Small Business Lessons That Plump Your Pocket

Now that I’ve calmed down after finding the phrase “plump your pocket” very funny (for unknown reasons) it’s time to get down to business. Small business to be precise. With more and more of us treating blogging like a business there is always enough time to take home some Small Business Lessons.

Small Business Lessons is owned by Jacob Gorban who won this review in the Problogger B-day Bash. Before you think he is another blogger blogging about blogging (aahhh!) think again, and then think again after that one more time (just for me).

Jacob previously created and still runs a successful website at mind-energy.net which consistently rakes in several hundred dollars each month. You can tell by reading Small Business Lessons that Jacob is something special and I can tell he is going to find greater success in the future.

An example of a post that made me think this is when he wrote about What got him started with business. Jacob thinks like successful entrepreneurs do. I.e. If there is a new skill that needs to be learned, he gets right in there and does it and just keeps on developing. I can be so sure of this because he literally creates graphical progress charts to show himself and his readers where he came from and what his next move should be. A glance at the Small Business Lessons About Page reveals various self-taught technical skills adding to the entrepreneurial air.

Jacob is rigorously honest with how his past experiences have been. Here he outlines his First website business experience. It is refreshing to see some real and original thoughts and conclusions about blogging and web business when so many bloggers just rephrase what they read on another blog.

Despite its newness Small Business Lessons covers a plethora of topics including Day-trading lessons. You can take a look of his day-trading progress chart here. The progress charts are the sort of think I’d imagine being worth their weight in gold (if they were not digital) once Jacob creates a very successful venture for new aspiring entrepreneurs to compare their own progress too.

Improvements

So far I have been very positive about Small Business Lessons, because I think the content is great but there are a few tweaks I would make to the blog.

• 1. Make better use of the space. The site has a very empty feel to it and not because it is young but because the sidebars consist mostly of nothing. As long as there is a trickle of traffic that space has a value; be it a direct money value from advertising, more links into the blog or even blog community widgets which leads me onto point 2.
• 2. Get active in the communities and find readers. There is an empty feeling to the site which is not minimalism and could be solved by slapping up a Mybloglog widget and growing the community, commenting on other blogs and making a name on a voting site such as Sphinn.com. It needs a community, or at least to look like it has one.
• 3. Decide who the lessons are for. Reading the posts gives the impression they are written more to clear things in the author’s mind than to help the readers. Personally I do like reading them like this but it doesn’t help build the brand. For readers to feel wanted the style should focus more on them. The posts seem slightly more like like musings/thoughts than engaging blog posts that have a voice.

Conclusion

Overall I am very impressed with Small Business Lessons. The content makes a useful and interesting read. The main issue to address is branding and the feel of the site. The idea of it containing “lessons” is the focus, so it is important those lessons are for the readership to make use of. A more eye catching and modern logo/header that still incorporates the chalkboard could also help with the branding.

Technorati Tags: Small Business, entrepreneurs, Small Business Lessons

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