Comparing business blogs to profiling criminals & high school students

Which business blog is the best for you? You’d better hope the answer isn’t, “none of your business.”

I read many business blogs partly out of interest and partly to help generate ideas for my own business oriented blogging endeavors. I have found that each business blog out there seems to have its own style and identity. After a few years of reading, I learned that these blogs are so different in character that you could in a sense profile them the same way that law enforcement officers profile human beings. It’s a bit like high school too — there are the nerds, the jocks, the popular kids, the average kids, the fashion crowd, and the delinquents. With business blogs there are very intellectual blogs, popular blogs, and some quirky blogs too. Let’s take a closer look.

(Academic) Harvard Business Review
Its academic stature speaks for itself. This blog’s followers tend to include many serious thinkers, and high level business people. A scholarly yet surprisingly narrow focus, not to mention that they limit the quantity of blog articles you can read without having a membership. But, then again, Harvard always was an exclusive club. Although they incorporate a lot of valuable information and statistics, its practical application in the real world is sometimes sorely lacking.

(Popular) Entrepreneur
Their choice of topics is broad, always interesting, and performs very well on social media. Unfortunately, their articles often lack depth and are often just too short. Their article about five ways to reduce stress was all too predictable and could have included many stress reduction techniques that none of us had ever heard before. Maybe coming up with such content would have caused them too much stress.

(Well-Rounded) Inc.
Inc. thrives on a seemingly endless inventory of amazing article titles, and just the right amount of thoroughness and just intellectual enough without over doing it. Their blog titles do well on social media and I find them a pleasure to indulge in.

(Fun & Potent) Marketing Profs
Ann Handley delivers amazingly useful marketing & content creation tips which work for my business in real life. I actually discovered many of her tips on my own months or years (and derived tremendous success from them) before reading her articles which is why I realize how potent her secrets are. Her articles confirm a lot of the information I discovered by accident, and teach much much more. Additionally, she makes her articles fun, personable and digestible by including many references to puppies, snacks, vacation, childhood, and other feel-good and relatable themes which incidentally is a proven marketing technique to get more reader engagement.

(Delinquent & Philosophical) 123outsource.net’s Blog
This blog is written by yours truly. It is delinquent because I lack any formal writing training and make many technical writing mistakes including using the word “writing” one to many times earlier in this sentence. Like fellow delinquents, I’m not living up to my full potential. However, my blog has many very unusual looks at international cultural issues, marketing, health, stress management, lifestyle, politics, and business in general that you won’t find anywhere else.

(News Media) Forbes, Wall Street Journal & Bloomberg
These blogs are all typical of News Media. They are all very professional, and interesting. As far as being useful to a startup Entrepreneur, I cannot say. Additionally, the quantity of titles that these news blogs innovate is much more limited than some of the other business blog choices.

So, when people ask me which business blog I like best, I reply, “Mind your own business!”

No animals were harmed in the making of this blog

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