The thing is, I have no time to run any of these projects. None. I’m working over 80 hours a week, and these will require more attention than I can give them.

The problem gave me something to consider: what I’d want (and by extension, what I feel other people would want) in an executive editor for a blog. In this case, I’m thinking about retail or B2C or the consumer-facting.

Build it as a Business

Blogging isn’t always just writing whatever comes to mind, or riffing off other people’s posts. It can be built around solid business intentions, such as content marketing (writing posts that are intended to deliver action, or at least actionable information), thought leadership (ideal for consulting opportunities), or even media sales model (typical “write good stuff and put ads against it” thinking). For someone to run a blog project like this, they have to develop a simple set of filters.

• Does this move my business goal forward?
• What’s working? What’s not?
• Can I isolate things that aren’t working and replace them with new experiments?
• What purpose is the content serving?
• How do I measure that success?

That’s simple enough. If you answer these questions faithfully every time you consider posting content, every time you consider adding some widget or functionality, every time you work off-blog to build promotional relationships, and in other business circumstances, you’ll find progress a bit more reasonable.

Be Merciless About Content

Write great work or don’t post it. Make decent videos or don’t post it. Create exceptional pieces that drive the business forward, or don’t bother.

There are plenty of personal blogs that roam about just fine, unchecked and all. We’re not talking about them. We’re talking about you as a blog’s executive editor, with a goal of empowering your audience with actionable information. Ask yourself every day whether your efforts are having results.

Promote Liberally, but Tastefully

“Write it and they will come” has been disproven. There are some great blogs out there who never see more than a few hundred people a day. In many cases, what’s often needed is just some old fashioned promotion and potential audience expansion effort. It’s not difficult, but it takes effort.

Always be looking for ways to connect more people to your blog. Find ways to tie-in to other, more successful blogs, perhaps through a guest post, and see if that changes your numbers. Think often about ways to grow your audience and then experiment with them. Leave nothing sacred. Are the titles of your posts boring? Are you using a messy screen layout? Have you built several ways for people to subscribe and pick up your work?

It all relates.

Look for New Revenue Models

Money from blogs doesn’t begin and end with finding ad sponsorships. There are several ways to build revenue. Beyond ads and affiliate marketing opportunities (and I think the latter offers so much potential in the coming years, you might also find ways to build a consulting practice around what you know. You might find crossover or tie-in opportunities that pay better than typical banner sales. You might discover that informational products sell like hot cakes on your site.

A great executive blog editor thinks about this all the time. How do I get more from the effort of blogging, and sometimes, when I say “more,” I mean “any.”

An Executive Editor Makes Decisions

There’s not a lot that can crush a blog too quickly. Build boundaries and relationships with your other business partners, if there are any, and then give the lion’s share of the decision making power to the person running the day to day of the blog. She’ll know better.

Decide up Front the Money Situation

If this is a blog intended to make money, be very clear with all potential business partners what the money exchange situations will be. Know before you spend a dime, and know before you make a dime. This kind of experience can really wreck it for some folks.

Find Great Writers And Develop Them

You have a sense of the work that needs doing. You know what’s important in a blog. How do you work with your writers? My recommendation is to praise and develop the ones who do good work. Be willing to give them advice on how better to craft a story. Give them a sense of how strong you need the piece to be.

By developing them, also give them a platform from which to grow. Make this their place to be “discovered,” and create your business accordingly. Meaning, don’t worry if your stars run off to launch their own blog projects, but instead, develop a deep bench. Make sense?

If it Ain’t Fun…

Decide how long to do this, and what your target setting goals will be on the way to that decision marker. Is it “Write for 3 months and determine the potential revenue between now and then is the kicker, or if its number of readers, or whatever you want to use as a killswitch. Decide whether the experience is fun, whether you want to keep doing it, what you’ll do to transition it or kill it, if it doesn’t worky.

Make sure you keep fun in mind. I wrote this about business, and I’m thinking from the perspective that an executive editor for a blog is here to serve a business purpose, but if that’s you and you’re not having fun, bail out. Be clear with your business partners about what would lead you to make that kind of decision. Be ready to talk through all the details of that with your partners.

What Have I Missed?

What else should an executive blog editor have for a skill on board? Where are these blog editors all doing their work? Can you see how this shifts if you do B2B or enterprise blogging? Can you see the similarities?

Photo credit, ChicagoEye

Effective immediately, become the owner of your store. This is very much the same advice Tom Peters gave a decade or more ago when he told us all to become the CEO of our career. The reason I want you to think store and store owner is because it’s a little more accurate to the climate, even if you’re within a huge corporation.

Store owners think in fairly simple terms. Is there enough money coming in? No? What can I do to get more? Am I spending too much money? How can I cut back? Stores run with a simple balance sheet mentality that helps you understand quite quickly the very basics of the business.

You can apply this to how you think about your own career, and/or to your offerings. If you’re not thinking about what you do as offerings, that might be a good first step. You might just be “an” employee, but you could envision yourself as a store owner in a larger marketplace, and that would probably help you better prepare for 2009.

How a Store Owner Thinks

Sam Walton came back from the war and bought a Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. He ran it better than a lot of other Ben Franklin owners. Here’s an example: one day, a guy came into the store saying he had an entire truckload of ladies nylons that he couldn’t return to the manufacturer, and the destination store couldn’t take them either.

Sam bought them in a heartbeat. He knew that he could sell them super cheap and get people into his store, where they’d buy other products. It worked. He started selling more than any other Ben Franklin in the area.

The story goes that franchise management for Ben Franklin didn’t like this, that they told Sam to stop it, and that Sam decided to go it his own way. He picked up a new store and called it Walton’s Five and Dime. Not too much further down the road, Sam started Wal-Mart.

What Sam did wasn’t amazing, wasn’t huge, wasn’t a genius play unto itself. He simply figured out what customers want and he gave it to them. His view: give them the best possible value for the lowest possible price. Don’t be cheap for cheap’s sake. Find the middle. He was a store owner that came up with a solution.

How Store Owners View Downturns

In this economic downturn, a store owner will do a few things. She will strengthen her existing relationships with customers. She will strengthen her relationships with suppliers, and perhaps work to understand which of her suppliers are having a tough time (so that she can find alternatives or maybe even help out). Store owners will look for new customers to handle the potential attrition a bad time might bring, so that customer numbers stay somewhat solid.

Can you see how this extends into your own business? If you’re an employee, have you started thinking about your suppliers (your company) and looked into how alternative relationships might form? Are you seeking out new ways to be useful during this time? Have you thought about which of your products might be more useful to others in the coming economic climate?

Now is the time to treat your career and/or your business as if you’re a simple store owner. Look for ways to strengthen your relationships with customers. Look for ways to manage your suppliers (employers). Look for the ways you will need to earn more, cut more, and balance your financial needs.

Does this make sense to you? How do you apply this analogy to you?

Photo credit, striatic

You’re making decent revenue and the store is happy with what you’re doing, but they want more money for next year. Your customers are mostly happy, though they occasionally ask for something a little different than what’s out there.

What do you do NEXT?

Do you find products that give you an even bigger margin of profit? (Croutons are $1.00 a box, but add weight to a salad.) Do you work simply from your community’s requests: “Sure, we can throw sushi in for the same price” (at a loss)? Do you do NOTHING and start to lose customers from lack of variety?

The salad bar business is not unlike a lot of other businesses, including the business of making content for people. On the one hand, you want to give your community what they demand. On the other, you have cost and profit requirements.

How do you manage the balance? What comes first in your mind? If you’re the salad bar owner (and you are!), what’s your next move?