I've read the post of @ph1102 about building a business on Hive and it gave me the idea for this post. You are probably not aware of it, but all of you here on hive are running a business!
Let's have a quick look at how the concept of Business is defined by Wikipedia:
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services) It is also any activity or enterprise entered into for profit.
When you are active on Hive and you get money from whatever you do, you are actually running a kind of business. It might be a good idea to try to get better at what you do and improve your business.
What is your business model?
What are you doing in order to get coins? Are you producing content? Are you curating? Are you delegating? Are you playing games for money? Are you trading tokens? Are you getting a return on your investments? I would say yes to all of them and there are even some others that I forgot. The quantity of available business models on hive is staggering.
If you take Splinterlands for example, the game itself offers plenty of business models. You can play to earn, you can stake tokens and earn rewards, you can rent your cards out, you can exploit land plots, you can trade cards and I probably forget others.
Whenever you run a business, you need to figure out what your cash cow is. What brings you the most return.
Figure out your main income source
I've been running an offline business for 12 years and one thing that I learned is that you should invest the most of your energy into the model that gives you the biggest profit. It would therefore be interesting to figure out for yourself what activity on hive provides you the most income. Also you should put in consideration how much time and resources you need to provide to get this income.
A good tool to figure what income source provides the most return for you is Hivestats
For many of us, content creation is probably the main income source for the first years on the chain. When content creation is your main income source, you will quickly realize the limits of it...
The limits of content creation
You can create only a limited amount of posts and if you create too many, you will probably not be able to keep the quality upright. In the long run, you will produce more posts but you will get less return.
Just creating content isn't really the answer. You also need to bring people to your posts. In order to do that, you need to invest time. Go to other peoples posts and comment. This is the very first principle of building relationships on hive. The chances are big that these people become aware of you and maybe they will check your blog as well.
Choose carefully where you leave your comments
The important thing here is to try to find the people that are on the same path than you are. For whales, content creation is peanuts because they make much more with curation rewards. They are not interested in spending hours in the comment sections. So when trying to pick people that you want to follow, you should aim for people who have a similar amount of hive power and have a similar way of trying to build their followership. These people will care their comments because they want you to go on coming to their post. They are also aware that they need to go to other people's post in order to achieve that.
Building relationships is very time consuming but it's definitely worth it. Not only it will bring life to your posts, it will also be motivating to exchange with like minded people and it might be the ingredient that lets you stay on the platform much longer.
To expand your content creation business, you will need time to build relationships and time to create and care for your posts. Your time is limited and therefore your income potential from content creation is physically limited.
Plan for the long run and scale your business
If you plan in the long run and instead of cashing out your income, you will actually scale your business. Of course, you need to pay for your life costs but you should keep as much as possible in HP or HBD. This will be the long term scaling tool for you. The more money you have staked, the more curation and interests you will generate. There will come a point when this income is higher than what you get from content creation. For a time, you might continue doing both until you reach a point where you realize that the staking part has become your main cash cow.
Again what I said before matters, you will find people on the same path than you and these people will also have more HP. Their votes will matter more and so you will get more income from your content creation when you have more HP yourself.
The key to real success on hive is to build your stake
Whatever you do on hive, as seen above, your HP matters. It will give you more weight, it will attract more powerful people and it will allow you to create cash flow. Money that you can use for other things. Maybe there is an opportunity in a game. If you have some cash, you can take this opportunity, otherwise not...
Maybe you have one day an idea for a product, an NFT or a token. Again you will need cash to get it started. Imagine, if you have a business that pays you cash on a daily basis and that allows you to introduce even more scaling opportunities? In order to get there, you need to build your stake and your income sources.
So next time, you get a nice payout from a post, don't cash it all out. Keep your HP and your HBD and let them work for you...
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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