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Hey… just got back from city hall, paid my business license for the year.

Wait, let’s back up. You have probably been reading all sorts of rants about “treat your blogging as a business!!!”

But that’s the extent of it: rants. No actionable information. Nothing about how to actually operate as a business. NO NUMBERS! As usual, I don’t have any interest in ranting, but I’ll be happy to let you take a peek into one of my actual business processes.

So let’s be about it.

This Website In A Weekend thing isn’t free for me.

You might not be paying anything at all to read Website In A Weekend. But I’m paying for the privilege of presenting it.

As soon as I:

• Offer an affiliate link, say for Bluehost, I need a business license.
• Offer a product for sale, perhaps a blog post ebook or wordpress whitepaper, I need a business license.
• Offer a service, perhaps doing an SEO due diligence, or a totally custom designed website using WordPress and Thesis, I need a business license.

If you do any of the above, you probably need a business license too.

Let’s look at some real numbers.

Business license is 180 bucks:

$180/365 days = $0.49/day

49 cents a day doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Maybe, maybe not.

Let’s see what that is in terms of Whitepapers. Last I checked, Paypal takes a percentage and $0.34 off the top of the sale. I don’t recall the percentage, let’s make it easy:

180/($1.99 – $0.34) = ~109.
I need to sell 109 whitepapers per year, say about 9 per month, just to cover my business license. Bummer. And that doesn’t include taxes due. Bigger bummer. Probably need to sell about 140 per year to cover taxes.

So there’s the reason I’m not writing very many Whitepapers: There’s no good market for them. Given it takes me roughly 2 (full) days to produce one (anyone who has purchased one will testify to the quality), my return is too low. I could cut the time down to 1 day after the next half dozen, but that’s still too long.

Being more specific:

• I like “perfection.” Only I don’t call it “perfection.” I call it “professionalism.” These Whitepapers are daggone close to perfect; they are the same quality as reports I submit to clients in my consulting business.

  In fact, I use them myself.

• There’s one more thing here, it’s really important but I left my email open and got distracted. You know who you are.

  Aha… Keith’s comment just clicked it in: My conversion rates on the Whitepapers are very good, exceeding 10%. This means I’ve sold about as many as it’s reasonable to sell given my traffic and list size. I need to either write a lot more of them (as Keith suggests), or grow traffic, a lot.

Which is a pity, because I really like the format, and I would love to write 2 or 3 whitepapers per week.

Tell us about your business. How much is your business license? How are you covering it?

[Update: I just started a public business spreadsheet which I'll be adding to over many future articles. If you would like to have your business and link, leave a comment and say so.]