Turning This Blog into a Business | The Probabilist . com

Turning This Blog into a Business November 28, 2006

Posted by The Probabilist in : [News], Business, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Technology, Blogging , trackback

Just to give a heads up on the future progress of this website, I’ll describe some of the options I’ve been thinking of implementing to start generating some income off this blog. This is not an entry that argues whether blogging for money is morally less or more approving so you’ll have to wait for an article scaling this question for another time. Instead, this post just lists a few changes that I’ll be focusing on in the near future.

The most significant stream of income to implement is the ever-familiar google AdSense ad system, which will be a part of all the entries I publish. I’m sure it’s a more approving alternative than say having pop-ups dominate your screen and I’m impressed with the results I’ve seen reported from using it. It’s also supposedly very easy to start using and the contents of this website will surely be appropriate to qualify for it.

Another thing I’ve found interesting is ScooptWords, which allows for editors to find and buy written blog content. It will then be published exclusively in a newspaper or a magazine. The concept is very new and I don’t yet know the specifics of how well the system works, how much it pays in average and how good in quality an article needs to be to catch attention.

Then there’s another side of blogging that I need to look into and it’s how to start building more traffic. I’d still consider myself as out of the loop when it comes to concepts like meta, rss, css, feeds and using services like Digg, Reddit and Delicious. It’s also a question of how far I want to go to direct traffic to this site and at what point it’s more trouble and time-consuming than it’s eventually worth.

Lastly, I need to establish an entity for this business and make some practical changes in keeping financial records, delving into copyright issues and create a more specific business plan. My deadline for all of these issues is January 2007 so you still have a month or two to explore this site as it looks now. Traffic is low at the moment, averaging about 300 hits per day and I’ve used extremely limited resources to promote this site’s existence. Thus, I don’t expect a gigantic uproar to rise once these change take place. But since some of you are lurking around, already reading what I write, I figured it’s fair to share a glimpse of what’s going to happen.