This Week in Small Business: 15 tips and tricks, $15 minimum wage and 15 lousy industries
Fifteen seems to be a magic number this week. We have 15 SEO tips and tricks, the 15 least profitable industries and the impact of a $15 per hour minimum wage in San Francisco. Need more than 15? How about 53 great ideas for blog posts? Leadership, management and productivity Are you talking to your customers? It could be the most important thing you do in your small business. Sometimes we can get distracted by the details. This article discusses the one thing you must have to achieve small business success. There are a lot of benefits to being recognized as an social media authority, but merely being on Twitter doesn’t get the job done. Small and medium-sized businesses are taking two distinct paths for growth: mergers and acquisitions versus launching new products and services. Here are some interesting survey results. Investing in yourself and getting help for your small business virtually always pays an impressive ROI. Marketing and sales Jonathan Ebenstein, managing partner of Skoda Minotti Strategic Marketing, offers five steps to turn strangers into profitable customers. Anyone hunting for a good – and thorough – look at social media marketing should check out this post from Hootsuite. But if you’re ready to take the next steps in content marketing, Neil Patel has put together an advanced guide. There’s a lot of money to be made in niche marketing and this article from the Shopify blog offers a lot of tips on how to market within a niche. Carter Hostelley discusses how social media can help you optimize your B2B account-based marketing. Need ideas for blog posts? Here are 53 good ones. If you’re serious about optimizing your return on email marketing, you must have a strategy. These 15 SEO tips and tricks from Sujan Patel, will definitely help boost your content marketing efforts. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Need money? Here are seven ways to find investors for your startup. Ted Coiné discusses the simple question that must obsess all entrepreneurs. Know what it is? Please! Avoid these 15 least profitable small business industries. (You’ve been warned.) Politics, government and the economy The IRS clock is ticking down. Have you eliminated these three small business tax time worries? See how a $15 minimum wage is impacting three businesses in Baghdad by the Bay (that’s San Francisco, by the...
read moreWhat do you know about Small Biz SEO? Take the Quiz!
Basic knowledge of and the willingness to implement search engine optimization is fundamental to achieving success with any website. Without good SEO, your website will never get found by your prospects who are using search engines like Google. Here is a short quiz to help you see if you have a grasp of some of the SEO basics. If you don’t score as high as you thought you should have scored, scroll through these articles on SEO to build on your understanding. (Correct answers will appear green when submitted.) facebook...
read moreBreaking News and 5 Tips for Instagram Marketing
If your small business has a following on Instagram, you need to understand how the algorithm governing its news feed has changed recently. Items used to appear chronologically in the news feeds of your followers, so if your followers checked their Instagram accounts shortly after you posted something, your photo would appear at the top of their news feeds. That has changed. Instagram, as you probably know, is owned by Facebook and the Instagram news feed algorithm has been reworked to parallel how items appear in the Facebook news feed. Items that generate more Instagram user interest get priority news feed placement – or items that Instagram believes will be of more interest get better placement. This paves the way for more profitable advertising in the Instagram news feed. However this ultimately plays out, it shines a very bright spotlight on the importance of engaging your followers on Instagram. You need to do everything you can to prove to the new algorithm that – darn it – people like you! With that goal in mind, let’s look at five strategies that will help you engage your followers and gain you new (engaged) followers. 1. Capitalize on the special interests of your customers. What are your customers passionate about? Maybe it’s sustainability. Use a “hook” like that to build your Instagram marketing around. Create a hashtag. Use other general hashtags related to your topic of choice so you can branch out to new people. “Diversity” has been a mainstay of American culture for a generation and the Internet has allowed us to push diversity further than ever before. This is great for marketers because it creates all kinds of “micro-niches” that can be exploited. Find these niches and use Instagram to develop them. Hint: Sometimes you can discover these micro-niches by looking at the long-tail keywords that perform best for you. 2. Feature your employees (great for a local business). With all the talk about moving jobs overseas, let people know that your hire locally and support the local economy. Have your employees post to your business Instagram account showing their activities in the community. When your employees post, they bring in their social network following, so you can greatly increase the size of your digital marketing footprint with zero cost. 3. Post a discount code via Instagram. Create a custom graphic or just have an employee hold up one of those hand-written signs with a discount code and other offer details. If you do this on a regular basis, you can get your customer tuned into what you’re doing and they’ll regularly check your Instagram feed to see if you’ve posted any more discounts. 4. Get your customers to post using a hashtag you’ve created. If there is any “lifestyle” angle to your business create a contest where people post pictures of your products being used in their lives. This can also be adapted to the B2B environment in many cases. Pick one random winner each month for a discount, special recognition or a prize. As with encouraging your employees to post, when you get your customers involved, you also get their social network followers involved. 5. Let your followers know that some of your special offers are ONLY communicated via Instagram. As with any social media marketing, you need...
