The Blog as a Business

Most blogs are small potatoes. The vast majority are online journals where teenagers
talk about their lives to a readership made up of their closest friends. A growing
minority, however, are businesses in and of themselves. They balance costs and
income; they purposely seek out content providers, advertisers, and paying customers.
They make a profit. They are, in fact, Blog Empires, ruling over a reader-defined section
of the blogosphere as the go-to site for millions who come to get the news, buy
promotional merchandise, and donate money to keep their favorite bloggers fed and
happy.

Blogs can draw millions of readers, because what You have to
say is important. You can accumulate advertisers, because they will pay to reach your
readers. A Business Blog, like any other business, is made up of three major components: a
supplier, buyers, and the products for sale. But a blog in many cases differs from the
average business because you are bringing together two sets of customers and
delivering two sets of products. And you’re not even selling the main item you produce.

The first component is a supplier. That’s you. It is your words, your opinion, your
research, and your art which can bring thousands or even millions of readers to your
blog. You will be the attraction, the broker, and the Emperor of your Blog Empire. If it weren’t for you, the blog wouldn’t exist. Because of who you are, what you know, and
what you do, it can thrive.

The second component is a buyer, a customer. While the vast majority of your
customers will be your readers, other customers will include companies that pay you to
feature their links and advertisements on your blog. “Traffic” (those millions of readers
out there who care about what you say) is the lifeline of your site: you’ve got to find
them and bring them in. Once they are there, your advertising customers will pay for
access to your reading customers, and your reading customers will pay for your
information and merchandise.

The final component is a product. Like all businesses, yours can’t exist without a
product to sell. But what do you sell when you’re giving your opinion away for free on a
blog?

The first product you sell is yourself: your opinions and your expertise. Without selling
yourself to your readers, you will have no customers. They may not always pay you
directly (though we’ll see that in many cases, they will) but if they don’t buy what you’re
saying, they will not buy anything else.

The second product you sell is your space. You lease it to advertisers who will pay you
to put information in front of your millions and millions of readers. Whether text links or flashing popup banner ads, your advertisers will pay you for a small part of your
readers’ attention.

The final product you sell is your merchandise. With a properly-branded name and a
reputation for excellence, your readers will purchase coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper
stickers…anything you can imagine.

In your Blog Empire, your reader is a customer and a product, and the more customers
you have, the more products you can sell and the more profit you can pocket. You can
turn your labor of love into a digital cash cow by building a Blog Empire that brings
customers and buyers together.