Small Businesses go to Work.com
October 9th, 2006 (12:01am) Liz Gannes 17 CommentsTweet This
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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This is wonderful! I love this idea!