This is pure indulgence, so I do apologise in advance for such abuse of your attention. Since I've already harped on about my life story, I'm going to extend my personal introspection.
In about 10 weeks, this blog will be a two year old. It's time to grow up a bit.
It started off as a hobby and an outlet for boredom and frustration. Now, indirectly, it's my living; my "marketing department" for my brain services.
But how do you build a business model around a blog such as this? At the moment I do consulting and strategic advice. It does well enough, but I'd like to do better. The cost of sale is too high to make the business scale well.
Yet there's a catch to blogging as a means of promoting yourself as a consultant. I have to keep back all my best ideas and arguments behind the consulting pay-wall. They then don't get as wide an audience as they deserve (in my humble estimation). And they don't benefit by being beaten about in the blogosphere. Word documents don't autonomously improve overnight whilst sat on my laptop hard drive.
I was kind of sad that Nokia recently closed down their sponsored public wireless think-site, The Feature [don't click, it's gone 404]. OK, they didn't market it well and get the brand goodwill they deserved from it. But the site was filled with good ideas. I don't know if the contributors were getting paid. It certainly points away from trying to get sponsorship to write useful stuff that a broad audience will enjoy. I'm under no illusions that anyone is going to pay me just to write.
It would be interesting to find some allies in the big strategic consulting firms, such as McKinsey or Booz Allen. Having been on the receiving end of their work, I'm sure mine is every bit as good -- if not better, when it comes to "stupid network" stuff. There are some good boutique advice shops like Analysys, too. I think I could help them deliver better advice. But I lack inroads to any of these; thoughts anyone?
I guess I could pursue an academic job where you can just think, talk and write, but I find that world rather closed. I've no aspirations to follow an academic career path. And the pay doesn't match my tastes for the good life!
I'm getting tempted to break up all my (publicly reproducible) consulting work and start posting it up here. But to do that I'd need some quid pro quo. One route is to take the Google dollar. Slashdot today points to someone offering good advice on how to make a very comfortable living off AdSense. At my current traffic volumes, it's probably more than coffee money, but nowhere near a viable living. I'd have to get a lot more into the down and dirty of product reviews and company profiles to generate better ad fodder, and increase pageviews. I'm not sure if that's what I or you want.
I hope you've enjoyed reading my essays and ideas. I think it's a unique site, and one of only half a dozen in the subject area. I'd now like your feedback on what you like and don't like; what you'd like to see more of; and any thoughts you have as to how I can put more time and energy into it without having to worry about how the next Caribbean holiday will be paid for! Feel free to post comments, or if you'd like to protect my ego or send something confidential, just email me at feedback@telepocalypse.net.
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