read moreHow to create a media kit for free publicity
Free publicity. It’s the dream of every small business owner. But sadly it’s not the goal of every small business owner. We can dream in our sleep, but to achieve a goal we need to be fully awake, alert and working hard at it. We’ve talked about press releases before. Recently we covered the impact of Google’s Panda algorithm update on press releases, plus we’ve given you the basics you need to craft press releases that get read and published. However, for your best chance at extensive free publicity, you need to do more; you need to create a press kit (also called a media kit). Your first question to answer when you sit down and decide how to create a press kit for your business is to ask yourself if you have the writing, graphic, photography, web design and layout skills to do it yourself. When you create your media kit, it’s an exercise most small business owners are going to do twice – once on paper and once online. You’ll want to include your media kit when you send out press releases via snail mail and you’ll also want to have it on hand when you attend trade shows or go virtually anyplace in public with your small business. Having it online is also a smart move. It makes it much easier for writers, bloggers and editors to cite your business and include it in articles if your information is easily accessible online. Here are the basic elements to include when you create a media kit for your small business: Artwork. You should include your company’s logo along with professional photographs of your product, service and location. You want editors to be able to pull from these pieces of art to create comprehensive articles about your business. And even if they are including your business as one among many in an article, they will choose the best photographs to run with their articles – so make sure yours are the best. Hire professionals to create these elements. Introduction/pitch and company background. These can be separate pieces or combined in some cases. With your introduction, you want to “put your best foot forward” and make the case for doing business with you. This is a marketing piece without making it too “salesy.” The company background should cover its founding and short – but compelling – biographies of founders and key personnel. Concise fact sheet. Many won’t take the time to read your full introduction and background papers, so provide an overview organized as a list. Product or service information. Tell readers exactly what it is that you make or the services you perform. Describe in detail what makes them different from others in your industry. Press clippings and press releases. You should have a clipping service of some kind so you can collect mentions in the press. Include these when you create your media kit. For online kits, they can be links to articles, as long as you provide a sufficient overview. You can also include significant press releases that you have distributed over the years. A sample, or “model” news story. Some editors are looking to fill space and if you give them a good article written about your business that is factual and not just a...
read moreContent Marketing/SEO Success: Two Places to Gather Business Intelligence
Ready! Fire! Aim! The order of those commands may seem patently silly, but frankly, they capture exactly what many small business owners do when they work with content marketing campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO). First we need to quickly explain that content marketing and SEO are, in many ways, “kissing cousins.” Good content marketing campaigns – especially those that involve posting articles to your website blog – will help improve your website’s position within search engine results pages (SERPs). But what’s required to make a “good” content marketing campaign? Good content? No. “Great” content, and creating great content starts well before you ever put one word down in whatever word processing software you use. Unfortunately, most small business owners I talk to believe that if they have a “good idea” for a blog, they just need to get to their computer, pour it out and post it. That’s “Ready! Fire!” There is no “aim” in that sequence. So the question becomes: How do you “aim” your content so that it is effective for content marketing and improving your website SEO? Answering this question moves us into an area of business intelligence. If you don’t approach content creation by first doing your homework and gathering accurate business intelligence, you’re simply rolling the dice on whether or not your content will do anything to improve your SERP or sales. There are two basic areas where you need to gather business intelligence when you’re about to create a content marketing/SEO piece, such as a blog article: What attracts your prospects, and What works for your competitors. You should have website history that tells you which content best attracts prospects and customers to your site. What pieces of content have logged the most views? Dig a little deeper when you answer this question. You might find that you have some content that isn’t at the very top of your list of popular articles yet, but it consistently brings in readers or viewers. When this happens, it means that the content is pulling in people without being supported by a crash social media promotional campaign. In other words, people are finding it organically. You may have discovered a “diamond in the rough.” If you create more content like this, promote it, and cross link it to the original content that you discovered, you may find that you’ve released the (organic website) Kraken! The principle here is simple: Find what works and do more of it! But this means that you need to spend a good amount of time looking through your website history before you ever start writing an article. If you invest this time, you should be able to come up with a list of promising article topics. For my second point above: What works for your closest competitors should also work for you. Your competitors may have found some keywords or topics that interest your prospects that you haven’t yet developed on your website. Let me share two free tools to get you started: Buzzsumo SimilarWeb There are paid versions of these, but you can gather some good business intelligence on your competitors with their more limited free tools. Use them to discover the most popular articles in the sites as well as the most popular organic search terms that lead...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: The Rise of Messenger Apps
The evolution and increased importance of messaging apps for marketing gets a lot of attention in this week’s roundup of top articles. You need to see how your small business will fit into this new marketing world. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Facebooks’ Messenger app is already the second most popular app in the world, but Zuckerger has an even bigger vision for it and it could become the “app for everything.” If you’re looking for excitement, you might consider jumping into an industry that’s ripe for disruption. Three are described in this Forbes article. Marketing and sales It looks like the future of social media will be in messaging apps. Will your brand fit in? Step one in social media marketing is discovering which platforms are best for your small business. And once you’ve done that, you need to get a grip on the trends that are here to stay. Jeff Barrett, SEO of Status Creative, outlines four things small businesses should do to succeed with inbound marketing. Need to do something to increase online sales? The three ideas presented here should get you moving. You may – or may not – need to hire an SEO firm. At least try these 16 DIY SEO tips first. Digitalux CEO Daniel Scalco lists five B2B marketing strategies you need to consider. Today you have to weave a good narrative to engage and lead prospects. These five tips for effective small business storytelling will help. Leadership, management and productivity Unfortunately it’s not just the major brands and big government websites that are in the sights of the hackers. Small businesses are increasingly under attack by ransomware. To do things right you have to know the mistakes to avoid. Here are five common small business mistakes. We recently noted “World Backup Day.” If you don’t have solid backup strategies for your virtual world, you need to read this article. Really. Small business owners should be on top of the seven important trends listed in this article. They include fintech, the rise of the Millennials, and more. Politics, government and the economy As the primary season drags on, it looks like small business owners are losing confidence in virtually all of the candidates. Two streams of history crossed paths recently: U.S. Relations with Cuba and the gig economy. William Fenton has an interesting take on the situation in his cautionary tale. (No)surprise! Small business and big labor are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to government...
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