How To Start a Blog for Your Small Business
Yes, I know that books have been written on the topic of how to start a blog, so why bother with it here? I have an answer to that question and I think it’s a good answer. I’m going to focus on one specific aspect of starting a blog for your small business because I think it’s the stumbling block that prevents many from starting their blog and also causes many to soon abandon their small business blog. I’m going to talk about how to get ideas for your blog and especially ideas that are going to engage your audience. I will start out with a few general approaches and then list some specific tactics that will help you find topics that fit into the general approaches that I’ve outlined. General approach #1: Write about topics that interest you. This is important for two reasons. First, if the topic doesn’t interest you, you won’t be able to write about it in a way that interests your readers. Second, if you have a small business, your small business blog should be on topics directly or indirectly related to your business; if the basic topics of your business do not interest you, you are in the wrong business! Don’t even think about how to start a blog; think about how to start a business that you’ll be passionate about! General approach #2: Write about what you know. Confession time: I wasn’t going to bother mentioning this general approach. I think it’s obvious. However, if you pass the passion test above, pour your knowledge and observations out in your blog. They will engage your readers and you should be able to produce great content for your small business blog easily. But in the long run, the next general approach is more important. General approach #3: Write about what you don’t know. Unless you’re Stephen Hawking, you’ll come to the end of your knowledge fairly quickly – at least when measured against how long you want your business to thrive. You need to find topics that center around your business that you are less familiar with, but want to know more about. If you want to know more, your customers will certainly want to know more as well. Pursuing these topics allows you to create great content for your small business blog and also elevate your authority. It’s a win-win. With those three general approaches giving us big picture guidance on how how to start a small business blog – from the perspective of content – let’s now get into some very specific tips that will prime your idea pump: Be a forum troll. Scan forums on topics related to your business and see what people are discussing and what questions they are asking. Prowl Amazon.com reviews. Read through reviews of products related to your business in the same way as you do forums. Create some Google alerts. Set up some Google alerts using keywords that relate to your business and see what is happening in the news. Become a Quora aficionado. On Quora people ask open-ended questions covering every topic imaginable. You’ll get notifications from Quora on your topics of interest. Discover relevant podcasts. We’re in the Golden Age of Podcasts. Find time to listen to the best in your subject area....
read moreUse Make-a-Will Month to Plan Your Small Business Exit Strategy
August is National Make-a-Will month and it should serve as a reminder for small business owners to have their succession plans in place. Often it’s hard enough to coax small business owners into writing an initial business plan when they’re starting out and it can get even more difficult to make them seriously consider putting a plan in place for their end game. Sadly, the consequences can be disastrous. For example, my parents owned a small business and probably intended to sell it to a key employee. It would have been the ideal situation. However, they waited too long, the employee left and became a competitor. Illness struck my family and eventually they were backed into a position where they were forced to sell. Consequently, they sold for pennies on the dollar. Succession plans differ wildly and perhaps a will is not the best legal vehicle to handle your small business. There’s no doubt that you will need some professional advice to finalize your plans, but here are a few concepts to get you thinking about the subject. Living trusts for small business Living trusts can be the right way to go for some small business owners. Small businesses often have assets that fit into a living trust arrangement quite nicely. For example, many small businesses own property and living trusts are often used in this situation. Further, some small businesses will own patents and copyrights. Again, establishing a small business living trust can be the right strategy. Sole proprietorships, partnerships and closely held corporation interests can generally be transferred to a living trust fairly easily. However, if you’re involved in a limited liability company (LLC) you’ll need a majority of the owners to agree. Please get a good estate attorney to go over all your options in detail. Also, if you have a small business that operates in more than one state, going the living trust route can spare your heirs the hassle of dealing with probate courts in different states. Establishing a trust generally means that you plan to pass on ownership of your small business interests to your heirs. However, many small business owners are best served by selling their businesses as they are approaching their retirement years. Often family members don’t want to continue the business. Selling a small business I hope that the story I told at the top made an impression on you. If you plan to sell, you need to have that goal on your mind and be working on it for many years prior to your retirement. To put it simply, you need to build value and find a buyer. Fail at either of those to items and you’re out of luck. And while it’s fine failure at a few startups when you’re younger, it’s tragic to fail at achieving a successful small business sale when you’re older. So take National Make-a-Will month as a gentle reminder to be actively planning your exit strategy. You’ll be extremely glad you...
read moreThis week in Small Business: Marketing tips from big biz, how to cope with startup stress and more
Tips this week are inspired by binge viewing Netflix, writing a novel, competing with LinkedIn, becoming totally obsessed and more. Scan the topics here and dive into a few of the articles to increase your small business edge. Leadership, management and productivity Here is advice that is sooo 2015: 12 things you can do for your small business while you’re binge watching Netflix! Since this is more of a “why to” article than “how to” article on social media, I’m putting it under management. In any case, if you aren’t all-in on social media, here’s what your missing out on. Some millennials don’t have the right attitude toward work, says J.T. O’Donnell, and this is causing them to get fired. Employers and millennials both need to read this article. When creating the ideal customer experience becomes an obsession – not merely an item on a to-do list – it can have a powerful organizing effect on your company, says Shep Hyken. Marketing and sales Joe Calloway is a performance coach and advisor who helps great companies get even better. In my One Percent Club podcast he tells how to attract new business like a magnet. Your prospects get turned off when they find themselves staring at big blocks of text. (Notice how I keep these paragraphs short?) These eight ways to use visuals in your small business content marketing will prove beneficial. Are you using direct mail? If you need inspiration, here’s how one tech unicorn became a billion-dollar startup via direct mail. The five low-to-no-cost marketing tips in this article will serve virtually any small business well. (Don’t miss the Yelp review badge idea at the bottom.) Big businesses started out as small businesses, so they must be doing some things right. Jeffrey Hayzlett shares some big business marketing tips for small business owners. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Male entrepreneurs are 86 percent more likely to be VC funded than their female counterparts and men are 59 percent more likely to secure angel investment. Shivvy Jervis looks at the reasons. You think all the good social media ideas have been taken? If so, you need to read about these two guys who have launched a startup intended to be the LinkedIn of small business. Entrepreneurship requires a whole lot of mental energy. Understanding these five emotional challenges you’ll face will improve your chances at success. Need more guidance on the best way to get your small business or startup up on its feet and growing? Think of it like writing a novel. Politics, government and the economy The US House of Representatives recently voted to increase the SBA’s lending authorization ceiling to $23.5 billion for the 7(a) loan guaranty program. Brock Blake explains why that’s such a good thing for small...
