How do I protect my blog's "future" on someone else's site?

Hi All,

I'm a freelance writer, new to blogging. Believe it or not, someone wants to pay me to blog. It's for a site I've already been contributing regular articles to, so I know the folks and everything is cool. However, I'm the one who came up with the blog idea. To be fair, without the site as the platform, I probably wouldn't have had this idea or the opportunity to get paid for it. That being said, WHAT IF I end up drawing in a huge audience? WHAT IF my blog is wildly successful and I want to, oh I don't know, graduate from this local portal? How do I protect that option now? I haven't ever signed a contract for this company. The initial articles were just easy topics that I wasn't concerned about for the long haul. But now, I'm thinking about copyrights, and the stake I may or may not have in this in the future.

Thoughts? Advice?

Thanks to both of you.

Leva, I took your suggestion, sent an email to my editor and am awaiting her reply. I appreciate the money factor, but I'm not even going to approach that since the site is a local startup. I get paid $25 per post as it is, which seems pretty good in the scheme of things. At the beginning, I tried to negotiate more moolah based on samples I saw at 800 words. But as it turned out, the ed is pretty easygoing. I can turn in 400 words (good ones) and still get paid the $25. She also mentioned at the beginning that there may be raises in the future as the site grows. So, what I'm most concerned about is retaining my rights down the line and that's what I asked her about.

The ed got back to me. She asked for first North American rights as well as first electronic rights, and only asked that I wait a month before I attempt to re-publish or re-market a post. Sounds darn fair to me.