For the kind of successful webcomic I’m talking about, I don’t mean Penny Arcade or similarly HUGELY successful ones. I’m talking about something like Schlock Mercenary , which has been Howard Tayler’s sole source of income for himself, his wife, and his three (I think) kids for several years now.

I’ve been thinking alot lately about how exceedingly difficult it’s actually become — because if you’re not moving forward, then you’re moving backward. I have a feeling entrepreneurs will have to find new ways of partnering with other entrepreneurs to create new business models that make it feasible to help each other out in a complementary or interdiscplinary fashion. A relationship of this kind may be short-lived or lasting depending on the circumstance or need. Or it may be periodically revived across time.

Either way, it will require a different mindset and operating framework than the way entrepreneurs typically think.

We continue to wrestle with the issue of extracting value from the inordinate time required to author quality posts, and appreciate your writing about it.

I author two websites, my consulting site, on which I typically post once or twice weekly, and a laborious, not-for-profit, consumer advocating travel website (http://beatofhawaii.com) that I post on 4-5 times per week.

I’ve been a fee-based consultant for over 30 years with clients relationships that mostly predate “e”-word of mouth. Moving to Hawaii a decade ago, however, it has been difficult to develop local clients. A significant and truly unplanned and unexpected benefit of writing Beat of Hawaii has been in establishing local credibility and forming relationships with people and an industry here that might otherwise not have occurred.

Aloha,
Jeff

But (as I believe Chris Anderson’s book FREE ultimately contends), free is NOT its own economy but a complementary aspect of the monetized economy. Like yin and yang, they are both separate and interrelated. But capitalism is about nothing if not constant change, so the relationship between free and paid inherently changes over time.

You, Scoble, etc. have much in common with other industries where the revenue models are changing. And this is where (as Seth Godin writes this week), our essential “job-oriented” thinking is unmasked, even though we call ourselves free agents.

We don’t have jobs as bloggers. We are “entrepreneurs,” and one of our biggest jobs is to figure out the value creation engine of our various independent activities (and change with the times). A lack of innovation is a stumbling block for small organizations, whether for-profit or non-profit.

There is no answer that exists out there a priori. There is only our individual creativity, business knowledge, and courage to create a content based revenue model that works in each of our businesses. We have to learn, apply, think, network, and work at it. THAT is our job.

FREE lists 50 potential business models for making money in a content-based undertaking. I am taking his list as my starting point for a section of the book I am writing.

I do know this from my days as a VP for Entrepreneurial Programs in an SBA-funded business education program: Learning to think like an entrepreneur is a lot more involved than it sounds….ideally, it is learning process that never ends. We all are smart, we know what we know….but every so often we have to put that aside and look afresh at how we exist in the economy. It’s not easy but it is possible.

This is an incredible learning (and achieving) opportunity to not only solve our own financial/income issues but to also contribute to the US’s post-recession economy. Recessions are where great changes are made and what I have outlined above is what I personally am committed to contributing.