Interview with creator of Uncommon Business
Blogging, Business & entrepreneurship
I’ve enjoyed being a regular reader of a blog called Uncommon Business (tagline “Unusual Business Ideas That Work”) for about a year now. Recently, the blog’s author, Dmitry Davydov, offered to provide an interview to bloggers who were interested in learning more about him and his commercial blogging business. He’s been able to pay off two mortgages and support his family through his portfolio of blogs and sites that include Picky Domains (a site where you can earn money by suggesting domain names), NicheGeek, among several others.
Thanks very much for conducting this interview. I’m curious on how you first got the idea to start a blog about unusual business ideas?
Well, I am sort of addicted to such stories and I wanted to keep them all in one place. That’s how this blog started. And then the blog took off.
Where do you get the content/material for this blog? Do you write everything yourself? If you do, how do you find the time? If not, where do you find the content?
99% of content is not mine. I think I have a few posts that werewritten by me, but most are reprints. Most of them come from magazines (Entrepreneur, Forbes, Business 2.0, Startup Journal) plus Springwise.com.
One of the toughest things about maintaining multiple blogs as you do is scalability. How do you manage to keep on top of all of your sites?
Well, you can’t if you have to write all the content yourself. But if you reprint content, it’s not a problem. There is a lot of fuss about printing other people’s content – both moral and legal. However, all my blogs are about topics that interest me personally. For instance, I love documentaries – so I have a blog about that (called Best Free Documentaries). I get e-mails every day about that blog. People thank me about starting it – because they come to one place and it’s all there. Every day there is a new documentary. You can go to Google Video yourself and enter ‘documentaries’ in search. But you’ll get good videos and bad videos. The ‘this is a documentary me and my buddy Mike did for a school project kind’.
So it does pay to collect all the good stuff and post it in one place. And since I do read about weird businesses daily and browse Google Video daily, having so many blogs isn’t a problem for me.
Bloggers span the spectrum when it comes to the question of monetization and commercial blogging. You mentioned that you gave AdSense a shot, which didn’t pan out as well as you hoped, but ultimately you were very successful. I’m sure many readers are interested in how you managed to become a successful commercial blogger. Can you give us a glimpse?
