Bizmore: Like Yahoo Answers For Small Business

There’s no shortage of web sites online offering help for small business owners. Heck, Search Engine Land’s Small Is Beautiful column does it, I do it both here and on my Small Business Search Marketing blog, and there are countless other blogs and sites with advice for the SMB market. But what if a small business owner wants to go straight to the source and get advice from his/her peers about all aspects of business, not just marketing?

Bizmore is a new “help engine” that aims to do just that. A beta version of the site launched earlier this month.

If you like analogies, think of Bizmore as something of a cross between Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn. Users can do keyword searches to find existing Q&A discussions on a variety of topics, or browse through conversations in categories such as Communications and Marketing, Sales, or Finance and Accounting.

In addition to the user-generated content, Bizmore has brought in more than a dozen experts to join in the Q&A conversations. And Bizmore’s own staff writes business-related features like this recent piece on the “Daily Download” staff meeting that many Apple retail stores do each day.

By aiming at such a targeted, professional audience, Bizmore should avoid some of the problems that plague Yahoo Answers — like spam, clutter, and the general usefulness (or lack thereof) in some Q&A threads. But the flip side is that Bizmore is aiming at a target audience that’s fragmented and difficult to reach. The question for any site aiming at the SMB market is not only if it can find users to join the community, but also if the community is valuable enough to keep them interested. On the surface, Bizmore appears to provide a useful service … but that’s no guarantee of success.