Defining Your Business (The Trick to Get Past Ad Income Only)
A decade ago, when I was starting my first website (and for some years afterward) “starting a blog” and “becoming a blogger” were key catch phrases of the make money online space.
If you ranked well for those terms Google in 2019, you could basically print money. (And, ranking for those terms on Pinterest was a pretty solid second… ask me how I know lol.)
These days, it’s apparently extremely uncool to refer to yourself as a blogger and no one should attempt to become one, lest they die of uncoolness.
Whatever.
We’ve now evolved into Content Creators.
(It’s the same thing, but there’s more social media involved and more people understand it, so you don’t have to try as hard to explain to your cousins that what you do is, in fact, legit.)
However you want to call it these days, the process of growing a content creation business is very similar and growth often stalls at the exact same place…
Creators start without defining their business.
Or maybe I should say – they go on too long without defining their business. I accept that it’s pretty hard to ask a career waitress with no marketing experience to propose a coherent long term strategy for creating money from literally nothing… again – ask me how I know.
But, unfortunately, If you can’t define your business, you’ll always struggle for direction. Making choices becomes very difficult. Every single shiny object derails you from the last project you started. And every single traffic fluctuation feels like the end.
All of a sudden you have 3 websites making $50/month each, 2 email lists you never mail, and an unfinished product grave-yard.
(ASK ME HOW I KNOW!)
If I ask most any content creator earning $1000/month what their business is, they’ll often tell me:
“It’s content creation”.
Or “it’s a blog”.
But… by definition, a blog (or website or instagram account) is not a business.
…What is a business, anyway?
According to well-known professors Pride, Hughes, and Kapoor, “business is ‘the organized effort of individuals to produce and sell, for a profit, the goods, and services that satisfy society’s needs.’ A business, then, is an organization which seeks to make a profit through individuals working toward common goals. The goals of the business will vary based on the type of business and the business strategy being used. Regardless of the preferred strategy, businesses must provide a service, product, or good that meets a need of society in some way.“
Get that?
A business must:
- have a strategy
- to provide products or services
- that satisfy a need
- to generate income
When your business is in the ad-income-only stage (or the sponsored-post-only stage) the need that you satisfy within society is the ad network’s need for space in which to advertise, and your reach + readers are the product you’re providing.
The strategy that you will do that with is more pageviews.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
Knowing it helps dictate the decisions you’ll make about your content, your promotion, your pursuits.
But; problem.
As we talked about when we looked at how long it takes to make money with content creation, pageviews are hard to scale past a certain point. And they can be hard to maintain.
(Same for sponsored content – earning potential is based on views on whatever your platform of choice is.)
If you define your business as an “ad space providing platform” only, the increasing struggle is that advertisers have no shortage whatsoever of places to advertise – and as Ai makes content easier and easier to create, there’s only more choice for the ad networks.
(When we talk about the whole Ai evolution and the devaluing of content, this is the thing. It’s an important consideration for 2026.)
Thriving, scalable, long-term stable content creation businesses rarely define themselves soley as ad space providers.
Ads can (and should) be a secondary income stream for your over-arching business.
You probably won’t start your content creation business with a clear idea of who you’re going to reach or what kind of questions you are going to be able to answer or where you’ll have the most success getting real people to engage with you.
That’s normal.
But, as time goes on, if you’re consistently creating content, you’ll start to see patterns that can guide you towards the business you CAN have.
Where can you provide a service, product, or good that meets a need of society in some way?
THAT’s where you find the definition of what your business is and suddenly where it becomes EASY to grow your email list and engage your audience and create pain-point addressing products.
That’s what frees you to pursue ad income only without wasting time on other projects…
OR that’s takes your business beyond ad-income only.