Frustrated with Creative Weblogging

For the last three months, I've been writing a mortgage blog for a blogging network named Creative Weblogging. The pay isn't great, but it was steady.

I say "was" because the folks behind Creative Weblogging just downgraded my contract. Instead of having me post every weekday, they are now asking me to post just four times a month, at an even lower pay rate.

I accepted their new contract -- some money is better than no money -- but I'm not happy about it. The powers that be at Creative Weblogging said that my blog wasn't bringing in enough income. Yet, they barely gave me three months to boost traffic.

And that leads me to my biggest beef with blogging networks: Why do they want us writers to boost traffic, and ad revenue, for them? With the piddly amounts of money they're paying us, you'd think they'd get off their rears and handle blog promotion themselves. I'm a writer, not a promoter. Yet it seems that everyone who wants you to write for the Internet expects you to be both. It's a big pain in the butt.

My worst fears about the Internet are being realized: It's not given writers great new writing opportunities. No, it's given us more work for lousy pay. And the idiots behind blog networks? They expect us to not only write every day for them, they want us to bring traffic to their sites, too. What, may I ask, are the blog networks actually doing? Not much.