b5media Takes Funding

Just a short post to point to some exciting news for me and the blog network that I’ve been a part of building over the past 12 months – b5media.

Today we closed a deal with two Canadian VC companies (Brightspark and JL Albright) for a round of financing.

You can read about it more at our main blog and from the VC’s perspective over at Rick’s blog.

It’s an exciting time for us as a network. While I can’t believe how fast we’ve grown in our 12 months (we’ve been so busy with this deal and the network that we didn’t even have time to post acknowledging our birthday) this injection of investment will allow us to ramp up what we’re able to do an extra few notches.

To use a Spinal Tap analogy – we’ve been growing at a volume of 10 but this takes us up to 11 (or more).

The money allows us to do a number of things for the network and our bloggers. This isn’t the post to outline them all – but I thought I’d share the news with you as it’s both something I’m excited about but also is somewhat relevant to our topic here.

How does it impact me directly?

The main thing is that from today I’m the VP of Training and Development at b5media. This is something that over the next few months I’ll be transitioning into in a full time capacity.

My role will largely be working with our wonderful team of bloggers in a capacity that will help them to take their blogging to the next level. In a sense I’ll be doing a lot of what I do here at Problogger and have done consulting with bloggers but focussing more upon our team.

As part of my role I’ll continue to develop ProBlogger (as it is part of the network) but some of my other blogs will be transitioned into others writing on them to allow me more time to work on b5 directly.

I’m sure a lot more will be said about b5 taking this step – but I’ll leave my two cents worth at this for the time being.