This week in small business: All your basic assumptions challenged!
There may be more variety in our curated content this week than ever before. We go around the world to see what women are doing in Liberia and Saudi Arabia and we feature several articles that will challenge your preconceived notions. Hang on to your hat! Leadership, management, and productivity While there are certainly many benefits, Nick Clements details five risks of using a small business credit card. Need to get up to speed on SBA loan basics? This article from Independent Bank will do it. There’s no substitute for good training, so Wakas Javed’s article on how to train for top productivity is recommended reading. Exactly what should you say to your employees and when? It’s time to master workplace feedback. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of wisdom in Harvey Schachter’s point that laziness is the secret to productivity. Think social media is killing your workplace productivity? Jo Disney makes a good case for the opposite. In this installment of Laura Emily Dunn’s Women in Business Q&A, she interviews Ammara Yaqub, who has been a major player in the fashion industry for many years. Have a great business that you want to take to the next level? Check out “4 Tips for Creating a Strong Franchise Infrastructure,” by Rick Grossmann. Marketing and sales Are you taking advantage of the three 2017 marketing trends Marie Flounoy covers in her interview with Kim Brown, founder of Centrally Human, LLC? Brian Sutter takes an unusual look at small business marketing in his Business.com article, “3 Big Ideas for Small Business Marketing.” Writing for Buffer, Ash Read shares seven secrets of successful video marketing. (I guess they aren’t secrets any longer…) Clip this infographic and stick it on your lunch room refrigerator: The Anatomy of an Optimal Marketing Email, by Sean Work. Lin Grosman gives practical advice in her Forbes article, “Six Ways To Improve E-Commerce Conversions.” If you’re ready to see things from differing perspectives, check out Andrew Stephen’s, “Challenge The False Dichotomies Of Marketing.” Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation After civil war and Ebola devastated the Liberian economy, new businesses – powered by young women self-starters – are finally on the rise, says Gayle Tzemach Lemmon in Fast Company. Let’s continue our world tour. Ellen R. Wald relates why business will determine the future for women in Saudi Arabia. Maybe you’ll need a pair of those new Apple wireless earbuds because Rahul Dubey says music can make you a more creative entrepreneur. Neil Napier relays the biggest business mistakes made by 14 entrepreneurs. Writing for Entrepreneur India, Aashika Jain explains how one Internet businessman believes that the next four to five years will be the best time to be an entrepreneur. “Forget seizing the moment. Seize the opportunity.” – Tim...
read more4 little-known strategies for creating powerful marketing blog topics
Coming up with marketing blog topics – ideas for your blog to market your business – week in and week out is difficult, to say the least. Quick tip: Have Evernote or a similar app always nearby so when that killer blog topic idea strikes you from out of the blue, you can immediately capture it. Remember the old Chinese proverb: The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory. (In our digital age, I think apps like Evernote are included as “ink” in that wisdom!) Unfortunately, for most of us, those random, great ideas don’t strike all that often, so we need systems and strategies to for creating marketing blog topics, and that’s what I’m going to share here. The accordion strategy When you have a good topic at hand, think about the subsections that will be included in the content. Usually, these will be subheads. Once you know the subheads, give them additional thought with the goal of making the strongest ones stand-alone blogs, or parts of a series. This expands your material like an accordion…but unlike most, it will be an “accordion” that’s music to your ears. Expand on the work of others A variation on the point above is to expand on content that others have created. An easy way to do this is to find the most popular blog topics in your subject area, scan them, put all the subheads in a spreadsheet, and choose the best subhead topics for stand-alone blogs. There’s a good free tool on the Internet that you can use for this strategy: Ruzzit. When you go to the Ruzzit website: Set categories to “all,” Set content type to “articles,” Set social network to the ones you feel are most appropriate, and Set time to a period that works for you. (The first time you do this, you might set it to “All Time.”) This Ruzzit search will return the most viral content. At that point, it’s your job to find the articles that best suit your niche, review them, and capture the subheads. These subheads can often become blog topics on their own, or they may inspire related topics to write on. Explore Amazon questions If you sell or manufacture products, or provide a service that’s related to a product, find the bestselling products in this niche on Amazon and scan the questions buyers have asked. I was just looking at one of those water filters that attach to your tap and found these questions: When using unfiltered water setting (Brita basic on tap filter), the water is white in color – as if there’s calcium. Has anyone else noticed this? A store selling these could address this concern as well as anyone who owns a plumbing business. How do you get a stuck filter out of the cone? This could lead to an article that specifically answers that question, but a better idea might be to do a longer article or series on troubleshooting these kinds of filters. I live in a modern house in Shanghai. Do you think it could be attached to a non-American faucet there? Addressing this question could lead to an interesting discussion of water and plumbing around the world. Review reviews Reviews of products on Amazon and other e-commerce sites as well as reviews of...
