Excuse me for a minute while I rant. This will happen from time to time on this blog.
I’ve been searching for examples of useful small business blogs to link to, so that you readers can access some of the wisdom of the web. After all, with the accumulated knowledge available on the web, it should be possible to find valuable nuggets of information achieved through years of experience. Well, I’m here to tell you that while it may be possible to find those nuggets, it’s not easy.
To be frank, many small business blogs are trivial and irrelevant, providing information that anyone with half a brain could figure out. Their content is the equivalent of, “You need two legs to be able to walk!” Well, duh, thanks for that. You will find titles like, “The Ten Things You Need To Know In Business”, which are designed to make you think that if you just knew those ten things, you could succeed. Never mind that those ten things, if relevant at all, turn out to be cribbed from other, better, sources. And the comments are just as bad, with nobody pointing out the elephant in the room, namely, that the blog post was stupid.
Problem is, all these blog authors have read the same books on how to get readers, namely, by providing some “original content”. In this paradigm, we’re not insightful thinkers, not careful researchers, nor experienced businesspeople, we’re “content providers”. This undefined “content” will draw in readers. Trouble is, most of the blog authors don’t have any original ideas to post, so they come up with vague generalities, old saws, and pilfered material. And in many cases, the commenters are bloggers themselves, who have also read the blogging books, telling them that the way to get web traffic is to participate in other peoples’ blogs to increase their linkage in the blogosphere. So they leave their vapid comments, conveniently mentioning their blog URL, hoping that will attract readers to their sites. In the end, what you have is a self-referential loop that performs no useful function except to increase verbiage on the web.
Don’t get me wrong – blogs don’t have to be “useful”. They can be funny, they can be personal, they can be a thousand different things. However, if you’re writing a blog that claims to be about the concerns of a small business, it better be informative about small businesses. Or at least be entertaining.
I suppose it’s like that old rule – 90% of everything is crap. On this blog I will try to do better: 1) I will provide personal experience, writing about things I truly know something about; 2) if I use other sources of information, I will provide the reference; 3) I will only link to blogs that I believe to be useful and insightful; and 4) I will try to be entertaining. It may and may not work for you, but it will at least be honest. And I hope not be crap.