Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

    Hi again everyone. I haven`t posted anything for a while, but I came across an article recently and after reading it, I just had to post this question.

The article was in Business 2.0 and focused on " Blogging " and specifically on people who started blogging as a hobby and have somehow turned this into a full time profession and making money by selling advertising on their blog sites. While the article talked about how these people were making money on their sites from advertising, I wonder about the longevity of this type of biz model ( if it really is one ) and if it does qualify as a business, how do you go about setting this up as a business entity? I am already writing about things I know alot about, like being an unhappy blucollar worker, and also talking about all things gaming, ie; video games, collectible card games and gaming miniatures, and anime. Things that I am familiar with intimatley, so is this really a business and if so how would you structure it to be considered legitimate at tax time and lets say setting up for protecting your personal assets, in other words would you set up a small llc or a corporation, or is this a ridiculous notion? Just wondering.


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Anime Kid

I will post a thought to this thread. Company name: ThreadPeople.com . Idea: To have a specific Blog and a company of blogs that link to each other in such a way as to promote products,services,organizations. Yes, all income is taxable and such a company should hire an outside auditor/accountant to determine what percent of profits go to the government. Everything else is reinvested minus that portion which is shared by any blog owners. The best way is to have a complete vision of what you will present to the public and freelance content on an income based payscale. I know certain bloggers who go it alone with only one blog and get lost in their attempts to reach a large scale audience because they have not considered the value of a total blogger vision. Example: If you take(from me) EuroDynasty . blogspot.com and title the various blogs as derivations of the names of every nation state, you will have a total vision of products,services,organizations which will most certainly generate an immense following of readers and then also buyers of all things product related. EuroDynasty.com is taken but not every .net,org.us.tv . Also i have EuroAmerica . blogspot.com, though only .tv is available. I`m not the only one who thinks a friendship between Europe and the U.S. is valuable. I believe that a blog as small business is only as viable as it`s links to a website,product,service,organization and with the growing popularity of online collaboration,partnership, and mergers also must first anf foremost be presented to the public as the exiciting information behind the business, be it product or....well let`s say your company P.S.O. count. As to the question of set up i would begin with sole proprietorship.

Methinks that selling ads will work for only a few bloggers. You have to have mega-traffic in order for this strategy to pay off. And most blogs don`t have mega-traffic.

As for the rest of us? I think that using the blog as a marketing tool for promoting products and/or services could work. In fact, I know several bloggers who are doing this right now.

But, if you want to try this approach, don`t to be overly sales-y. The blogosphere rebels against such things.

And don`t just sit there and blog all day. One of my successful blog-friends is a very active public speaker. Another is an avid writer of articles and winner of awards, which he is very good at publicizing.


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Design & Consulting | | Water Harvesting

I don`t know if blog-writing is or should qualify as a business of its own.  I agree that few people will really profit from it.  What the blogging world is missing are editors.  People that can both improve the quality of the writing (for those posts worth improving) and people that can find the interesting voices on subjects worth reading about.

The problem with Technorati and even Google in rating blogs and prioritizing links is that both are mechanical.  The popularity of a page or blog is rated by how many other people point to it.  That is a great measurement of popularity, but it is not a great measurement of insight, provocation, uniqueness, or any other quality other than "the masses found it interesting so it must be so."

Imagine all the other garbage "the masses" find interesting and hence popular, like pop music, pop psychology, pop religions & spirituality, etc.  Does popularity really qualify one article as being more valuable than another or only more popular?