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How much Internet can small businesses digest?
A problem that most Internet cognoscente face is that they don't realize the difficulties others have in keeping up.
Sections: Business
Topics: bootcamp popularization weblogs
With limited resources, small businesses seriously need to harness the Internet. The web gives small businesses more bang for their buck. As is the point with this particular teleseminar, the Internet can provide a system to help small businesses be more efficient, productive, and strategic with their time. Definitely worth the investment.
Ken Yarmosh - TECHNOSIGHT ยป Small Businesses Need to Harness the Internet
At first blush, it's hard not to agree with this sentiment. But, if you deal with real small businesses where owners are time-constrained and chasing to make a buck, you start to wonder.
The real problem with harnessing the Internet is that it takes too much time. For instance, if you're going to try to make a name for yourself blogging, you have to learn a blog software, you have to understand how search engines work, you have to dig up conversation partners, you have to invest in learning to measure performance. While most people can surf the net, figuring out how to position yourself on the net requires all these skills, and they take time to acquire.
[update: Oliver Thylmann has written a nice follow-up to this piece, and I accidentally deleted the trackback while clearing out SPAM, so here's the link.]
Bud posted this on January 26, 2006
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Comments
As far as blogging goes, I don't disagree that it requires an investment in time. But with the Internet in general, I see more of an investment up front.
I'd also argue that unlike a blogger like myself, for instance, small businesses serving niche markets don't have to jump through as many hoops (i.e., "finding conversation partners", etc.) in order to be successful bloggers. In fact, in many instances, there probably won't be many other voices for their particular topic.
And blogging won't require any more effort than say writing a newsletter or answering e-mails. The beauty of blogging is that you can easily repurpose content. So, whether it is taking the content from your newsletter and breaking it into smaller daily bites or combining ideas from different blog posts, there are a number of ways to avoid more work.
Posted by: Ken Yarmosh at January 27, 2006 08:32 AM
