How To Run Your Blog as a Business – Part3: Business Secrets Revealed For Bloggers

Posted on 30. Apr, 2009 by Ashwin in Business Blogging

In an earnest endeavor to treat blogging as a business, I had started a series of posts explaining how exactly it is to be done. Part 1 of this series introduced the concept while Part 2 explained how business planning has to be done. Let’s now dig further into the secrets of running your blog as a business.

Most bloggers tend to take up blogging as something that resembles self-employement, except that the way the blog behaves is exactly like a business – you work first, pay yourself last and wait for the revenue to flow. The approach itself is flawed. Successful one-person businesses do certain things most bloggers won’t do, for instance:

Do you re-invest in your blog?

Most bloggers start blogging, put up some posts, continue posting and the effort goes on and on. Eventually, most bloggers will even start making money. However, ferry wheel stops there. The money is just earned and is never ploughed back into the business. Successful businesses invest a part of their profits back into the business until it grows upto the size it was intended to. Out of X dollars coming in, what percentage did you re-invest into your blog again? You could have purchased a paid wordpress theme; you could have paid a guest blogger to write for your blog and much more – a lot could be done with that money flowing in.

Do you leverage?

Most bloggers work solo. They actually spend time thinking of some great concepts, relevant posts, networking, linking, the works. Now, that’s a nice little job that you are doing. Unless your blog is boingboing.net, problogger.net, etc, you can never make huge amounts of money by wedging your time in. You got to let someone else do certain things for you. Outsourcing is a great option, but it is fraught with its own black spots. It is nevertheless, a mandatory requirement to run your blog as a business.

Do you have a business model?

I insist on having a product that could be sold or at least a service you could render. If you are blogging about a niche, it means that you would have done renough research. In that case, I am sure that niche would love to buy an informational product that delves deeper into the topic of the niche and you would have to create that info-product then. But there is a way this model has to be kicked into place. The basic way is to set-up an autoresponder, collect email id and then start giving away a free report or a free ezine/newsletter that provides more information and develop trust. When your prospects are ready, they would buy.

These 3 secrets are to be understood and assimilated immediately.

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Tags: Blogging as a Business, Blogging Elements, buisness blogging

2 Responses to “How To Run Your Blog as a Business – Part3: Business Secrets Revealed For Bloggers”

James

02. May, 2009

Excellent series of posts on business blogging, these are all great points to take in consideration when running a blog as a business. I think there is a line that most will get to when a blog moves from just a fun hobby to something that much more resembles a business. How do you know when you are at that point?
Ashwin

03. May, 2009

Hey James,

When a hobby becomes a profitable passion, you will be tempted to put that passion to work such that these profits are on steroids.

You get to that point when you start to realize that you started spending more and more time on blogging than anything else; your blog starts to show potential; people visit and leave comments; your amateur monetization you only experimented with starts yielding and revenue starts trickling in.

You do know the rush, excitement and ebullience when you first earned your $1 or more, don’t you?

Even more importantly, you begin to see potential. Your blog, which was just a series of posts until yesterday, begins to earn valuable readership, trust and the likability factor. If we stick to it long enough, readership grows continuously, trust builds-up and your blog becomes a mini-magazine. We then know that this could be a profitable business to run. It might not make anyone a millionaire, but it can make you cubicle free and allow you to do what you always wanted to do. When you start leveraging, it frees you up considerably.

However, it will serve us well when we put quality and service up in front and not worry about revenues yet. It helps if we strike a chord with readers rather than looking to pinch your money off your wallet. It helps if we do a great job of providing content and leave it at that.

Blogging as a business is truly a wonderful thing to do. You and and the team here at blogging elements (among many others) are already doing it James; but the lesson for all of us, difficult though it might be, is to stick to it long enough and be consistent in our efforts.

Let’s rock