Intro:

bizSugar lets you discover, share and vote for the best business tips, trends, news and strategies on the web. It’s designed for owners and managers of small to medium-sized businesses. The bizSugar voting system incorporates the wisdom of the masses to funnel through the Internet fluff and provide you with the most useful ideas and news that affects your business. This allows entrepreneurs to spend more time enjoying their lives and less time reading.

bizSugar was created by DBH Communications, Inc. and is based on the Pligg open source content management system. Since 1991, the company has provided business owners and managers with award-winning business news and information. In addition to bizSugar, they founded the Kansas City Small Business Monthly magazine, the Entreprenuer’s Guide, the Business Intelligence Report newsletter, and co-published the book, Entrepreneurs: You Can’t Afford the School of Hard Knocks.

John Holsen, Founder of www.bizSugar.com, was gracious enough to allow for an interview. This very busy entrepreneur has a lot on his plate, but takes some time to share with us why the name “bizSugar,” what it will do for fellow entrepreneurs, how it compares to Digg and much more!

Interview:

Q: Why bizSugar? (what inspired you, reason for the service … etc.)

A: When I first heard about social news and bookmarking sites, I thought it was a great idea and immediately started checking them out to see if they could help me in my business. I was disappointed to discover that their business sections had a lot of useless information and much of it had nothing to do with business. After all, isn’t the point of going to a social news site to find the best of everything?

I decided that if I felt this way, many other business owners and entrepreneurs might be thinking the same thing. Normally, I’d conduct marketing research to confirm a hunch like this, but with the declining costs of launching a website, and by using open-source software, I concluded that it was actually less risky just to launch the site and see what happens. Plus, our company already provides news and how-to information for small business owners, so it was a good fit with what we were already doing.

Q: How did you come up with the name?

A: I often joke and tell people it was the last domain name available, but actually quite a bit of thought went into it. We selected around a dozen available domain names. A few of them were the nonsensical names that have become popular with Web startups, but we thought it made more sense to pick a memorable name that someone could mention to a friend during lunch without the need of writing it down. Finally, we showed our domain list to a few of our colleagues and nearly all picked bizSugar. That’s when we decided we had a winner.

Q: What benefits can users experience using bizSugar?

A: I think for most business owners, it’s the ability to have a single source for the best business news, trends, tips and strategies. By using the wisdom of crowds to help decide which stories to read, it helps you avoid so-so articles and fluff – big time wasters. Plus, it offers entrepreneurs a chance to be introduced to bloggers, journalists and other business resources that they weren’t familiar with before. And, like any social media, it offers opportunities to network with others.

Q: How does bizSugar work?

A: In a nutshell, users upload links to their favorite articles. Each story should ideally contain a catchy headline, which may or may not be the original headline, and enough of a description to make someone want to click through and read the original article. Those articles remain in our “recently submitted” section until they get enough votes to be published to the front page.

People wonder why the best stories don’t “rise to the top” on the front page, but that wouldn’t be fair because the top-voted articles would just keep getting votes and newer articles would never be discovered. Instead they are in the order that they were published and move down the page as new articles take their place. The front page is the best chance for an article to get votes, although bloggers who use our voting buttons on their own websites can continue to gain votes for a much longer time. From there, users can click on any of the time links: today, yesterday, week, month and year. That’s where you get to see the most-voted-for articles rise to the top for each time period.

If the article is of poor quality, it can be voted off of the system by the use of “sour votes.” A sour vote is not a negative vote – it doesn’t subtract from a positive vote – but it is considered to be a “thumbs down” on the story. If an article gets enough sour votes, based on a formula, it gets discarded. Also, if a bizSugar administrator recognizes a story as being irrelevant or spam, it can be immediately discarded.

Q: How does the rating system work?

A: If you mean the voting system, I think that was explained pretty well with the last question, but we also have another rating system called a contribution score. That’s how we pick our top contributors. Most assume that the contribution score is based on how many article you contribute, but that isn’t the case. The contribution score is based on what’s called a “karma” formula, but we’ve modified the original formula to better suit our needs.

The formula counts everything a user does: article contributions, click-throughs, votes and comments – each of these are used to calculate your score. But it also measures the quality of your contributions based on everyone else’s click-throughs and votes. That keeps people, for example, from pumping up their contribution score by posting a lot of junk. In fact, posting weak articles will actually subtract from your score.

Q: What is bizSugar’s business model?

A: Like most web based businesses these days, we offer our services for free to our members. The money is made by displaying advertising throughout the site.

Q: What is Pligg and how does that work with bizSugar?

A: Pligg is the open-source content management system that bizSugar is built off of. Pligg allows anyone to build Digg-like sites and it’s a great system with a strong user community. We started with the basic Pligg system and have been modifying it to better suit our needs.

Q: Have you had just bizSugar as your only entrepreneurial venture?

A: I’m what some might call a serial entrepreneur, although lately I think I’ve become a parallel entrepreneur. My first venture was a business magazine called the Kansas City Small Business Monthly. I ran the publication with a partner for about five years before selling and using the money to start another publishing firm that creates business newsletters for chambers of commerce. I also run a marketing and advertising firm, some smaller web-based ventures and, of course, bizSugar.

Q: Most people we have who visit our community are entrepreneurs. Do you have any advice, tips or hints you might like to share with them?

A: I guess I’d like to share a bit of practical advice that I’ve been forced to relearn. If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels completing your “things to do” list each day, it’s probably because you’re writing down multistep tasks as simple lines like “write a press release” or “research new market.” Those few words make the tasks look simple on paper, but they seem rather daunting when it’s time to do them. Under the pressure of the business day, you’re not quite sure how to attack them and end up doing all of your easy stuff first – never having time to do the more important tasks.

Instead, break each task down into manageable bite-sized mini-tasks, such as “write headline for press release.” Now those big tasks don’t seem so daunting, and you’ll know exactly what to do at each moment even if clients and employees interrupt you. It’s true that you may only get half of the task done in one day, but I’ve discovered that I can get a lot more done by taking two days to do one task rather than putting off a task for two weeks until I can find “enough time” to tackle it in one day.

End…

In my short time using bizSugar’s social networking system, specifically geared toward the small to medium businesses and entrepreneurs alike, has really brought me even more exposure and traffic. What I genuinely appreciate overall is the quality of traffic I do receive from bizSugar.

Unlike Digg (which is a wonderful site), bizSugar is most relevant to what I do and many other entrepreneurs and worth the time in “giving a ‘lil sugar” out to related posts and articles. This site is entirely about our subject and that’s what I think is very cool about bizSugar! No more hoping people will find you within a multitude of unrelated categories!

So go get your buttons for your site and start giving a ‘lil sweet love to others – they’ll give it back! It’s a perfect time to jump in to www.bizSugar.com’s new system!

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