14 Reasons why your small business needs a blog

In this age of content marketing and smart devices, it goes without saying that your small business needs a blog. Even you are directly not selling online, an interesting blog page will have a positive effect on your customers and website visitors, who will definitely want to know more about you. It thus attracts traffic and builds authority. Here are the various reasons why you need to blog regularly.

Direct Communication Channel: This is a direct means of communication between you and customers. It enables you to get in touch on a more personal level. Small business blogs help you to exchange views and discuss the trends in your particular field. It enables the customers to look up to you as a source of valuable industry-specific information.

SEO Friendly: Business blogs always attract a good SEO ranking. A well-written blog provides valuable content. As we are aware, search engine bots are always looking for fresh content to crawl. A website with fresh and unadulterated content is a favourite with Google and other top search engines, who will obviously elevate its page rank.

User-friendly: Having a blog doesn’t require you to have programming or designing skills. You may choose user-friendly platforms like WordPress and get the images from free sites like Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr Commons, PDPhoto.org, Publicdomainpictures.net, Free Stock Photos and Good Free Photos.

More Customers: According to a survey, it has been found that more than 50% of businesses that have a blog get more customers. In this era of online marketing, people do not watch self-aggrandising advertisements and buy their products right away. They will check out if the business they are dealing with, is online, in the first place. They will also trust a website which has a blog displaying the company’s expertise in their respective field, before trusting them enough to do business.

Share your Expertise: A blog gives you a voice which will be heard by thousands, if not millions. People will seek your opinion as they will begin to regard you as an expert in your respective field.

Blog is a two way conversation: Blog c comments by your readers, result in a to and fro exchange of thoughts leading to a healthy conversation. You can thus invite users for giving their insights regarding a trending topic and see the diverse view and angles to that particular topic. You may thus get to know how people’s views differ from point to point regarding the same topic.

Creativity and Entertaining: Blogging need not be a chore. It can be something you look forward to doing regularly. Your love for blogging can make your blog entertaining and much sought after by your subscribers and daily website visitors. And your blog doesn’t have to be serious; a dash of humour when added appropriately can be like an icing on the cake.

Expand your Horizons: When you have a blog to write, you need to seek out new information regarding current affairs, and trends in your chosen field. As you go about your daily life you may get inspiration from movies, talking to friends, or taking a stroll around the block; you need to jot them in your notepad.

Blog and Content Marketing: Having a blog helps you in making a content marketing strategy. Accordingly you may plan your blog posts, as part of a strategy. You may thus have a blog, to get you business leads as well by capturing interested subscribers by means of a form, offering them value, giving freebies and finally putting up an irresistible offer!

Free Publicity: Business blogs, along with social media are the best way to advertise your products or services. Many people can get to know about you. In fact many bloggers are interviewed by the press, which gets free publicity.

Confidence and Rapport: A blog builds confidence and rapport between you and your subscribers. Your subscribers will begin to trust you and your opinions.

Stay on top: A blog helps you to stay on top. Search engines will obviously keep you on top of their results and you will definitely get more web visitors than your competitors who don’t blog like you do.

In this video, “The Introduction to blogging” Eli the Computer Guy, talks about why we need to blog and what are the advantages.

On his YouTube Channel, Eli the Computer Guy provides in depth information about IT as a profession. All his videos, are created with an eye towards ROI, and TCO.

Let the world know about you: Your small business blogs can also let the world know about your company, and the kind of business you are into. You may also let them know about the key persons who run the company and the staff who are the life-blood of the company. You may let them know what happens behind the scenes, through your blog pictures.

Analytics: Last but not the least, you will get to know more about your visitors through the blog analytics. This will help you know what kind of postings draw the majority of the audience, and you may use this knowledge to your best advantage.

It is thus very important for any business to have a blog, which is up and running. Make sure you are consistent in your postings so that your followers know when to expect your next blog and eagerly await the same.

The Secret of Successful Facebook Advertising for your Local Business

When it comes to successfully marketing your local business, Facebook is the best bet. It is also easier to advertise on Facebook than through any other medium. You don’t even have to worry about the audience and how to get them; that’s because the audience is already classified according to your specifications. Once you specify your geographical location, age group, gender and language, much of your work is already done. If you are a local business, much of the targeting is done for you, including the exact placement of the ads, whether it is a mobile or desktop; it is pretty easy and catered to your local requirements.

Reach Out to your Specific AudienceWhen you place Facebook ads, let it mention the name of your city. This way, people reading this ad will immediately notice that it is meant for them in the first place. For e.g., if your ad title is “Web Design Services in Melbourne”, then it will have a greater impact on your target audience, who will then realize the Facebook ads are meant for them and that you are based in the same town. Boost Post OptionWhen you choose to boost your post, you may start as little as $5. Select ‘people you choose through targeting’ and choose your city as well as the age group of your audience. You may choose to boost different kinds of posts. If you are into Facebook marketing, you may promote your blog. If you are a restaurant, then you may promote your new menu or restaurant pictures.

