One’s annual net income is considered by some as the meter of success. The higher your income is, the more successful you are. So there’s no surprise why many soon-to-be college students choose a career that will land them to one of the highest paying jobs in the technology industry.

Setting what job pays the highest is easy by merely looking at the average annual salary. What puzzles many is why that some tech jobs surprisingly pay better than others? Apparently, there are certain factors that affect how much is earned by what profession.

Money. Specifically, it is the amount of money at stake. People who risk and earn more money tend to get higher pays. Compare the research scientist who gets about $105,000 to a computer support specialist who gets roughly $47,000.

Why the significant difference? Well the former earns and risks millions for his boss with a single correct or wrong analysis while the latter only works as a support and does not risk or earn that much money for his boss.

Supply and Demand. Why does a systems software engineer in Arkansas paid about $130,000 while the same professional in New Jersey gets only about $103,000? They are in the same profession but Arkansas has only 40 of them while New Jersey has 3,500 of them. The former has high demand but few supply while the latter has more than enough to satisfy its demand.

Job Security. It’s a common notion that the higher the risk, the higher the potential income. A computer programmer for local government, earning about $54,000, is fairly safe in his job compared to a programmer working for the mining industry who earns $84,000. The extra thousands of dollars should be worth the risk of being laid off when the mining company closes at anytime.

Getting one of the highest paying jobs almost always starts with the right education. After all, well-educated professionals like those in the medical field are not getting $220,000 out of luck, but because they started their career with the correct college degree.

I feel for the Phildelphia bloggers who were subjected to anxiety attacks this week. On Monday, rumors spread that Philly is in dire need of an infusion of cash and that bloggers are going to be taxed. Of course, this kind of news affected not only those located in Philadelphia but bloggers everywhere. The thought in every blogger’s mind: “If this is happening in Philly now, who knows when it will happen in my area as well?”

NY Daily News is one of the sites that published the story about bloggers being taxed in Philly:

How does a financially strapped city with a shrinking manufacturing base and rising unemployment attempt to make a little extra cash?

Tax the bloggers.

Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for a business license, whether or not the blog brings in a fraction of that amount in profit, according to the Philadelphia City Paper.

$300 for a business license??? That is atrocious, to say the least. Even if you didn’t catch the news early this week, you can easily understand why it stirred up the hornet’s nest.

Here’s the good news, though: the rumor is just that – a rumor and nothing else. Interestingly, the news that doused the fires came from The Guardian. Yesterday, they published a story that put the facts straight: there is NO blog tax in Philly. The $300 tax mentioned is actually a lifetime business license fee for anyone who is doing business and making money. This fee can be broken down yearly – $50 annually.

Classic case of people jumping to conclusions. Bloggers, rest easy and please read more carefully next time.

Photo credit : Phillip

There’s money in micro-blogging. Twitter has made an astounding $25 million (roughly about 15.5 million pounds) just from deals made with Google and Microsoft.

More than half of it is from Google ($15 million), says BusinessWeek, which interviewed two insiders who are familiar with Twitter’s finances — and apparently, the deals made in the boardroom. “The deals were huge,” one says, of the contract signed just two months ago, in October.

And if the numbers are to be believed, he wasn’t exaggerating. With $25 million in just two months it will be interesting how much revenue the company will rake in 2010. Especially since, as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone one said, things are just starting to come together. He’s put a team dedicated to finetuning the site’s “search and discovery perspective.”

The success of Twitter is how it’s turned micro-blogs into an instant feedback system. “Twitter is earning a reputation for delivering real-time results to queries about things that are happening right now.”

Too bad the execs won’t be Twittering if the revenue results are true. The company’s had prior financial struggles, and as recently as November Stone mentioned in his blog that it may use stocks to raise funds.

The Blog Herald’s Thord Daniel Hedengren invited three heavy hitters in the blog network industry for our sister site’s first roundtable discussion. Those invited were:

• Jeremy Wright, CEO of b5media
• Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato
• Mike Rundle, triad member of 9rules

The discussion revolves around the health of the blog network business model, the current financial situation, and today’s ideal blog network setup, among others.

Read the full discussion here.

