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Last week I reached out to some of my amazing blogger friends that I feel have ‘made it’ in a way that I would be proud to tell you about. My friends ROCKED with their advice and I will be sharing that here over the next few weeks. But one of my friends wrote back a mini post with what she is passionate about. It was written roughly, as an email between friends usually is, but I wanted to share it because I think the questions she poses are so valuable. This is one blogger who I personally really look up to so I hope that you all can glean some wonderful advice from her.

So much talk is going on about monetization. The conversation is good, because strong and honest dialogue between bloggers and brands is key to building successful relationships. However, without assessing what you, as a blogger—regardless of how long you’ve been blogging—can offer the brand and the ways in which you can track your success measures, how can you really demand compensation for your time?I think it’s important to ask yourself: What are you offering? What is your unique difference? Do you have reach and influence? If so, what is it? Are you passionate about the product or have a unique way in which your service (blog/business) and a brand’s product/service couples to combine potentially amazing results? If so, how? Are you a social media extrovert who can get the word out even though Alexa and Technorati aren’t ranking you high? If so, in what ways? Do you have an offline presence that can be combined with your online influence to produce even more amazing results than from purely online outreach?If we, as bloggers, are going to say: “Show me the money,” I think we need to be prepared to answer those questions and help brands understand the unique value we bring to the table that will help them get a return on their investment.

Soon we will be talking about how to build a media kit and I think these are perfect questions for you to ask yourself before we get started. Your media kit has to be much more than your ad rates. You need to be able to say “Show me the money and here is WHY”. It is a good time to go back and revisit your stats. Do you have a specific niche developing? A super low bounce rate? What stands out in your stats?I, also, wanted to let you know that I was asked by a good friend who is a PR rep in the mom blogging world to do a monthly twitter chat. The Blog Frog will be there participating as well.  More info to follow but save April 5th at 9 pm EST for our first #prmonday chat. This is NOT a prize twitter party. It is a conversation about PR that you can openly ask your questions and get some advice.So, lets get that conversation going…What is it that you bring to the table??? Let’s brainstorm how to answer this together. *I do answer a lot of comments so make sure you hit the subscribe button after leaving a comment or check back*