Small Businesses go to Work.com
October 9th, 2006 (12:01am) Liz Gannes 17 Comments
Business.com is launching a user-contributed small-business manual today at Work.com. The site already hosts more than 1000 guides dealing with contracts, accounting, financing, et cetera. Most guides are super basic, but the provided templates generally render them well-organized. And offering all this information as a website is definitely more proximately useful than yet another paper how-to book.
The deal is: anyone and everyone can contribute a guide about some aspect of running a small business. Each new guide goes live unedited, and then an editorial staff swoops in to suggest changes and give an initial rating on a scale of 1 to 10. Jake Winebaum, CEO of Business.com, told us he expects contributors to be motivated by the promise of being considered an expert as well as the opportunity to feature a link to their own websites. For now, he has no plans to share advertising revenue with guide creators.
Though Winebaum likes to call the guides “workis,” they are not at all true wikis in that users can not freely collaborate on a page’s content. The best they can do is offer a comment and a rating. To avoid spam and unhelpful self-promotion, low-rated guides get pushed down out of search results.
For starters, we enjoyed the “Guide to Low-Cost Businesses You Can Start,” “Guide to Incorporating a Business,” and “Guide to Doing Business in Ghana.” Most guides aren’t more than a simple jumping-off point, but hey… sometimes that’ll do. Let us know in the comments if you find a certain guide helpful or create a guide yourself.
Disclosure: Business.com provides advertising for GigaOM.com.
17 Comments Post your own comment
| Business Blogs - RSS Feeds - Business Case Studies | Business Thought Leadership | BNET says: October 9th, 2006 2:00pm
[...] The latest resource for small businesses is Work.com. Work.com combines business how-tos, user-generated content, generous outbound linking to third-party websites, and even some social networking. Webworkerdaily.com describes Work.com this way: Business.com is launching a user-contributed small-business manual today at Work.com. The site already hosts more than 1000 guides dealing with contracts, accounting, financing, et cetera. Most guides are super basic, but the provided templates generally render them well-organized. And offering all this information as a website is definitely more proximately useful than yet another paper how-to book. [...]
Anthony says: October 9th, 2006 2:03pm
Im all for sites like this, I love them, if it wasnt for entrepreneur.com I may have never reached some of my own business milestones. One issue that I have though is that currently work.com looks like a damn parked page. They site is setup like parked search page that generates ad and click-thru revenue. When I see pages like this I usually assume that I’ve typed the wrong address and move on. Maybe there should be a “How-to build a site that doesnt look like a Yahoo! Search page” article.
Vincent Brown’s Journal » Blog Archive » Small Businesses go to Work.com says: October 9th, 2006 3:38pm
[...] read more | digg story Bookmark this story with:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
small bizzer says: October 10th, 2006 10:18am
work.com looks promising, expecially the guides. i’m a small biz owner and i have found this to be a very good resource: http://wwwsmallbizresource.com — i check it a couple of times a day. lots of relevant content.
Rajan Sodhi says: October 10th, 2006 2:37pm
This is a great concept. I use my blog to share marketing strategies that help small businesses get results while working with a shoestring budget. Work.com looks like a great opportunity to add a guide to marketing. Thanks for the post!
The Perfect Balance » Work.com - Save Time and Money says: October 11th, 2006 6:49am
[...] Sounds good doesn’t it. I was recently reading a post on Web Worker Daily and I came across and excellent post on Work.com. Work.com is a website geared for small businesses/entrepreneurs. [...]
Mexico501 » Blog Archive » Small Businesses go to Work.com says: October 27th, 2006 12:13am
[...] Page Summary: The site already hosts more than 1000 guides dealing with contracts, accounting, financing, et cetera. Most guides are super basic, but the provided templates generally render them well-organized. Each new guide goes live unedited, and then an editorial staff swoops in to suggest changes and give an initial rating on a scale of 1 to 10. They site is setup like parked search page that generates ad and click-thru revenue.read more | digg story [...]
Cash Money World » Blog Archive » Work.com for Small Businesses - Web 2.0 Influence Evident says: October 30th, 2006 10:16am
[...] The latest resource for small businesses is Work.com. Work.com combines business how-tos, user-generated content, generous outbound linking to third-party websites, and even some social networking. Webworkerdaily.com describes Work.com this way: Business.com is launching a user-contributed small-business manual today at Work.com. The site already hosts more than 1000 guides dealing with contracts, accounting, financing, et cetera. Most guides are super basic, but the provided templates generally render them well-organized. And offering all this information as a website is definitely more proximately useful than yet another paper how-to book. [...]
Cash Money World » Blog Archive » Work.com for Small Businesses - Web 2.0 Influence Evident says: October 30th, 2006 10:16am
[...] The latest resource for small businesses is Work.com. Work.com combines business how-tos, user-generated content, generous outbound linking to third-party websites, and even some social networking. Webworkerdaily.com describes Work.com this way: Business.com is launching a user-contributed small-business manual today at Work.com. The site already hosts more than 1000 guides dealing with contracts, accounting, financing, et cetera. Most guides are super basic, but the provided templates generally render them well-organized. And offering all this information as a website is definitely more proximately useful than yet another paper how-to book. [...]
The Digg Effect - Search for Diggs or get Dugg » Small Businesses go to Work.com says: November 7th, 2006 7:13am
[...] Business.com is launching a user-contributed small-business manual today at Work.com. The site already hosts more than 1000 guides dealing with contracts, accounting, financing, et cetera. Most guides are super basic, but the provided templates generally render them well-organized.read more | digg story [...]
Jitterboo Marketing Blog » work.com says: January 12th, 2007 11:35am
[...] From : Web Worker Daily [...]
work home business says: January 25th, 2007 5:55pm
work home business
125vd4sghg says: May 8th, 2007 1:10pm
장된 페이지’는 웹을 검색한 당시의 문서 상태를 보여 드립니다. 있습니다. 하이라이트 색깔표시 없이
Business Card Templates says: July 4th, 2007 5:37am
Business Card Templates
I don’t agree with you in 100%, but you covered some good points regarding this topic
Small Businesses go to Work.com · Your Economics ,Forex and Trading News snippets says: October 19th, 2007 4:13pm
[...] read more | digg story Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Baby, it’s just business » Blog Archive » Small Businesses go to Work.com says: October 29th, 2007 7:52am
[...] read more | digg story [...]
Nancy says: April 8th, 2008 12:34pm
This is wonderful! I love this idea!