read moreAn eclectic guide to the best productivity apps 2017
I’m taking a broad view of productivity as I run down what I believe are the best productivity apps you need to be running in 2017, and you’ll see what I mean by “taking a broad view” as I detail the first app on my list. I’m also going to touch on apps and services across all the platforms, including the Apple Watch. 1Password. This is a password app that functions across all of your devices. You compose one master password (or use the iOS fingerprint function) to unlock the app. It then fills in your username and password. Let’s be honest here, most people are very lax in their password security habits. 1Password will create long passwords that use all the letters, numbers, and symbols on your keyboard. This will save you a bit of time by eliminating the need to look up, create, and enter strong passwords, but more importantly, it will save you from the lost productivity suffered if and when you have a security breach. It’s like they say: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That is the essence of productivity. RoundTeam. This is an online service that posts to your Twitter account. There are many scheduling apps available – such as Hootsuite and Buffer – but RoundTeam doesn’t require you to find the content. Here’s how it works: You create a list on your Twitter account and Round Team will create posts from that list. You can set up filters, frequency, and the times of day you want it to post. Once you set it up, you can walk away and never have to tend to it again. If you have just one Twitter account to which you’d like to add an “autopilot” feature, the free RoundTeam level will be fine. TripAdvisor. If you travel for business or need to entertain clients, the Apple Watch TripAdvisor app will enhance your productivity. Getting to the best places quickly and efficiently when you’re on the road is a must. Having the latest crowd-sourced information available on your wrist is an invaluable service. Harvest. This is time tracking, expense reporting, timesheet approval, and invoicing software all in one app. Harvest has reports and graphs that let you know how you’re doing with billing and timing on specific projects so you can maintain control – and profitability. If you’re a solopreneur or freelancer, you might be able to get by with the free version of Harvest. Forest. For day-by-day, hour-by-hour productivity, the Pomodoro technique is tried and true. There are many apps that will take you through the 25-minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of down time routine, but while all are functional, few are very interesting. Forest changed that by using gamification. Instead of merely watching a timer count down, you plant trees and watch them grow. The browser plugins are free; the mobile device apps are a couple of dollars. Streaks. In terms of personal productivity, the single biggest secret is to create good habits – it isn’t by accident that Steven Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has been a perennial bestseller. Streaks is an app designed to help you form good habits…well, six of them at least (sorry, Mr. Covey). This is an Apple app that...
