Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

The recent series of articles I wrote on blogging as a business model sparked a few queries about how I have gone about outsourcing the writing of my blogs. In the article I talked about how it is important to move away from being solely responsible for content output, otherwise you limit your potential for growth and are effectively self employed.

SmallBusinessBranding.com Case Study

Over a year ago I purchased the blog SmallBusinessBranding.com (SBB) from Michael Pollock. When I first took over ownership of the blog I began writing the content myself, doubling my writing commitments since I was also writing to this blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey (EJ), at the same time.

I had a lot of difficulty writing to two blogs. Each time I wrote an article for SBB, I realized it was appropriate for EJ as well. I went from writing one blog 100% of the time to dividing my output across two blogs, and I knew from experience running two businesses at once would end in weakening both sites (see my business timeline for the story of the English School I was running [badly] as a second business). I decided to come up with a solution to keep SBB running without me as the author, since I wanted to devote all my writing output to EJ.

After asking for suggestions in my forums and brainstorming, I decided to bring on one or two bloggers to write for SBB. My initial plan was to advertise for the bloggers and test them for a month. If they proved dedicated I would offer them revenue share of income generated by SBB - I was thinking something along the lines of 50%. I was going to do some number crunching first to work out how many posts were done vs how much they would get paid, but this situation never eventuated.

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I’m up early tomorrow on a Westjet plane to Florida with my mum as we both head to the Rich Schefren mid-program seminar. Rich is broadcasting his free seminar from this event on Saturday, so you never know, you might see the back of my head in the audience - look for the big pile of curly hair.

Word on the street says Rich might actually start selling some of the seats in his coaching program this weekend, even though the big launch date is later this month. I guess there might be a little bit of built-up demand :). Remember if you want in, you have to be on his launch list.

Here are some cool links for today:

• Betsy Flanagan sent me a note about here new entrepreneur podcast, The Startup Studio. Normally I’m apprehensive about people coming out of the blue and asking me to check out their site, but in this case I did and I’m impressed - Betsy’s podcast is polished, her voice is smooth and clear, and so far she’s lined up some fairly heavyweight guests.

  I just listened to the latest episode with Patemm founder Grace Welch. Grace’s story is of a simple work-at-home-mom business that came up with a new diaper bag design using a circle layout, which surprisingly had never been done before. Parenting magazines went nuts over it, she receives tons of press including some Oprah time (!), and thus found herself in charge of a million dollar home business. Nice

• Nick Rice recently published a great article at SmallBusinessBranding.com - 9 Branding Tips For Small Businesses. Danielle also had some entertaining stories to tell in her article - Want To Make Your Brand Shout Out From The Crowd?.

  We are about to do a new call for authors at Small Business Branding, so if you want some exposure on a popular small business blog, this might be just the ticket you are looking for. Stay tuned next week for the announcement calling for applicants.

• The Brisbane blogging conference has been postponed until August, which I still hope to attend. In the meantime I’ll have to organize a few more Brisbane entrepreneur meetups and perhaps add Brisbane bloggers to the mix as well.
• Jon has done some rough calculations on how much money he is investing to launch his start-up blog network, Home Turf Media. It’s pretty scary when you look at it that way. You might want to go read my series on blogging as a sustainable business model before you follow in the footsteps of Jon. Of course I’m glad Jon is doing it, otherwise we wouldn’t have the Brisbane is Home blog.

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