The real heroes of business blogging that I’ve seen over the last 6 months specifically are (surprisingly) SEO firms!

As soon as it became more the norm for them to advocate blogging to their clients, I started seeing job postings increase, rates increase, and frankly a desire for better quality (especially in the ghostblogging side of things).

So I think the rate increases have most to do with the actual gig increases.

Don’t get me wrong – some “bad” SEO firms still advocate cheap content, so low paying gigs won’t go away. But in general they’re doing a far better job of convincing companies to take up blogging than the SM advocates are (in talking about relationships and community). What the SEO guys (and gals) are getting right is conveying benefits. Many businesses don’t see the ROI of blogging to be worth having their CEO or execs blog to build personal relationships – their time is worth more doing other things. Having freelancers take on that role is less effective, because then those customers aren’t really building relationships with the company at all – they’re building relationships with a freelance writer. Ghostblogging of that variety has gotten a bad name (and rightly so).

The benefits SEO folks are conveying are more about bringing in targeted traffic – something well-optimized content can do. A lot of these businesses now hiring bloggers are looking for things like evergreen authority content combined with some news elements (rather than real company interaction) for that exact reason.

So while some of us love to hate the SEO crowd for the plague of $5 article gigs, when it comes to blogging, the more professional in the bunch have become a driving force behind increased market demand and higher pay (even if not wonderful pay yet). We’re far from reaching saturation, and we’ll probably see more businesses entering the blogosphere over the next few years, many of whom will be willing to pay more than rock bottom rates for the benefits bloggers can bring to them.

The truth is that there is usually much more value in establishing your own presence, product, brand, and online real estate space than it is to improve the presence, product, brand, and online real estate space of someone else.