This week in small business: Plenty of lists to put on your refrigerator door
This week’s top content from around the online world features a lot of lists. Lists as short as one item to lists as long as 50 items. So you have no excuse to be listless this week. Sorry. Leadership, management, and productivity To outsource, or not to outsource; that is the question! And Nash Riggins lists and explains 20 advantages and disadvantages of small biz outsourcing to help us answer that question. As we enter the season of March Madness, John Greathouse’s article, “These Sports Are Precursors To Business Success,” makes good reading. Here’s some timely encouragement and coaching from Tamiko Cuellar: “Women Leaders: How To Make The Leap To Owning Your Own Business.” Entrepreneur Kelsey Humphreys talks to “happiness” expert Gretchen Rubin and gives us a blueprint for redesigning our lives for success and happiness. Aaron Agius tells us how to get our marketing and SEO teams to play nice with each other in his Entrepreneur article. Want to compete against the big boys and girls? Pius Boachie offers four tactics to help you take your bite out of the apple. Scott Shane tells us how our smart phones can cut our accounting costs. Can you hear him now? “You don’t get any points in life for doing things the hard way.” – Tim Fargo Marketing and sales Need to top off your tank of social media marketing tips? Here are 50 from Carlo Pacis. And, one specific area where many of us can use tips, is in developing a social media marketing schedule. That’s what Steve Hamm does here. Anyone charged with leveraging social media to market a startup will find Arachika Kapoor’s article useful. Do it wrong and social media will actually hurt your business, warns Pia Silva. Good, practical advice is found in this Deirdre Kelly article on creating Instagram lead ads. I love short lists, so I’m a big fan of Jim Keenan’s “The One Thing Sales Organizations Should Do To Increase Revenue In 2017.” Looking for a succinct primer on how to approach online marketing for your small business? This article by Jayne Kendall is it. Writing for the StarTribune, Harvey Mackay contends that sales is everyone’s job – no matter the business. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Marguerite Ward takes us on a tour of the eight books Elon Musk credits for his success. The reasons we’ve been given why so many startups fail are a bunch of hooey, says Ron Shah. For an industrial-strength dose of inspiration, check out Peter Daisyme’s list of 50 entrepreneurs to watch in 2017. “I’ll try.” That’s one of the 50 things entrepreneurs never say in this thoughtful list pulled together by Andrew Thomas. And like a nice cabernet and good steak, that article pairs nicely with Andrew Deen’s “5 Essential Qualities Every Entrepreneur Should Have.” “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” – Thomas Edison...
read more11 email marketing ideas you can use now
It’s a fact of human nature that when we are presented with the same thing over and over again, we become desensitized to it. If you’ve driven the same commute route for years, there are probably days when you get to work and you realize that you didn’t notice anything along the way. It can be scary. For this reason, it’s important to mix up what you present to your customers and prospects. That’s why I’ve pulled together 11 email marketing ideas for you to use to freshen up your email campaigns. Some of these email marketing ideas are fairly specific, others are more like “categories” or “genres” of emails that will interest your list. See how many would be seen as new to your recipients. Velvet rope emails. You’ve probably seen doormen at hot night clubs man the “velvet rope.” It’s where people line up to get in, but only privileged individuals make it past the velvet rope. In email marketing, these are exclusive offers or information that isn’t available to the general public. Unadvertised sales, articles not published on your blog, early access to sale prices, and “sneak peeks” would fall under this category. Feedback emails. These emails are asking to hear from the recipients. They can be polls, a simple survey question or two, or an invitation to submit general feedback on a topic or proposal. I’ve found that these get a good response. Many email service providers have built-in polling features, otherwise, you can direct your list to an online poll or survey. Breaking news emails. People on your list will be pleased to get the latest news about your business. If you’re retail, this could be what you’re ordering for the next season. For B2B, it could be future plans based on how you see your industry evolving. Additions to your staff might be appropriate. ‘Best of’ emails. Pulling together a “Best Blogs of 2016” for example, is a sure winner. Look at which of your posts got the most views and link to those in an email. It’s like crowdsourcing great content. If you’re retail, feature your biggest sellers over a given period of time. This is one of the email marketing ideas that’s easy to pull off. Special date emails. Make good use of special dates and seasons. This includes holidays, customer anniversaries, and the four seasons. These alone can give you at least 10 to 15 nicely targeted emails each year. Sales and coupons emails. I suspect most of you are doing this already, but if not, here it is! Followup emails. If you’ve sent out a sale notice, for example, follow it up when the end date draws near. A ticking time clock is a great motivator. In the same way, re-promoting an event using an angle like “Only 12 seats left!” works extremely well. Leverage scarcity and fear of missing out (FOMO), whenever you can. (By the way, FOMO is a major motivator among Millennials, as Kate Taylor explains in her Entrepreneur article.) ‘We miss you’ emails. Brick and mortar businesses need a loyalty program to pull this one off, it shouldn’t be any problem for an online-only business. After a few months of not engaging with a customer, send an email and include some kind of discount. Keeping...
