Herding Entrepreneurs

Cats are notoriously easy to herd compared to entrepreneurs.  Put two entrepreneurs in a room and three businesses and plans for four more will emerge.  One definition of an entrepreneur is someone who always wants to do it “my way”.  I plead guilty to fitting the definition.

Be that as it may, I am coordinating a network on FeedBurner called “My Way, The Entrepreneur Network”.  What does this mean?

To readers who like to read what entrepreneurs write, there is a single feed through which you can read the thoughts and experiences of a number of entrepreneurs including me.  Fractals of Change posts and those from other blogs will appear in this feed whether the particular post has to do with entrepreneurship or not. (Should it be this way or should only posts actually relevant to entrepreneurship be here?   One of the things I hope you’ll give me feedback on).

In order to read it, you need to either subscribe via RSS or via email (I’ve set this up with FeedBlitz but other email subscription services will work as well).  If you subscribe via RSS and use a feed reader like Newsgator or Bloglines, new posts will appear soon after they appear on the entrepreneurs’ blogs.  If you choose FeedBlitz email, you’ll get a daily email with all the posts and a convenient table of contents.

Some of you may want to look at the feed only occasionally to sample individual authors you want to subscribe to.  It’ll be interesting how this all works out. There is no actual blog site associated with the feed but there will be landing pages which list the network members.

There are three benefits to participating bloggers:

1. being found by new readers who look at or subscribe to My Way;
2. receiving advertisements (and revenue) through FeedBurner from advertisers who have purchased placement in the entire network;
3. cool stuff like badges and other widgets to put on your blog site.

Advertisers benefit by being able to make network-wide buys – good way to get a targeted audience. Click here to buys ads.

Once the FeedBurner network capability is fully released, almost any blogger will be able to establish a network.  The current Beta is supporting only a few coordinators of which I’m one.  I’ve sent out invitations to a few entrepreneur/bloggers whose blogs I know about and whose email addresses I have.  If you are or have been an entrepreneur and blog about your experience and would like to have your blog included in the network, please email me – tom (at) evslin (dot) com.