Reading Good Articles is an important part of becoming an Internet Entrepreneur. College sorta teaches this by requiring students to complete so much reading homework. The challenge with this is the reading is usually pre-selected by the instructor, which does not help students gain the skills of learning to find good articles on their own. There are good reasons to give students reading materials of course, but too often I see college students graduate with a limited ability to think on their own and solve their own problems!
How does reading articles help one to become an entrepreneur?
In my experience, I feel like I have learned a lot through my various business experience. I have started many business projects, new product sales, various marketing campaigns, hiring challenges, pretty much all of the stuff you can only learn from experience. At some point I started reading business books and articles from magazines and the internet. What I found was that I was really interested in so many topics. I also noticed I was easily distracted, and I really didn’t gain a deep understanding of any particular area. A mentor of mine once told me that a specialist always beats a generalist. This was great advice for me! I have since learned to identify good articles from the bad ones, this creates a lot of value and learning that would take me too long to learn on my own through my own experience.
What makes an article a good article?
For me, good articles have several qualities. Here are a few qualities:
-read articles that discuss your industry, especially when it has to do with facts and figures. Find industry publications that will send you a daily or weekly email that you can browse through the headlines at a glance, and only choose the articles that look like they are worth reading. Be careful not too spend too much time reading and not enough time doing. This is an easy trap for an entrepreneur to fall into.
-read articles from those who have done it before, do not rad articles from consultants that have no or very little experience. For every 1 good consultant, there are 10 others that are imitations, well meaning perhaps, but still imitations. When it comes to investing your time or resources as an entrepreneur don’t settle on imitations.
-read articles that have to do with your daily work. Figure out what it is you do every day, and chances are it involves talking to a lot of people. Make it worth your time to become a better communicator. There are many articles that discuss the “how to” or “step by step” instructions when it comes to some entrepreneur skills. Not all entrepreneur skills can be learned by reading articles, but you can understand a lot of things.
-read articles that involve experiments. These are articles that have tried using 2 marketing methods for getting new customers for example. It is important to recognize here that the best internet entrepreneurs that I know have a good knowledge of many entrepreneur areas. This type of knowledge comes by a focused effort to learn and understand entrepreneurship. This type of learning may take years, so get used to learning effectively by choosing good articles to learn from.
-stay away from the “hype” articles. These are articles that try to tell you that unless you do this one thing your business is going to fail. Make sure you understand the motives of the articles you read… Why are they writing or sending you this message? Does the author have a good history of sending you articles that truly look out for you, or are they trying to create an unnecessary sense of urgency for something that doesn’t really matter? Really evaluate the reasons the author or publication is writing about that subject. Learn to trust reliable authors.
Over time you will be able to recognize good articles by your own experience and judgment. Remember articles are also great for introducing new ideas to you that can help expand your world of understanding.