This Week in Small Business: Mount up, Rev your Engines and Get Ready to Win the Small Business Race!
A lot of advice this week is directed toward helping you tune up your website. So as we go into racing season – the Indy 500 and Triple Crown events – get your web presence running efficiently at full speed and stretch out your lead over the competition!
Leadership, management and productivity
One of the big advantages of a WordPress website is the plethora of plugins available. Check out these 24 must-have plugins for your small business site. And if you want to find out what’s wrong with your website, review the findings of this study that looked at 200 million page crawls.
If you’re in retail, you need to understand how employee satisfaction impacts your bottom line. And in any small business you need to grasp the relationship between customer loyalty and expectations.
Discover how the right analytics can strengthen your customer engagement.
This guide to understanding your buyer’s journey will help you do better market research.
Marketing and sales
When you’re thinking about monetizing your website, consider these alternatives to Google’s Adwords.
Jayson Demers gives you seven simple changes that can make your website more visible to search engines.
Jason Acidre says that search engines are moving to brand-related metrics to determine search results rankings. If that’s the case you need to use modern SEO to build your brand authority.
Facebook is still the Mac Daddy of social media platforms so these 11 little-known marketing features could be valuable to your small business.
This Search Engine Watch article sums up LinkedIn’s Jason Miller’s talk on how to achieve “face-melting content marketing ROI.”
If you’re a life-long veteran of advertising, direct mail, and cold calling, you may not appreciate the hidden value of content marketing.
One writer stopped publishing on LinkedIn, but he thinks maybe you shouldn’t. Find out why.
The biggest barrier to social media marketing can be finding the time to get it done. Brett Relander has some ideas how to solve that problem.
Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation
Planning a new startup? Maybe you better locate in one of these cities that are proven to be best for small business.
This Nashville small business is doing a great job at competing with the big names in the fashion industry. See how they’re doing it.
Politics, government and the economy
Small business owners don’t like it when leadership is unsettled. That’s probably why this year’s presidential election cycle is so vexing for SBOs.
Capital One Spark gave me early access to some survey results and asked me to look them over for a post. What fascinated me was that while there is a somewhat gloomy attitude among small business owners, younger owners – and especially millennials – have a positive outlook.