read moreWhy Even Hot Startups Need To Do Business Development
A friend was telling me about a great Brian Wilson concert he went to. Wilson is the creative mastermind of the Beach Boys and he had fellow Beach Boy founder Al Jardine with him for the show and a slew of other great musicians. The audience was on its feet throughout the show and singing with all the great Beach Boy tunes and when it was over they refused to sit down or leave. They demanded more. The band didn’t disappoint. They retook the stage and lit into “Barbara Ann” and “Surfin’ USA.” Wilson knew he needed to have more to offer his fans and he produced. Where was the business development? It’s a lesson business owners need to learn and that was recently highlighted by the financial crash and burn of Internet retailer, Zulily. Wilson had a great audience entertainment strategy while Zulily didn’t have a solid business development strategy. Zulily is one of those enterprises that streaks across the IPO sky like a Death Star falling out of its orbit. At its high point, it was valued at some $9 billion. When its growth tanked, so did its value and QVC picked it up for the bargain basement price of about $2.4 billion. Unfortunately, in the startup world, it’s easy to get blinded by your initial idea and then be caught without any business development ideas when the original idea runs its course. Flash sales were Zulily’s original hot concept. It offers deep discounts on great brands. Zulily doesn’t hold any inventory. It buys merchandise as it is ordered and buyers have to wait a couple of weeks to receive their orders. Because Zulily started during the recession, initially there were plenty of manufacturers looking to dump excess inventory. However, today supplier inventories are in balance, consumers are less pleased by the wait-vs-discount tradeoff, and there are other flash sale sites. Zulily didn’t have an encore prepared. Hiring a director of business development isn’t a high item on most founder’s “to-do” list. After all, they’ve done the initial business development by coming up with the original concept. But for most businesses, that’s not enough. Look at how Amazon has done business development; it has branched out into all kinds of services. In fact, I think that its web services area is doing very well in terms of profits and that part of the business is quite unlike selling Oprah Book Club bestsellers. Where were the brand loyalists? The handwriting was on the wall with Zulily when most of its customers made one purchase and never returned. Any business that doesn’t have a way to develop brand loyalty as part of its strategy is always swimming in perilous waters. The very nature of offering super low prices on items that will be on sale one day and off sale the next, makes developing brand loyalty virtually impossible. The only people who will be loyal are deep-discount shoppers who have no idea what they want and are willing to wait for three weeks to get it. I suppose some hoarders fall in to this category, but it’s a very small universe. So the question becomes, once you saturate that universe, where does your business development strategy lead you for expansion. It’s interesting to note that QVC made a very...
read moreLessons from a Linebacker: There Are No Participation Awards in the Real World
Steelers linebacker James Harrison created a small social media firestorm when he posted that he wouldn’t let his sons accept trophies for merely participating in sports. In fact, when he found out that they had participation awards, he had them sent back. The intimidating linebacker (jhharrison92) posted a photo of two participation trophies on Instagram with the hashtag #harrisonfamilyvalues and had this to say: “I came home to find out that my boys received two trophies for nothing, participation trophies! While I am very proud of my boys for everything they do and will encourage them till the day I die, these trophies will be given back until they EARN a real trophy. I’m sorry I’m not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I’m not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best…cause sometimes your best is not enough, and that should drive you to want to do better…not cry and whine until somebody gives you something to shut u up and keep you happy.” When I checked, the post had 17.3k likes. Bravo! I don’t know if Harrison’s boys will grow up to be athletes or go into business, but I know that if they decide to go into business for themselves, the lesson their father taught them about earning real trophies will serve them well. You see, the business world has something that’s nearly the equivalent of a children’s sports participation trophy – it’s called a bankruptcy judgment. It concerns me that our country’s small business startup rate has been going down and I wonder if it’s because too many younger Americans grew up being awarded for merely participating and they realize that launching a successful business requires a much deeper level of commitment. This might be reflected in the fact that as of 2013, immigrants started 430 businesses per 100,000 people while native-born Americans started only 250. And although immigrants are only one fifth of the labor force, they account for a quarter of the new US entrepreneurs. I suspect that these hard-working immigrant entrepreneurs were raised in cultures where they don’t hand out participation trophies. In any case, learning the lesson that Harrison is teaching his children and adopting the attitude toward business formation that our immigrant population is modeling would serve us all well and do more to secure the future of our country than anything our politicians can do from Washington, D.C. The basics are simple. For startup and small business success you need to be competitive and put in an effort that goes far beyond what you think you are capable of. Harrison, a five-time all-pro linebacker, said that sometimes our best isn’t good enough to win and when that’s the case we aren’t entitled to some kind of award. And in that same spirit, we need to know that we can soar beyond what we consider our best. Sometimes it takes being knocked down – or facing the threat of failure – but there is always room for “extra effort,” for establishing a new “personal best” and then setting out and beating it tomorrow. In every endeavor, refuse to settle for a participation trophy. In fact, see it as an insult to...
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