If you are a webmaster you probably do not have a balance sheet. You do not need one. What would you put on it? What would you put as your assets and liabilities?

Of course it is possible to start being a webmaster with absolutely no assets. OK, actually you do need one asset. A public library card. Go the library, use one of the computers and sign up for a free online blog (like Blogger). Everyday you go to the library and write your blog. Completely free and no big assets.

Assets

I am sure that there are a few blogs out there created from a free access computer at the library, but most web masters use their own computer, at their own desk, and on their own chair. There you go – three assets right there. Computer, table, chair.

Next you probably do not want to use a free online hosting service. They look unprofessional and your domain name will be tom.freehosting.com. So you register a domain name for 1 year. And because you are not sure you really want to be a webmaster, you sign up for a six month hosting service. There you go again – more assets. You have prepaid a years worth for a domain name and six months for a hosting service. These are assets that you now own.

Liabilities

Now for the liabilities. For a month straight you slave away long into the night punching away at your keyboard spewing out Hemingway quality content. Nobody is paying you. You are doing it for free. But it is still work and you expect to be paid back one day. It is like you are giving your website a loan. One day when the website is making money it will have to pay you back. This is a liability to the website as wages owed to you. After a few months the website will start making lots of money. As soon as it does it will have to pay its debts. Namely the one to you. Your salary.

Equity

You own the website.

After it has paid you and if there is still some money left over that will be your equity. Equity=assets-liabilities. The amount the website is worth to you. If you could sell all the assets and pay off all the liabilities the amount left over would go into your pocket.

Most businesses when they start the equity is not a pretty sight. This is especially the case for all webmasters. You put a little bit of money into the required tools (computer, desk, chair) and then a lot of time into building the website. Once it is built you still have nothing. You have spent money and you have spent time. But you still have nothing. Just a whole bunch of megabytes sitting on some server’s hard drive.

Only after the visitors start coming and click on ads and buy your products do you recoup your initial investment. Only then does your negative equity begin to slowly turn around and begin its climb into the positives.

As I write this my equity is still deep in the negative.

Actual Stats From The Website Used, There is a HOW TO in the Post, What YOU Should Do

My high school English teacher explained that to get your ideas across in writing you need to do the following:

• Have an introductory paragraph which clearly states the thesis
• Summarize the key points to be argued
• In detail argue each point
• Have a concluding paragraph which summarizes the arguments and clearly states the conclusion.

If I tried to do that for this post then nobody would read it.  You would give me an F.  Blog posts are a completely different entity then high school essays.

First of all the audience is not your teacher – a person who is paid to read your writing.  Teachers must dread reading that rambling, formatted, go nowhere dribble.  They constantly remind themselves that they are doing it to put food on the table.

Blog posts must not resemble high school essays at all.  Look at any successful blog and you quickly get a sense of the format.

• Exciting title
• Attention grabbing sentence withing the first few sentences
• Short paragraphs – just a few sentences each
• Lots of lists
• And if possible pictures

A blog post should resemble a children’s book.  Why? Because the audience of your posts are people who do not need to read it.  They are using up their free time to read your post.  You better give them something; and you better make it easy to read.

Actually even asking them to read it is already asking too much.  They will not even read it.  They will just skim.  Reading every 4th word.  Or reading just the first sentence of each paragraph. Why do they do this?  Because most likely your blog is not worth the time.  This can be deemed from the fact that 99% of all blogs created are failures.

A visitor has a 99% chance of landing on a bad blog, one that in a short time will fail.  So why should they risk the time to give it a careful read.  They will quickly scan, find nothing of interest and look for another one – gone forever.

Maybe after your blog has a loyal audience which has been reading your short, interesting, list filled posts, can you dare to please your English teacher.  But even with a loyal audience I still doubt that anybody will read it, including your English teacher.

What YOU Should Do