Work.com Small Business Community Blog

David Mullings' Startup Signs YouTube Deal for Caribbean Channel

Remember David Mullings, who gave us his uncommon startup advice? Well, let's give him a big hand - his company, Realvibez Media, a leading online provider of media for consumers of Caribbean music culture, just signed an agreement to create YouTube's first official Caribbean channel.

Check out the Realvibez channel at youtube.com/realvibeztv.

If I were a startup, I would follow David's advice closely. It appears he knows what he's doing! David, how about a new guide to partnering with YouTube? ;-)

drupal, startup, youtube, caribbean

Work.com Business Expert of the Week: Joel Libava

Joel Libava, of Cleveland, OH, is president of Franchise Selection Specialists, a franchise consulting and marketing business. He blogs about franchise trends, tips, traps, and truths at The Franchise King blog, hosts a green franchise directory, and has already written 6 Work.com guides on franchises. His latest one is:

Fitness Franchises

We look forward to more guides from you Joel! We're also enjoying the back-and-forth with you on Twitter.

Eve Lopez - Work.com Associate Editor

In between her new gig as associate editor of Work.com and Business.com, Eve Lopez volunteers at orphanages in places like Ghana, Russia, and China. Many of her guides focus on the human side of business, such as Escaping Your Cubicle During the Work Day and Volunteer Opportunities for Your Business - a major theme being that it enhances the health of your business to care about the health of individuals and communities!

We're excited to see more guides in the future about how doing good helps you to do well.

New Work.com Members

• Todd Mumford, SEO Visions, Vancouver, Canada, social bookmarking
• Resource Nation (website), which matches businesses to vendors
• Karen Knutsen of BTI Benchmark Control, Hackensack, New Jersey, risk control and knowledge management consultants

Are You Most Popular?

The top 10 most popular Work.com members based on profile visits in August 2007 are:

1. Linda McHugh - Sr. Account Executive, Business.com, 1 guide written
2. Frances Sharpe - freelance business writer/editor, Frances Sharpe site, 77 guides written
3. Jenni Simcoe - freelance business writer/television producer, 70 guides written
4. Greg Brown - reporter, Greg Brown site, 123 guides written
5. Matt Alderton - writer & editor, Matt Alderton site, 63 guides written
6. Daniel Kehrer - Work.com Editor, 115 guides written
7. Akwasi Adjei - network operations, Callwave, 2 guides written
8. Dawn Martin - Principal, Simply in Place, 1 guide written
9. Michael Wissot - Managing General Partner, SymAction Communications, 1 guide written
10. Khalid Aziz - Chairman, The Aziz Corporation, 1 guide written

Congratulations! How did they get so popular? Well, the best way to get visits to your profile (which of course highlights you and your business through links, bio, and photo) is to write guides and comment on guides. The higher-quality your guide is, the better the chance you get highlighted on Work.com and in emails and the blog - which brings more visitors to your profile. Also, don't forget that many people find Work.com profiles through people searches in search engines (Google Deborah Kurfiss for example to see how her Work.com profile shows up) - so you can do several things to maximize your visibility and findability - first of all, contribute guides and comments that will link to your profile, and also make sure you fully fill out your bio and use keywords in your profile that will help people find you and your business.

Tags: linda mchugh, frances sharpe, jenni simcoe, greg brown, matt alderton,  daniel kehrer, akwasi adjei, dawn martin, michael wissot, khalid aziz, work.com

Featured Experts on Work.com

In our ongoing quest to highlight the good people sharing their business advice, we just updated the Featured Expert section on the Work.com homepage.  Our current crop of featured experts includes:

• Khalid Aziz (Advanced Communication Skills)
• Denise Clancey (Establishing an Effective Telesales Training Program)
• Linda McHugh (Conversion Tracking Simplified)
• Jenni Simcoe (Creating a Customer Database)
• Dawn Martin (Professional Organizing for Productivity and Profitability
• Michael Wissot (Free Business Cards)

If you are a guide author with a guide rated at least 5 and would like to be featured on the Work.com homepage please contact me. Remember, you can always see all the top experts on Work.com on the full top expert list.

You can climb up the top expert ranking depending on how many guides you've written, how many visitors you have to those guides, and your guide ratings. The best way to increase your expert score is to write highly useful guides that people visit often, tell other people about, and link to! 

Tags: work.com

Top Business Experts: Are You Next?

As Work.com grows, I love watching to see which guide authors are emerging as topic-specific experts. Whether it's about how to optimize search engine traffic, how to make money on CafePress, or where to find programs for women business owners, there's a Work.com member to tell you how to start. Right now, here are the guides most viewed by the business community in each Work.com category, and the experts who wrote them:    

• Employees: Employee Evaluation by Amara Rose
• Government: Programs for Women Business Owners by Frances Sharpe
• Internet and Ecommerce: Making Money on CafePress by Kimberly Dawn Wells
• Legal: Incorporating a Business by Frances Sharpe
• Management: Creating a Small Business Strategic Plan by Constance Gustke
• Money and Finance: Getting a Business Line of Credit by Daniel Kehrer
• Operations: U.S. Postal Service Business Mailing by Frances Sharpe
• Sales and Marketing: Learning Search Engine Optimization by Aaron Wall
• Startup: Creating a Great Business Plan by Frances Sharpe
• Technology: MPLS by Marc Wind

Way to go Amara, Frances, Kimberly, Constance, Daniel, Aaron and Marc!

Hints for increasing the popularity of your own guide: I do notice that many of the most popular guides are heavily linked to from sites such as Stumbleupon, Squidoo, del.icio.us, industry blogs and sites, and/or do well in the search engines. Of course, picking either a very popular/hot topic or a niche topic about which it is hard to find information helps too. Make sure you use the terms that people will use to search for your topic. Go get 'em!
   

Been-There, Done-That, and Still Look Pretty Good

I added some photos of actual Work.com members to the sidebar of this blog. I'll be rotating them pretty often. Mouse over the images for the name of the member and their most popular guide, or click on an image to see their profile and the guides and comments they've written. You'll have to register or log in to contact members or add comments to their guides.

I think pictures of the amazing Work.com contributors really bring home the fact that when you read a guide, you're getting business advice based on real-life, been-there, done-that experience. Instead of a few trusted business contacts, you have access to the wisdom of thousands. Reading a guide is like picking up the phone and asking one of your connections for answers to your business questions (you could always read a guide first and then call your friend too!)

P.S. Your devoted blog author and Work.com community manager is the one on the upper right. My most popular guide is Small Business Blogs, where I link to great small business blogs such as BIG Marketing for Small Business.