read moreStrategies to survive the tidal wave of retail closures
Have there been times in your life when you’ve looked back at some mistakes you’ve made and said to yourself, “I should have seen the handwriting on the wall”? For retailers today, the “handwriting” is appearing in business news headlines like: These major retailers are closing more than 3,000 stores this year, Clark.com Stores are closing at an epic pace, CNN Money “The Retail Bubble Has Now Burst”: A Record 8,640 Stores Are Closing In 2017, Zerohedge.com More than 3,200 stores are shutting down — here’s the full list, Business Insider You would recognize most of the names on these lists. Some, like Sears, RadioShack, and K-Mart, wouldn’t be surprising, but others – Bebe, CVS, and Abercrombie & Fitch, for example – are more of a surprise. (It just doesn’t seem very long ago that Abercrombie & Fitch was killing it and retailers everywhere were trying to clone its approach to retailing.) It’s no secret that much of this disruption is being caused by online sales. If you look at the various lists of retailers closing stores, it’s like taking a stroll down the center aisle of your favorite mall from the anchor store at one end, to the anchor store at the other. Malls are being replaced by online mega-sites like Amazon. Phil Wahba has a great article on Fortune that details how the Simon Property Group is fighting to “reinvent” the shopping mall. I’ve heard about big hunks of shopping malls being taken over by medical groups, fitness centers, public libraries, public schools, and all sorts of other “mixed use” tenants. Often some stores will stick around as well. These repurposing efforts could create opportunities for local entrepreneurs. Keep tabs on the ups and downs of your nearby malls and look for news about possible redevelopment projects. There are two other approaches to consider if you don’t want to get caught up in this retail disaster: The if-you-can’t–lick-’em-join-’em strategy, and Selling items that aren’t sold over the Internet. Join the crowd As I said above, online portals are replacing malls. In addition to Amazon, eBay and Walmart are notable. You may have recently seen that Walmart is tweaking its shipping charges to compete better with Amazon Prime deals. Walmart has a “marketplace” program for third party sellers; it’s their version of the Amazon Associates program. Sears has a marketplace program as well, and so as does Rakuten.com (formerly Buy.com). An aggressive approach would be to get your products included in as many online marketplaces as possible. Inventory tracking and order management are the hurdles you need to clear to pursue a multi-channel approach like this. Software packages and cloud services are on the market, but they can get fairly pricey. Orderhive is highly rated on GetApp.com and has inexpensive entry-level pricing. Specialize in non-online products Some things may never be sold online, others are probably years away. For example, I don’t think anyone will be selling puppies online very soon…at least at the big shopping portals. Other items, like liquor and cigarettes, are illegal to sell online. (It’s interesting to note that liquor sales is one of the categories that is also pretty recession resistant.) Anything that can be customized will be somewhat immune to online competition as well as items that people need to experience first-hand...
read moreThe Essentials: What is SEO content?
To start answering the question, “What is SEO content?” we need to begin with the most basic and simple answer – anything that can go on a web page – and then start unpacking that answer. Think of what you have seen on the thousands of web pages you’ve viewed over the years. Your list would probably be something like this: Articles, Products, Videos, Graphics, Photos, Contact information, Audios, and Lists. We could break down many of those bigger categories into subcategories, but you get the idea. Anything that appears on a web page will play some role in the search engine optimization of your website. After all, Google and Bing are likely to “index” virtually every page of your site, therefore all the pages of your website have the potential to be found in a search. The question then becomes: Are your pages “optimized” so they will be found when people are conducting searches relevant to the purpose of your website? The elements of SEO The topics you focus on, the language you use, the titles you write, and the way you “code” the content on your web pages will all have a huge impact on their ability to be found in searches. Further, each of those areas or attributes contributes to how powerful your SEO content is. Google algorithms are getting better in their ability to understand the subjects and purposes of web pages, but search engines aren’t Einstein. For example, I was recently reviewing some political articles by a writer who was new to writing for the Internet. What he wrote was interesting and offered some insights, but most of his writing discussed arcane historical background. He seldom identified his core ideas in direct, straightforward language. His reasoning was mostly done via clever comparisons. Search engines would never be able to properly index his writing. If I had the assignment to write 1,000 words on President Trump’s environmental policy, but spent most of those words talking about the original formation of the EPA and laying down other historical context, Google probably wouldn’t index the article properly. So when we ask the question “What is SEO content?” I think an important way to begin defining it is through what graphic artists call “negative space”: Your content is not SEO content if it is not optimized. The creation of SEO The process of defining what is SEO content and then creating it for your website begins with a deep understanding of what you want to accomplish and how prospects relate to what you want to accomplish. You need to think of all the different online searches people would conduct in their efforts to find the product, service, or information that you hope to provide then with. Without that understanding, it is impossible to create SEO content. And, those who understand those things the best have a far greater likelihood of online success. To get a better grip on what is SEO content, let’s do some more defining by negative space: Content is not SEO content if it does not include relevant keywords. Therefore, spend more time up front researching keywords than creating content. Content is not SEO content if your content is not properly organized. Therefore, use headings, subheadings, bullet points and occasionally include your keywords in these...
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