Why Your Small Business Must Start a Blog

For those of you who have never visited a farm before, many of them have a large brick of salt for their animals, called a “salt lick.”

A salt lick is exactly what the name implies. It’s a salt deposit that animals keep coming back to—and licking -- in order to ingest nutrients they need. Now, whether or not you want your readers to lick their computer screens is up to you, but you definitely want them to look at your blog as a source of “nutrients” they need to return to and consume.

A small business blog is a marketing tool, but marketing is a nebulous term, especially if you’re an entrepreneur just starting out. You probably think of marketing and sales as synonyms, interchangeable in definition and in purpose. They’re not. Sales is the process of getting a customer to buy; marketing is how you position your product, find your customers, and decide how you’re going to reach them

Therefore, you shouldn’t start a blog simply to try to generate sales. It’s a place where you find your customers, feed them information, and position your value -- the equivalent of a digital salt lick.

Why do people go to the Internet?

Believe it or not, users don’t hop on the Internet for the sole purpose of buying your stuff. They go because they want information. A lot of advertising dollars are thrown away when blogs simply push a product, but offer no information. Or, worse yet, they get in the way of a web user’s search for information.

That tells us a lot about what a blog should offer, doesn’t it? First, it should offer relevant information that people want to consume. And second, it should pave the way to finding that information without obnoxious advertisements blocking the way.

You have to give, in order to get.

Why are you an entrepreneur? Because you want to be your own boss? Because you think you can do something better than anyone else? Because you’re the expert in your industry, and you decided to go rogue?

If you answered yes to any of these things, then, believe it or not, you are an expert. Maybe not on all of the above, but at least some part of it. Heck, even if you’re not an expert, you’re out there doing it--chasing a dream many other would-be entrepreneurs would like to chase. How you’re doing it and why you’re doing it are just as important as whether you’re any good at doing it! Give this information away for free.

Share what you’re learning, and share regularly so the animals, err,your readers know when and where to easily find the information they want. Do this long enough, and you’ll develop a following of potential customers who are aware of your product or service. Even if they’re not ready to buy now, your brand will be strong in their minds, and they may be sharing your site to other people who are ready to buy now.

Search engines are grading you.

There is a lot of information out there on the Internet. There is a lot of information out there, period. In fact, every 18 months, the total amount of data made in the history of our world doubles, and that rate is speeding up. How then can you stand out in an expanding sea of information?

Search engines are smart. Shortly after you start a blog, the search engine robots (or just bots for short) put your written content through their algorithms. Your blog receives a higher grade if you use proper grammar and spelling, and if website visitors like, share, or comment about your articles.

Search engines also look for important keywords that searchers are looking for. Depending on how many of those words your website has, it will drive up your site’s relevancy, or weed you out of the running based on a lack of it. So before you start a blog, you should be mentally searching for the intersection of what your potential customers want to know, and any specific words or phrases that they might search for in order to find it.

What you’re giving away is supposed to be original, factual, unique, of high quality, interesting, and above all, relevant to what readers want. That’s a lot to balance. My best advice is, focus on offering relevant information that is well-written and engaging. You can sprinkle in keywords and popular search engine topics later, but if your content isn’t good, it won't matter how well you appeal to search engines. In fact, people may come to your site and dislike what you’re offering, which could do more damage to your brand than good.

Should you start a blog?

Since blogging isn’t that easy, and the search engines are policing your efforts, should a small business maintain a blog?  Yes. Your website is more likely to appear higher in the search engine result pages if you have a blog than if you don’t. And those results are important now that more and more people are turning to the Internet to get information and make purchases. 

Why is “appearing higher” in the search engine results important? Easy. Think about how you consume information now. Do you scroll through every search engine result you get when you do a search, or, do you choose from the results on the first page, with special attention to those results found at the top of the page?

If you stay at the top of the first page of results, you’re like 95 percent of Web users out there. In fact, people commonly joke that the best place to find a dead body is page 2 of the Google search results. So, where does your blog show up on a list of search results? Do you come in first place in the search results? Second? Third? 400th? This is called pagerank. The more traffic your blog receives, the more engaging its content it is, the more likes and shares it receives, the higher you will rank. And that means more people will find your website; blog, products, services -- everything! 

How often should you write blog articles?

Blogging is like exercise, and the best exercise is the one that you’ll actually do. My advice is blog when you can, and when you will.

