Eleven years ago today I began the adventure that became the Business Opportunities Weblog.
My father and I had a small business in Modesto, California called Nickel News. We published what we called a “news-less-paper”. The publication was an 11”x17” folded sheet of gray paper with jokes and humorous stories, surrounded by advertising. We distributed the issues for free in local restaurants and waiting areas and supported it with advertising from local businesses.
Selling local advertising door to door was hard and not a path to huge profits, so after I got married in early 2001 and brought my very intelligent wife onboard, my father, my wife and I decided to expand the business by licensing our publication to small business entrepreneurs and non-profits in other cities across the country. We edited, did layout and published the Nickel News for their community; they sold the ads and distributed it locally.
To license our publishing opportunity, we needed a way to promote our business to people all over the country. Here’s where my blogging expertise came in: since by then I’d realized that blogs ranked highly in the search engine results, I set about to create a weblog about business opportunities. The whole point was to get in front of people that were Googling for business opportunities. That was the start of www.business-opportunities.biz.
I didn’t even really write much in the early days. My father, my wife and I just posted information about different bizops and franchises in a weblog-like format and then included information about Nickel News on every page of the website.
The results came in pretty quickly and dramatically. Overnight we had interested people contacting us for more information about Nickel News and we licensed a bunch of them all over the country. I was able to talk to hundreds of different people looking for a small business opportunity. Although we didn’t sell to all of them, I learned from them that there were other people like me out there — people who were on the lookout for a great idea to build something out of.
Since then, I’ve concentrated my efforts building the site. As of today, we’ve made over 26,000 posts on the site. My favorite blog post so far is 20 Things Not to Do Before Starting a Business. What’s been your favorite so far? How long have you been reading?