read moreHow long does it take content marketing to work? Here’s your answer!
One of the most often asked questions is “How long does it take content marketing to work?” The simple answer is that it takes a while, but I want to break this down into two major categories of content marketing so you can appreciate how content marketing works. Here’s how I’m going to divvy this up: Immediate content marketing, and Persistent content marketing. What I’m calling “immediate content marketing” is when you use your social media channels to share content you have created or you send out a newsletter that features your content. It puts your content in front of eyeballs immediately. Immediate content marketing produces measurable results over the course of a day or two. You can measure clicks, website visits, views, sales, or some other simple metric. If you have a large mailing list or generate a lot of website visits, you can monetize immediate content marketing. The content marketing problem However, many small business websites don’t have the daily traffic numbers or the huge mailing list that can create a significant cash flow via this kind of immediate content marketing. What these small business owners want is to start seeing results from their persistent content marketing. This is why many get discouraged when they start pondering the question of how long does it take content marketing work. By persistent content marketing, I’m talking about the marketing power that is created through the marriage of your content creation and search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns. This is when people start coming to your site through organic searches. Here’s the way this often looks to the owner of a small business website: Content is created and posted on website. This content is featured in social media and/or newsletter. This content generates small but measurable results. This content remains on website, but people generally stop finding it. Crickets. As the sound of the crickets takes over, the small business owner loses confidence in the value of content marketing. That’s understandable but very wrong. Let me put this simply: It takes several months for a piece of content on your website to become popular and payoff with organic traffic. Traffic growth over time Below are two graphs from pieces of content on my website. Note that when they are first posted, they generate a respectable number of views for a few days. Then they slack off. Eventually, they start to generate more and more views. Let me add one important caveat to this: Not every piece of the content you create will be a winner. Some of the pieces you post, will never get to the place where they create any significant traffic to your website. Knowing this and understanding how long it takes content to start producing steady organic traffic, I have two critical pieces of advice: Regularly create, post, and feature content on a long list of relevant keywords. Be patient. Do not expect an immediate steady increase in organic traffic. Do those two things and one day (fairly soon) you’ll stop beating your head against the wall as you ask yourself, “How long does it take content marketing to work?” You’ll have the answer! How to get started To find those keywords and blog topics, check out these articles. They look at the job from...
read moreHow to make benign neglect work for you!
