South West eCommerce

We’ve spoken not long ago about a process where we hired some inexpensive labour to get us through some arduous tasks.  We’ll pay these people once and they’ll deliver something that will work for us long into the future, everybody wins.

Meanwhile, another process that our constant re evaluation showed us to be valuable is up and running.  Our “matured” magazine site has got two writers on board and they’re going gangbusters.  Adsense income is up, and one of our writers’ area is very probably generating it’s own product niche.  We’re not spending less time on it yet, as I’ve spoken to 5 writers about coming on board and only 2 have been ready to work on our terms.  Meanwhile I’ve got another couple of group meetings to sort out and it seems likely that they’ll generate another one or two writers.

We’re excited about what this is doing.  It’s adding another stream of value to our business.  Our own resources are stretched tight, and while this is taking its share of those resources, we are building the machine, not making the money ourselves.

What’s really the point of this post, is what our writers get for their involvement.  Zig Ziglar said in 1984 “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” We wanted our magazine to become powerful and valuable.  We’ve done it for fun for some time now, and we’ve decided we want to do it for money.  So we’re heading down the track of having a powerful, profitable magazine site.  What are we helping our writers get?

One of our writers was a mother, student, ex participant in her chosen industry, wanted to write.  She’d been blogging for about 4 months and in discussions said she hadn’t seen 100 page views in that time.  Her third article for us went was sitting at 135 views after 24 hours on the site.  No question, this is a writer.  Even better, this writer is making cash out of the deal.  Let’s be clear, the probability is she’s made about a dollar a week, but that doesn’t change the fact that her writing is attracting significant traffic and it’s of monetary value to our advertisers.  All in all, this is about career development for our writer, and by starting with us she’s made a giant leap forward.

Our other writer is similar.  With a sense that he wants to be a writer, and no way into paid employment in that area, he’s turning contacts from his other interests into story leads.  The leads get free publicity, the writer gets to move around the region and look like a journalist (which he essentially is), and his work is getting in front of significant numbers of readers.  Same deal, he’s making a share of very little, but he’s a step closer to his dream and we’re helping to put the steps one after the other.

So I thought to ask all of you.  If you need to get help for your business dream, what have you to trade that costs you nothing?  What does your business structure give that others can’t build for themselves?  Is there any way you can give it to them?  So many of our great motivators are not about the money, and it’s kind of nice to get ourselves to a place where we move in and out of cash as the reason we do things.