Building an Alliance

A friend sent me this article from Problogger on Blogging Alliances. It's an interesting read, and basically involves setting up a limited partnership. I think it can be a great idea, but it really depends on the people you have involved.

As we started our company years ago, we had 7 people, formalizing our "partnership", but informally deciding to share the work. That didn't work out, and we ended up buying out people until there were 3 of us left. We found that we 3 could share the work pretty well and we ended up with a nice company we eventually sold off some assets from.

There is some power in synergies, and if you can find a similar business that doesn't necessarily compete with you, sharing some knowledge and helping promote each other could work out very well. I think this is an interesting idea for small businesses, especially software businesses, that could write about the products and cross promote with others.

You still have to do a good job in your blogging, but this could easily help build business for each other, as long as you are willing to contribute to the efforts of others without worrying too much about equal benefits back.