If you like examples, as in details about real businesses, particularly financial details, you are not alone. In my years of building business plans I was always hungry for real samples to help me ground my educated guesses in reality. It’s not like you could ever just apply what you see in one business straight to another; but a reality check is always good.
It’s for that reason that I really like what Darren Rowse has been doing on his Problogger blog, with his How I Make Money Blogging series. Here’s a real-world example of how the revenue splits for one very successful blog:
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you or I will have the same revenue that Darren has on his hugely successful Problogger blog. That’s obvious. But at least it gives you an idea. And if you’re developing a business plan, it gives you some data points to start with. You’ll want to go to the post itself to see how Darren explains some of the pieces of his revenue pie. You can see immediately that his ebooks are his main source of revenue, followed by Adsense.
If you click through to this post, then scroll toward the bottom, you’ll see that Darren’s been doing this for several months now, so you can see how things have changed over that time. All in all, this is a generous sharing example. Thanks Darren.
(Image credit: taken from the source post on Problogger)
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
