Small businesses start every day with no real business plan, just a vague notion of what they’ll do…and an even vaguer thought that they’ll make money doing it. South Park’s Underpants Gnomes are a classic example of this approach:

Some of those businesses even succeed — but not often. Any first year business student will tell you that a business model is the first step in figuring out how you’ll do something full-time for a living. A business model is the essential description of how you will make money by doing something. A retailer’s business model is buy items for one price and sell them for a higher price. As a professional nonfiction writer, by business model is provide high-quality writing to business clients in exchange for phat stacks of cash. A novelist would write fiction that attracts enough readers to make a living wage off the commissions. Writers used to have a limited number of business models available to them — mostly selling what they wrote to an agent, publisher or advertising company. Our new pulp era expands those options. Some of the newer business models available to writers include.

• Write a blog that attracts enough traffic to generate advertising income.
• Produce and sell ebooks or on-demand books to a core audience of a few thousand.
• Generate content for linkbait farms and content mills (the wholesale approach).
• Ghostwrite blogs for professional customers who lack the time or expertise to write for themselves.
• Create podcast scripts to sell directly or use as a magnet for advertising.