One week after blog network Splashpress Media launched Performancing Ads, the young ad marketplace has reached a couple of milestones already:

1. Over 1300 blogs and websites added

2. Over 450 ads created and booked

3. Thousands of dollars in advertiser buys

The platform is being billed as the “ultimate advertising solution for both blog publishers and advertisers.” Read the Splashpress announcement here.

Syntagma Media’s John Evans has published an article on the recent hardships endured by blog networks, which are tied to the economic downturn.

So what has the title of our post got to do with that? Well, that’s Evans’ answer to a timely question: What to do if you’ve invested heavily in an internet business, such as a blog network?

Evans writes:

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Read the full post at Syntagma.

Last month, we reported on the Gawker Media Network’s lowering of its writers’ pay rates. Their new system pays writers based on the number of page views their posts generate.

Well, it appears that this new system is working for the network, based on the results of a research conducted by Bloggasm’s Simon Owens.

According to Simon (no pun intended!):

So now that six months have passed, has the new system resulted in increased traffic? To find this out I analyzed Site Meter statistics for 11 Gawker Media blogs (I didn’t include Io9 since it only recently launched). Overall, traffic for all Gawker blogs combined saw a 40% increase in page views. Each individual blog experienced an average increase of 49%.

Read the full results for each Gawker blog here. Great job, Simon.

The Gawker Media Network has substantially cut its writers’ pay rates, according to Radar Online:

[For] the second and…third quarters of 2008, the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview. Other Gawker Media sites, including Jezebel, also had their pageview rate cut.

At the beginning of the year, the pay rate per pageview on Gawker was $7.50, according to Portfolio’s Felix Salmon; it went to $6.50 for the next quarter and it is now $5. (Other sites vary, based on overall traffic and ad rate.)

The article’s writer, Choire Sicha goes on to provide an opinion on Gawker’s pay model

The ultimate flaw in the company’s logic regarding its pay scheme seems obvious. The website’s income should escalate when the site’s pageviews rise—unless, for instance, some high-end advertisers regard it as too tabloid a product, and ad rates have dropped. (Unlikely.)

So more ad inventory—actual pages served—should mean more income for the company—particularly since Gawker seems to be mostly increasing in pageviews not attached to any writer. At the same time, reducing the cost of the creation of that inventory also gets the company more of the income that is attached to a writer. Kicking down less money to the workers seems, at best, cheap.

Read the full article here.

It is evident that this new wave of advanced marketing strategies using blogs and content writing has been the new resort of most companies in the world of business today. These are the new elements that have helped businesses evolve into better managed companies aimed at attaining set goals.

Marketing is the life stream of any business entity and all marketing people will exhaust all means to use any advanced and new ways of making marketing strategies work. Hence, the new age of marketing has turned to these technology driven gifts called blogging and content writing and have had headway in doing so as we can see today.

In a time where marketing automation is a big focus, it’s important not to forget that your website is, “…the place that brings everything together in a unified place…” This is a very important point. Think about the times you’ve received marketing communications from a company, gone to their website, and been confused because what you encountered there was nothing related to their marketing communication. Consistency of story is hugely important to having your content drive action. – New Rules of Marketing & PR

[tags]blogging, blog marketing, marketing practices, marketing strategies, advertising, promotions[/tags]

Whoever said blogs can’t be big business is set to be proven wrong by trends with blog and content networks these days. Frank Barnako of Marketwatch reports that Federated Media is posting revenues of $1 million per month.

In a little noticed pre-holiday posting, John Battelle said Federated Media Publishing’s stable of 100 Web sites and blogs had a great ’06. “I won’t gloat, but … we beat my year’s estimated revenues by nearly 30%,” he wrote on Searchblog. He added, the revenue run rate is now $1 million a month.

Of course, it helps that Federated Media has in its roll several of the most popular blogs and new-media related sites today, such as DIGG, Gaping Void, BoingBoing and TechCrunch. Also, FM is more of a clearinghouse that connects independent authors with advertisers, rather than being a network that manages its own sites or a commune that helps with linkages among independent sites.

We hear FM is opening its doors to more independent authors soon. If you think you (and your blog) has what it takes to be part of FM, then it might be worth the try.