Work.com Small Business Community Blog

Work.com Suggestion Box

Jeff Crites, founder of Brick & Click Consulting, former director at Fellowforce.com, and author of Guide to Open Innovation, asked me for a Work.com suggestion box today on Twitter.

Jeff, ask and you shall receive! This is now the official public suggestion box for Work.com. Add your suggestions and feedback in the comments. What would you like to see on Work.com? We can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Work.com Road Trip - Web 2.0 Expo

Your friendly Work.com community manager is at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today learning about ways to better share and highlight across the web the great business advice we get from all of you. If you are a Work.com fan or guide author and are here and would like to meet, email me or send a direct message to the Work.com Twitter feed.

Work.com is at SES NYC - Come On By!

We would love to meet you and chat with you if you're at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York (SES NYC) today. Swing by the Work.com/Business.com booth!

Scott Starts an Online Business

Scott Starts an Online Business says: “Today I wrote a business plan, It wasn’t a lot of fun. In fact it wasn’t fun at all. But, I used the guide on Work.com and it really made it easy.”

Thanks Scott! Maybe you were talking about Frances Sharpe's famous Creating a Great Business Plan guide? We're glad it was helpful. And please, let us know how your startup is doing!

Tags: entrepreneurs, startup, business plan, business plans

Work.com on Facebook

Work.com is now on Facebook, and you can become a fan!

How Work.com Guides are Googling

Work.com guides seem to be doing pretty well on Google these days:

• Starting a Pool Hall
• Doing Business in Second Life
• Making Money with CafePress
• Learning Search Engine Optimization
• Building an Online Community
• Doing Business in Ghana
• Developing a Business Brand
• Remote Check Deposit
• Resources for Starting a Business
• Finding a Payroll Processing Service
• Setting Up a Virtual Office
• Hot Franchise Opportunities

Guide authors who are dominating their niches with useful and relevant information are getting great publicity and online visibility. Remember when writing your guide to focus on using keywords that people would use to search on your topic!

Happy Birthday Work.com!

It's been a year since we launched Work.com and I wanted to thank all of our guide authors and those who participate every day -- you have helped Work.com become THE place to share the best how-to advice for people starting and running businesses. We now have over 2,100 how-to guides on a rich array of business topics, and your guides have been linked to from over 1,700 blogs. Hundreds of your guides are also appearing on targeted Business.com pages. MSNBC named Work.com a website of the week for June 17th, The New York Times named us a key small business resource, and lots of other people are finding us useful.

Guide authors have been reaping the benefits of writing Work.com guides -- as they increase online visibility, enhance reputation, and establish thought leadership. If you have a success story about how writing a guide has benefited your business or brought you clients, let us know!

What Doing Business in Ghana Looks Like

Shhh...it's not an official feature, but some guide authors have been adding images to their guides that really add pizzaz. Check out Deborah Kurfiss's image of doing business in Second Life, Ben Hanna's competitor chart in his guide Business-to-Business (B2B) Online Competitive Intelligence for Search Marketers, or Akwasi Adjei's photo of doing business in Ghana.

An easy way to add photos to your guide is to host them on Flickr. Then click the "All Sizes" icon above your photo, and copy and paste the HTML that Flickr gives you in your guide. See example below of a photo I've pulled from Flickr.

Or, if you have an image hosted on another site, here's sample HTML code you can paste in your guide intro:

Photo on right: 

<img src="INSERT_YOUR_IMAGE_PATH_HERE" alt="INSERT_IMAGE_TITLE_HERE" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; float: right;">

 Photo on left: 

<img src="INSERT_YOUR_IMAGE_PATH_HERE" alt="INSERT_IMAGE_TITLE_HERE" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; float: left;"> 

Remember to add the appropriate image paths and alt tags. Have fun!

What We Need Business How-to Guides About

Here are some business topics for which the Work.com community is looking for guides:

• specific eBay businesses
• setting up an eBay store
• drupal
• the fashion business
• the TV/film business
• landscape design
• plumbing business
• electrician business
• regional guides about countries not yet covered
• specific types of import/export businesses (auto parts from Taiwan/China, crafts from West Africa, etc.)
• customer service training videos
• prepress design
• starting a window washing business
• starting a wine shop
• starting a sewing business
• how to choose a human resources information system (HRIS)
• how to handle sick employees
• starting your own business if you're a baby-boomer
• starting a professional organizing business
• marketing your business through mobile search
• how to be a social entrepreneur
• blog widgets
• starting a hair salon
• starting a cleaning business

Go here to write a guide about any of these topics. Or if there is a business topic you want to know about, but we don't have, suggest a guide.

Tags: business, small business, howto

Work.com Social Media Meter: How Does Your Guide Measure Up?

Work.com business how-to guide authors are always asking me the best ways to publicize their guides. First of all, the most important thing is to choose your topic wisely. Guides about hot topics such as SEO (blog mention) or Second Life (blog mention) tend to do well, as do niche topics such as rural broadband (blog mention) or starting a pool hall (blog mention). Don't be afraid to write an interesting guide!

Make sure you've written a useful guide about a business topic that is either popular or about a niche for which it may be hard to find good information. Select your topic keywords wisely (see the SEO guide above for some pointers on keyword tools). These days, it's important to be visible on social networking and social bookmarking sites. The more relevant and useful your presence is on social media sites, the more chance of PR success you have. Always think about creating value for others and be respectful of site community norms - I don't recommend having a purely promotional presence, as I don't recommend writing purely promotional Work.com guides.

Often social media sites have profiles where you can add links to your guide, blog, or website (here's a list of business community sites to get you started). On social bookmarking sites, useful links get saved by community members and create long term traffic. So have all your friends add your guide to sites such as del.icio.us, digg, Netscape, and reddit.

Better yet, have your friends blog about your guide (or write to bloggers telling them about your guide), and its authority will increase in sites such as Technorati and Bloglines.

Here are some stats about how Work.com is doing in social media:

• del.icio.us: # of users who have saved Work.com: 755
• Technorati links for Work.com: 1529
• Bloglines links for Work.com: 179

You can search for your own guide or site here:

• Check how many people have saved your guide/URL on del.icio.us
• Check how many links there are to your guide/URL on Technorati
• Check how many links there are to your guide/URL on Bloglines

For more tips on how to increase your online visibility using Work.com, see my guide on that topic. Or, share your own tips.

Tags: social media optimization, smo, work.com