Or if you prefer, blogs are micro-businesses.
Either way, a blog is small independent business, with you as the owner and sole proprietor.
The blog is a small business in the publishing industry. In this case, the business is personal micro-publishing.
Your small business blog may be designed for profit, or it might have purely personal or altruistic goals. To say that it's not a business per se, ignores the fact that you spend time on it as a writer and as a marketer.
If you make any attempts at all, no matter how trivial, to get more visitors or incoming links or mentions on other blogs, then you are a marketer.
All that is different is the amount of time invested in your marketing efforts, and their results. Not all small businesses in the brick and mortar, or in the online worlds, spend much time on marketing either. The amount or success of the marketing is not the deciding factor.
The fact that marketing was used at all crosses the line into the business realm.
You might not be selling products or accepting advertising dollars. That is not the defining line for a business either. You could be operating a purely informational not for profit business, where your products are your posted thoughts and ideas.
The counter argument will be made that blogs are far too plentiful, and the internet is littered with abandoned blogs, that amounted to only a handful of posts at best.
In reply to that statement, I would say that there are many startup businesses that enver get beyond the planning stages. Perhaps they exist only on a business card or a letterhead. Those millions of failed business attempts, are the equivalent of the many abandoned blogs, that are so often mentioned by blog critics.
You write your daily posts on your blog.
You take care of it, and do all you can to provide quality posts to your regular readership.
You try to get more visitors to your blog, by varying marketing and promotional techniques.
Some of you are making varying amounts of income from your blog. Keep in mind that not all small business startups make money. Most small business startups fail within their first year of operation, for one or many different reasons.
Those small business failures didn't make them any less of a business. The businesses were merely the wrong combination of people, skills, ideas, products, capital, and markets for that particular time and place.
Blogs are very similar to business startup ideas. Thousands of blog ideas are presented every hour of the day. Not all are read. Many find wide and loyal readerships.
Those blogs that become successful like their small business related counterparts, either in terms of revenue or visitor traffic, provide information and posts their regular visitors want to read.
It's simply the old business axiom at work, of providing the products your customers want, coupled with excellent customer service. The same formula holds true for successful blogs.
Of course, listening to the wants and needs of reader customers, and providing them with personalized customer service is hard work.
No one ever said it was going to be easy.
No one ever said business or blogging success was guaranteed.
Many of you are letting your posts be the product in and of themselves. Instead of concerning yourself with revenue, you are more interested in providing information and knowledge management. Those are your business products. The profit motive is merely a secondary concern, if it is even considered at all.
When you add it all up, blogs sound very much like small independent businesses.
Treat your blog as your own small or micro business, whether the blog is written for profit, or not.
You will be surprised at how your ideas about blogging will change for the better.
