on the job

Net Gains

>>Steve Schadt makes his living running the corporate development division of San Diego-based Einstein Industries Inc., creating Web sites and collateral materials for pharmaceutical companies. On his own time, the 35-year-old Sarasota resident puts his Web skills to work for his real passion-fishing-on www.hornet

bear.com. His Weblog, full of fishing tales and photos of reds, snook and other prized catches, provides a wealth of information about fishing in Southwest Florida. He gets about 1,000 unique hits a month, including a handful from the Naples-Fort Myers area. His blog is also attracting attention from national corporations, including Volcom and Haber, which send him equipment to test and blog about, and sponsor his fishing expeditions. It's a sideline Schadt is happy to have as a hobby.

What's your process? I go out in my back yard, go fishing, and I always take spectacular pictures just being out there. The fish are cool, and the place itself is cool. You don't necessarily need to be in Yosemite to find inspiration.

Do you ever get to Fort Myers or Naples to fish? A few times a year I get down there. I love to fish [in] the Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands. It's one of my favorite places to go because it's so rugged.

Who's your audience? The masses. I get a kick out of it, and I find that people dig it. People are crazy into fishing. I get a lot of e-mails.

What kinds of gear do you get? People send me stuff from all over the country to check out and try-fishing poles, hats. But what does it do to my income? Not a whole lot. I'm an illustrator, writer and photographer, and [blogging] is a venue for that.

Why don't you cash in on it? I don't look at it as an income source, because I [already] have a pretty solid income source [with Einstein Industries]. My business is the Web. Maybe down the road it might have some kind of value, but I'd have a hard time putting my finger on the revenue stream at this point. The money to be made cashing in on it would not be from advertising. There's more money in the value of the intellectual property. Long-term, [the stories and the photos on the blog] could become a coffee-table book, but I don't see it ever making a ton of money.

How can people make a living with their blogs? You [had] better be good at something and [use] your blog [as] an outlet for that [skill]. If you're a realtor and you're into it enough to write about the communities and schools, that blog will augment your real estate business. But it's not the advertising that will make that happen. It's a small subset of people who are making a living blogging. It's something you do to show your talents.

What makes a good blog? Good content and a narrow scope. You can't be everything to everyone. At the end of the day it's about good writing and having something that people have some interest in.

-Rebecca Loveridge