Whoever said that building a sucessful business "should be easy"? The two examples I gave John Gruber and Ben Thompson are both one man shops who built businesses based on writing articles that people wanted to read and building a reputation.

In Gruber's case, he built a reputation strong enough that he routinesly gets Apple's SVPs to come on his podcast. He doesn't depend on an ad network. He sells ads directly - one per week.

Ben Thompson built a strong enough following just based on reputation to get over 2000 people to pay him $100 a year for a newsletter.

How "risky" is it to start a blog on the side until you get enough readership to figure out a business model?