers who have gained renown in their own communities. This would help enhancing the readership and the reputation of any blog or blog network.

Abe then suggests various bonuses that blog network owners might wish to give their writers. For instance, traffic bonuses would motivate bloggers to write material that will easily get linked to in social news sites like DIGG. Link bonuses would motivate bloggers to write stuff that A-listers or popular bloggers will link to.

What’s the perfect formula? It’s still a case-to-case basis. But it’s a good idea for blog network owners to explore the possibilities. I agree with Abe that running a blog network is just like running any business. Your employees will not only be motivated by the money you pay them, but also the overall environment that they work in.

Read about it on the Blog Herald.