Don’t stress yourself out over it, just start somewhere. Once a month is better than not doing it at all. Weekly is better than monthly, and daily is better than weekly. Just do what you can do. The more you write, the easier it will become -- not to mention the increased amount of leadsthat you will generate from doing so. However, the more time you put into the blogging, the less time you’ll have to spend on running your business. Yes, marketing is part of running your business, but you don’t want your last blog entry to be “How I Ruined my Business Because I Spent too Much Time Blogging.” Time is a currency more precious than money, especially for an entrepreneur. You only have so much, so spend it wisely.

What should you write about?

Once you start your blog, write about your business. Write about your customers. Write about your products.  Write about your successes, failures, and lessons learned. And, if you dare, write some interesting stories that pertain to how you decided to become an entrepreneur in the first place.

At my company, we make a point to do all of the above. I habitually inform my readers about the benefits of using payroll software solutions, recall my personal lessons for them, educate them about opportunities for growth (like blogging), and of course, outline the different ways that my team’s small business payroll software can help to improve their lives.

The small business value proposition is usually based on a personal and tailored level of care that a bigger business just can’t match. A blog can help you leverage that.

Personal stories about your business success, and how you did it, help your brand become relatable.That’s important. In today’s business world, a small business is just a few bad Yelps from oblivion. Alternatively, your business is a few great reviews from success.

As I said, people go to the Internet to find information. Some of that information is customer reviews about which products are best. If you have a relationship with your customer through your blog, you can leverage the power of the review. And you should!

Can you outsource the writing?

Yes, you can have professional bloggers do your writing for you. And, yes, you can pay them to invent content that would appeal to your readership. That process falls under content marketing.

However, content marketing can come off as disingenuous when executed poorly. If you do decide to start a blog and outsource, make sure you find someone that is excellent and transcribing your content in a tone and style similar to your own.

Consider speaking your own content into a voice recorder, or have your writer interview you. Regardless of how the two of you decide to work together, make sure that the content and writing style is yours.

How many blog articles should you have?

The quality of your articles matters greatly. But size also matters. In a perfect world, you want to blog more frequently than your competitors, and you want to have more articles in your blog than your competitors have. This way, the search engines will see that your website is more active and robust than your competitors’ sites. Plus, more blog articles means there are that many more chances for your website to be discovered when people run Internet searches.

Think of it this way, every time you add an article to your blog, you’re adding more salt for your “salt lick.”  The more salt there is, the more animals (i.e., prospective customers) will be able to find your website. Best of all, the blog articles that you write now will still attract prospective customers years from now. This is why I say, “blogging is the gift that keeps on giving!” 

by Mike Kappel, Serial Entrepreneur, Charis Holdings CEO, Patriot Software President and CEO

'Shark Tank' Star Robert Herjavec's Top 5 Small-Business Marketing Tips

When Robert Herjavec wanted to start his own company, people discouraged him. They said he couldn’t do it. He had zero experience, he didn’t have a business degree and he knew nothing about running a business.

The headstrong Shark Tank star investor steamrolled ahead anyway. In 1990, he launched his first company, BRAK Systems, which he later sold to AT&T.

“I only knew that I loved what I do and how to work hard,” Herjavec told Entrepreneur. Today, Herjavec Group, his Toronto-based Internet security firm, has grown from three workers in 2003 to 220 employees strong, and it’s on pace to bank $150 million in revenue this year, according to the company.

Herjavec’s commitment to taking the risky entrepreneurial leap -- despite the naysayers, and he had plenty of them -- has more than paid off. So what if he didn’t have formal training? He also didn’t possess the needed marketing know-how, at least not at first and not all on his own. But that was fine by him.

“Like many entrepreneurs, we didn’t really know what to do at first,” he says. “As a startup, it’s almost overwhelming. I learned that’s where a third party comes in to help you. They take the marketing pressure off so you can do more of what you love to do -- your business.”

Countless marketing agencies the world over aim to do just that. One such company is Deluxe Corporation. Herjavec announced a new partnershipwith the Shoreview, Minn.-based firm last week. Together, they unveiled a series of small-business marketing videos. The short “Behind the Business” vignettes feature the multi-millionaire celebrity entrepreneur alongside a few of the companies he’s invested in on Shark Tank.