The other day one of the morning shows did a segment on men’s socks, an area of commerce which has seen little change over the years. Until recently, men’s socks came in three styles: boring, dull, and bland. The last major innovation to push the “sock envelope” was the Argile sock, and the invention of that pattern and its application to socks dates back to the 1600s. So, it’s been a while. One of the new companies setting the men’s sock world on end is Stance and the company’s co-founder and CEO Jeff Kearl. It was by studying a wide variety of products on sale at Target, that Kearl got the inspiration to start Stance, which offers colorful, designer, and performance socks. When his attention focused on the men’s socks at Target, Kearl found an important consumer item that had been suffering under benign neglect for, well, centuries. I need to note that Stance isn’t alone in its effort to pump new life into men’s socks. Search for men’s socks on Amazon and you’ll be treated to a rainbow of attractive footwear. I tell you this story because there are probably thousands of important consumer items that are suffering under the same benign neglect. And, when someone comes along and finds a way to stir the pot, that person can end up creating a new category. Here’s a question: How many of us have walked by the men’s sock collection at Target and NOT seen it as an opportunity for innovation? I suggest that virtually all of us would be guilty for not seeing the possibilities, or recognizing the fact that little had changed in men’s socks for years and years. I often tell the story of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and the basic idea there is the same. They created a new category – “designer” ice cream, if you like – when they broke away from the standard chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. And in many ways, Apple did the same thing with the original iMac. If you remember, instead of a boring beige box, the first generation of iMacs came in “flavors” like blueberry and strawberry. The good thing about creating a new category, is you don’t have to invent an item from scratch. You just need to find a way to put a new spin on an old product. Discover a way to make it appeal to a young, lucrative market. Here’s one idea: Look for products that are used by both men and women. Determine which is “ahead” in terms of innovation or aesthetics, then take the one that’s lagging and bring it up to speed. And if you can’t think of anything right off the bat, why not do what Kearl did and head over to your nearest Target? Find some items that have fallen by the wayside in terms of modernization. List them all and then start doing some market research to judge the potential size of a category, were you to decide to go for...
read moreWhen good intentions go bad: The impacts of minimum wage hikes
There’s something business owners, consumers, and politicians need to understand: Basic laws of economics and human nature cannot be ignored or legislated out of existence. An example of this is playing out in front of us right now. For several years, activists have been clamoring for a higher minimum wage. The push is to make the minimum wage a “living wage.” Several localities have adopted higher minimum wage rates in recent years. It’s important to know that there are often three levels of government that set minimum wage rates: The federal government, state governments, and city or county governments. The more local governments cannot set a minimum wage lower than the federal rate, but they can set it higher. As the minimum wage battle has been brewing, opponents have warned that no matter how noble the cause may be, the final impact will be lost jobs for workers entering the job market with few, if any, skills. This is simply due to the unbreakable law of supply and demand, which says that people will buy less of something when the price goes up. Therefore, when the price of unskilled labor goes up, business owners will “buy” less of it. We’re seeing this happen in the food industry with the introduction of kiosks that replace order takers. I’ve watched Panera install self-order kiosks in many locations over the last year and now Wendy’s has announced that it plans to try kiosks in 1,000 of its restaurants. Further, CaliBurger, a Southern California hamburger chain, is installing burger flipping robots in its restaurants. To be fair, the handwriting has always been on the wall for repetitive jobs that are typically filled by unskilled labor. They are prime candidates for automation and it doesn’t help that good employees are, in general, hard to find today. That has been small business owners’ biggest complaint in recent years. Acquiring job skills There’s another dimension to this situation that is seldom discussed. Let me give you a little background so you understand this view. I remember when jobs in fast food restaurants were held exclusively by teenagers so they could get their own spending money. It went without saying that these jobs were no more than a very small stepping stone along a career path leading to a job that would support a family. I remember some great television commercials for McDonald’s that featured doctors and other highly skilled professionals who got their first jobs at one of the chain’s restaurants. Minimum-wage jobs have taught millions of new workers what is required to be a good employee. I might even say that the lessons they teach are, in the long run, as valuable or more valuable than what is often taught in the classroom, because they are the life skills required for success in any job. By insisting that the minimum wage be a “living wage” we are telling unskilled workers that all they should have to do to get by in life is land a minimum wage job. It’s a demotivating message. Put yourself in the place of a student who isn’t thrilled with school. Right now, our society is sending this person two conflicting messages: You need to get a college education, probably in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subject. We’re passing laws...
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