@barney – I wasn’t referring to you at all in terms of ‘bigging up’. There are a lot of opinions out there. I wasn’t specifically thinking of you guys although I did tend to pick on you a bit. I guess its that I don’t subscribe to opinion heavy blogs which are light on specific learnings. Please don’t take it the wrong way.

The context of my post was “things that need to be done to get your business up and running” and it was based very much on my own experience.

James et al, you are quite right when you say what suits some may not suit other. When I started up, I had not done enough of the fundamentals i.e. check out the market etc before I threw myself 120% into starting the business up. In this context, the business cards are not the right things to do first – sure I had nothing to sell to anyone . Having said that, if I’d done alot of the other things like market research, started product development etc before I had established the business formerly, then the sequence would be different and business cards would have been required because I had more than a basic thought/concept to demonstrate to people.

Rambling a bit – but hopefully you get my gist. I was not trying to “big myself up” or the bloggertone blog where this was posted, it’s just some insights that I have that people can take or leave as they see fit if they find themselves in the same scenario.

All blogs are written from personal experience with a personal view on a particular topic – people may choose to take something from them or not.

Cheers
Barney

I wouldn’t bother. You guys write blog posts based on research in a way that is pretty rare online. Most of the time posts are just pulled out of no-where. Conjecture and bs. Especially when it comes to business advice. From all reports, even 37signals ‘Rework’ falls into the same trap. If they can do it – surely anyone can. Damn it – I find myself proffering advice I really shouldn’t. Maybe I need to ad a ‘conjecture’ tag to some of my posts.

Reva’s day job isn’t selling consultancy hours, and perhaps that is why you guys can be as blunt as you are with your findings (good and bad). What gets my goat are opinionated blog articles where there isn’t really anything supporting the advice being offered other than a desire to big themselves up and look good in front of potential clients.

Is it just me or am I cranky today?

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

I think it goes without saying that you have to think about whether any piece of advice should apply to you and your business, no matter how important it was or is to someone else’s.

We often point that out when talking about the results of any SEO experiements we run. Maybe we need to point it out more often in Caelen’s business posts too.