The videos share tips on how to best market your startup. We picked Herjavec’s brain for a few, too. Here are his top five:

1. Target your customers where they hang out on social media.  

Simply having several social-media accounts for your company isn’t enough. To fully leverage the potential for acquiring new customers on social media, you must also market to them where they live online.

“With Facebook and other social platforms, you can have highly targeted marketing campaigns to attract customers who are interested in the product or service that you have,” Herjavec says. “Find the user groups they meet up in on social and win them over there.”

As an example, he points to The Natural Grip, a fitness product startup he invests in. The company makes special gloves for people who do Crossfit, gymnastics or lift weights. “That community, athletes, really likes to hang out in certain places on Facebook and we went there to find and engage them,” he says.

Marketing direct to potential customers on active fan pages and buzzy user groups within the popular social-media mecca turned out to be a smart move. It gained the sporty startup a grip of new customers, according to Herjavec.

2. Don’t be afraid to sell direct online.

Even as the ecommerce economy continues to surge, many small businesses old and new still don’t have shopping carts on their websites. Herjavec says failing to sell directly online is “foolishly leaving money on the table.” He believes that if your customers trust and believe in your brand, they’ll buy what you sell on the Internet.

Of those that do offer online shopping, the feature is often set up so poorly that it frustrates and confuses customers. The result: Potential buyers end up abandoning their shopping carts altogether and the sale is dead on arrival. “It quickly becomes such a hassle to go through with the transaction that they say ‘forget it,’” he says. “Don’t let that happen.”

If you don’t know how to set up an online shopping cart, Herjavec suggests leaving it to the pros. “There are lots of great companies that can handle it for you.”

3. Use stunning imagery to grab customers' attention.

“People are very busy and the first thing that hits them in any marketing communication is a really pretty picture, not words,” he says, “and I know that sounds really trivial but that engages people and gets them to look at more of your outreach.”

Herjavec’s onto something here. Visual imagery is often more immediately engaging than monotonous walls of text, as the brain is widely believed to processes visuals thousands of times faster than text. Images transmit messages in an instant, not only making your marketing messages pop, but also rendering them more memorable, too.   

4. Market to your customers how they like to be marketed to.

“Your customers have a certain amount of information they’re willing to absorb about your brand and certain ways they like to receive that information in over a certain amount of time,” he says. It’s your job to pay attention and learn how they are best marketed to.

How much information can they handle with each outreach? How do they prefer to be communicated with (via social-media updates, e-newsletter, text notifications, etc.)? How much communication is too much and how much is not enough? If  marketing email subscribers start dropping off, find out why and adjust accordingly.

When it comes to Herjavec’s own contact preferences as a consumer, he feels being marketed to by email once every couple of weeks is more than enough. “I’m a big car guy, so a lot of the car companies market to me, but they’ve learned when enough information is enough for me and that’s once or twice a month," he says. "Once a day is too much.”

5. Hire a marketing agency so you can do more of what you love.

Outsourcing your marketing needs to an agency dedicated to taking your brand awareness to the next level frees you up to get back to business. If you don’t have the budget to hire a marketing firm, Herjavec suggests partnering with someone you trust who has successfully marketed their own business.

Whatever you do, he says, don’t take the whole job on yourself, not if you don’t have the experience to back it up.

“I always say, if you’re not a marketing person, you didn’t start the businesses to do marketing, so don’t do it,” he says. It’s crucial that you focus your energy as a small-business owner on the core reason you started up in the first place.

“You wanted to take on the world with the product or service you had, that did something better than anybody else. And that was what you were passionate about, that that’s what caused you to quit your job, get a second mortgage or whatever the reason was.”

by Kim Lachance Shandrow, Entrepreneur Staff

1

What the Cofounder of 5-Hour Energy Wants You to Know About Success

As they say, “It’s not what you know—it’s who you know.” So how do you connect with a stranger, develop a relationship, and build the next successful business? Quite simply, it’s positioning, being in the right place at the right time, and being curious and assertive. Of course, having a little bit of luck never hurts either.

In 2006, I was seated on a redeye back from Los Angeles and met a guy with long blond hair, dressed in jeans and a black polo. He turned out to be a three-time James Beard Award-winning chef. Needless to say, we did not sleep on that flight. Instead, we talked all night about food and nutrition, and six months later launched an energy drink called Life2Go into supermarkets Costco and Meijer.

