The Business of Blogging: Five Shops in the Spotlight

Welcome to our series of posts on the business of blogging! Each Thursday for 6 weeks, we'll debut a new post designed to help you build, market, and successfully create a small business with your Typepad blog. This week, as part of our 10th Birthday Celebration, we're taking a look at some great bloggers who use Typepad to promote their small businesses. We hope they inspire you as much as they inspire us!

Elise Blaha

In the Typepad Gift Shop, you can find everything from arts & crafts to e-courses, which is exactly what you'll find with Elise Blaha Cripe's Elise Joy Workshops. Elise, who authors the personal & craft blog enJOY it, started offering online scrapbooking workshops in 2009. Her classes are organized into daily lectures, many with helpful videos, that are insteresting and easy to understand. The classes are hosted on a private blog and are meant to be completed at your own pace. Throughout the workshops, she is available to answer any questions and provide clarification. At the end of each workshop, PDFs of class lectures are available for download. In addition to offering workshops and blogging about her life, Blaha can also be found offering valuable insight about what it's like to run a small business.

Marc Johns

Marc Johns' drawings are famous. Chances are, you've seen them all over the Internet, inked onto peoples' bodies, and perhaps, framed in your own living room (signed originals and other prints can be purchased in the shop). Whimsical and marvelously witty, his illustrations of pipe-smoking rabbits, lightning bolt-emblazoned cats, and birds who prefer to travel via hot air balloon have been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Athens, and just about everywhere else. Johns blogs about his drawings daily at Marc Johns: Serious Drawings.

Kal Barteski

Kal Bartestki is a professional artist who specializes in painting, writing, design and keeping life inspired with her Bulletproof Positive Attitude. She sells her work internationally and keeps a daily journal at [i] LoveLife. Her ARTshop and online gallery can be found here.

A published author and winner of a Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award, she is a creative powerhouse and inspiration. Living the life she imagined - she is passionate about art and artists. When she is not elbow deep in paint she is busy speaking about art, creativity and the effects of creativity.

Rachel Ball

Based in Seattle, jewelry artist and photographer Rachel Ball runs a lifestyle blog, Elephantine, which features gorgeous photos, daily inspiration, food videos, and fiction. Add a popular Etsy shop of the same name which features gorgeous, modern everyday jewelry, and a kitchen shop called Mignon Kitchen Co. to the mix, and you've got a recipe for a charmed life. With a background in graphic design, Ball is particularly adept at capturing the beauty in simplicity.

Emily Winfield Martin

Emily Winfield Martin makes paintings, books, and other things. She is the author and illustrator of a paper doll epic called "The Black Apple's Paper Doll Primer" and an illustrated novel for children, "Oddfellow's Orphanage". When she was small, she spent every moment drawing, reading, dressing rabbits in fancy clothes, and having many peculiar daydreams. When she grew up, she began to illustrate those peculiar daydreams, and in 2005, she created a cottage industry called The Black Apple on Etsy, which sells all manner of art and etceteras. She blogs about her art and daily life on (Inside A Black Apple).

Check out other posts in our Business Blogging series here!