While meeting people on planes happens more by chance, you can deliberately expand your network by attending tradeshows and industry events. People who attend them are typically well-informed and passionate about your industry, so the best thing you can do is ask questions. Start by looking at their badges. Are you from the same town? Have you visited there? Look for points of mutual interest and get busy conversing. You’d be amazed at what can result just from being friendly and respectful.

I had the privilege of working a couple of tradeshows with NBA hall of famer James Worthy. When we walked the show floor, everyone would call out to him or stop him and want to talk. And he always took the time to stop and have a conversation. He was friendly, polite, and at one point, it took us nearly an hour to walk about 100 yards. I asked James how he did it. He said his Mom taught him that he’ll always have 30 seconds for anyone.

Not all of us are celebrities, but by taking interest in someone and being respectful, you can make a connection and just may find an opportunity—big or small. Case in point: I once met a former college football player at a trade show in Chicago. Months later, he formulated a product for a company that I cofounded and managed: 

5-Hour Energy.

And not surprisingly, while advising a company at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim a couple years back, I met Jatin Joshi, a British surgeon who shared his personal story of overcoming a near-death experience while recovering from Crohn’s disease. He and his wife Sonia developed Instavit, a more effective way to take supplements via oral spray technology. Feeling inspired, I asked to meet with him the next day, and I’m now the CEO of Instavit’s North American division—and we have a chance encounter at a trade show to thank for it.

Placing yourself in the right situations, having an open mind and friendly disposition, and following through with hard work is, at least in my experience, an ideal recipe for business success. Meeting other passionate individuals and sharing a conversation provides you an immediate opportunity to access a new network, new ideas, and gain knowledge from another’s perspective. If something in that conversation particularly piques your interest, follow through. Ground your new business relationship in shared values, but also seek connections that both complement your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses.

There are many amazing ideas and many amazing people in the world. All you need to do is position yourself to meet those people and explore those opportunities.

by Tom Morse for Fortune

Most Small-Business Owners Buy These 5 Digital Marketing Myths

Digital marketing, being a relatively new form of marketing, has a lot of myths associated with it. 

Running a digital marketing company, I often hear many small business owners who are under the impression that these myths are true. Regardless of whether you’re a startup or a local business, it’s important to understand fact and fiction when it comes to digital marketing. Below are the top five digital marketing myths, debunked.

1. "Digital marketing is only for big businesses."

Years ago, this statement might be true. Today, not so much. Technology has evolved, software and hosting have gotten cheaper, and nearly everyone uses the internet before making a purchase, whether it’s a product or service. While it is true that the higher your budget, the grander your digital marketing campaign can be, don’t assume that you need tens of thousands of dollars to get started. In fact, many small-budget marketing campaigns can be very successful.

2. "Results are instant."

It would make my life, as a digital marketer, much easier if results were instantaneous. However, as with any marketing campaign, there will be a buffer between when the campaign begins and when you start to see results. The difference between traditional and digital marketing is that the time difference can be much shorter and the results can be tracked much easier.

3. "More traffic equals more money."

Often times I will hear people say that the more traffic a website gets, the more leads and sales will come. In theory, yes, this is true but it isn’t the goal of digital marketing. The goal of digital marketing is to use the technology at your hands to best understand your demographic and drive hyper-targeted traffic to your site. Driving less but targeted traffic will provide a higher ROI than driving more but less targeted traffic.

4. "Email marketing is spam."

When talking to clients, it often surprises them to hear that email marketinghas been statistically proven as the digital marketing channel that provides the highest ROI. Email marketing, like all marketing strategies, can be used or abused. Unfortunately, many abuse email marketing by “spamming”. This gives email marketing a bad name. On the flip side, when an email marketing campaign is created by sending to emails that were earned with content that is truly valuable (e.g. promotions, coupons, updates) it can be an incredibly powerful digital marketing strategy.

5. “We need to be on every social platform."

Digital marketing is about finding your target demographic in the “crowd” that is the internet. Most likely, the demographic that uses LinkedIn on a daily basis probably isn’t using Pinterest the same amount of time. It’s important to survey your demographic and current customers to understand what platforms they use most frequently so you can be where they are to spark an initial relationship. You also need to factor in that social media marketing and management is a time consuming process. It's better to give 100% on two or three social platforms than it is to give it 50% on all of them.

By Dan Scalco, Founder and director of growth at Digitalux