Create an EventAnother way to attract people is through an event. If you are dealer of cars, then have a ‘Weekend Test Drive Extravaganza’ planned on a weekend. Advertise this event and drive traffic to your social media page, as well as your website. If you are a restaurant, you may perhaps arrange for a special ‘Recipe Class with a Celebrity Chef’, and create an event on Facebook. Offer a DiscountIf you are a restaurant, then you may offer a happy hour discount to boost sales. If you have a clothing store, you may offer a buy 2 get 2 offer. The kind of offer will depend on the type of business. Value Added Content for Local MarketAlways provide content which caters to the local market. If you are a restaurant, you may write blogs about different cuisines or ‘Special items’ on your menu. If you are a website designer, you may write blogs about ‘Web-design trends & techniques’. Giving value added content will help you gain credibility as an expert in your particular field. If you are a martial arts expert, you may post a video of everyday self-defence techniques. Likewise, if you are a yoga expert, you may post a yoga routine to start the day. So instead of asking people to buy your services all the time, you can shift gears and provide them what they want, and that is – providing value via blogs or videos. Darrel Wilson is a WordPress expert, who has dedicated his time to help others learn how to create their own business’s and start something on their own. Here he talks in detail about “How to use Facebook Ads for beginners”. It’s a must see video for small business owners who want to learn and master Facebook ads. This is how you market your products to your target audience. If you are a local business, make sure to mention the name of your city in your offer. Last but not the least, make sure that your offer is enticing enough for people to click through it. Thus, Facebook marketing has the potential to take your small business to the next level.

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9 Content Marketing Ideas for Success!

Marketing has evolved over the years, and attempts to woo future customers with traditional self-praising ads are just not adequate. Customers want to know more about your product, interact with you, and see if they are getting value. It is only then, they will become advocates of your brand and buy your products and services. Thus, content marketing is a means of achieving this trust and building a long lasting relationship.

Make a top 20 list

You can start off by making a ‘Top-20’ listing; search the web for top Bloggers, Tweeters and Instagram influencers, for your particular field. You can provide detailed information about these 20 people and what is so special about them. Let the audience know why you are so interested in their blog. Be genuine and make it interesting. You may also tag these influencers, in your postings. Some of these influencers may even re-tweet you, thus giving a lot of traffic back to your website and even improving its SEO value.

Answer industry specific questions

Content writing is all about providing value. People are always on the lookout for valuable information. You can answer various doubts pertaining to your industry via forums like Quora as well as your own blog. People will thus, get to know you by reading your answers and this helps you gain the reputation of being an expert in your chosen field.

Let the world know your Team

Interview your own team member. Let the audience know what an average day in the office, feels like. Talk about their aspirations, dreams, life and current affairs. Your fans and visitors on social media, as well as your blog, will realize that they are not dealing with machines, but human beings.

Reveal your new products (sneak peek)

Reveal your new products to your audience first! They will feel special by your gesture and love to be the first ones to start the buzz.

Make a tutorial video about your product

Make a video about how your product is used. Not every product needs a tutorial for usage instructions, as people will usually be familiar with them. However, if it is a new and revolutionary product, about to take the market by storm, it doesn’t hurt to show the world how it actually works. And the video will definitely generate a buzz!

Have a 50% OFF sale

Nothing sounds dearer to the human ears than hearing someone say “FREE” OR “50% off”. So capitalize on these magical words, and announce a 50% sale. Also make sure it is for not more than 3 days; create a sense of urgency! Make a nice graphic, put it on your website and watch the magic happen!

Hold a contest

Outside of a 50% sale, the other word which generates an equal amount of interest is “Contest”. Plan a contest for your fans. It may be as simple as taking a ‘Selfie’ with your product and posting it on social media. You may use the services of Gleam, in order to increase the chance of your contest being shared and becoming viral.

Participate at an event and write about it

People love to hear valuable tips as well as experiences of others in the same field; you may include such topics to make your content writing all the more interesting. For example, if you were at a trade show, you may re-collect your experiences there and write a blog about the whole trade show participation. You may even compose a point wise checklist of the “Do’s and don’ts about trade show participation”.

Share the inspiring story of how you became an entrepreneur

People crave for inspiration, and if it is coming from people of their own field – then there is nothing like it! Share your story and tell the audience about what inspired you to start off on your own. Tell them about the difficulties you faced and how you overcame them to setup your own business. Let them know, what it takes for a business to succeed.

These are the different ways in which you can use content marketing to provide value as well as market your products and services.

How to make your Blog more Search Engine Friendly

A webpage is not visible to the world wide web unless it is crawled by the search engine bots. The top search engine Google approximately crawls 40 billion web pages and keeps them cached. These pages are ranked in order of their relevance and quality. In order to gain a high ranking from google, websites need to make sure that SEO optimisation is done in the right way and the below mistakes are avoided.

Absence of a Sitemap

A sitemap tells the search bots where to crawl. Having a searchmap saves time, infact it makes its job ten-times faster! If there is no site map, the search bot crawls all possible places and even those parts of the site which may contain duplicate content. Unless these pages are marked as ‘ no-follow’, Google crawls the duplicate content and marks it as bad links – which is not good for SEO optimisation.

It is therefore very much necessary to have a site map for search engine submission. A site-map tells Yahoo, Ask, Bing, Google and other search engines, how to crawl your website in the first place. You need to setup Google’s Webmaster Tools and Search Console so that you will be aware of what’s happening when Google crawls your website, and rectify errors if any. For best results, make sure that search engine submission has been done for all the popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

Messed-up Code

Make sure that the text to program-code ratio is 50-50. If not, it will be perceived by searchengines as spam. If you are writing the content, then make sure you speak to the developer to make sure that elaborate content is written on all required pages. Make sure that the content reflects the keywords in the right way. If there is too much code and very little text, then it is likely to be perceived as spam and excluded by google in its quest for quality content.

Be active on social media

You need to make the best use of social media. Social media updates get indexed immediately, although they disappear soon as well. Some social media updates reach viral status; these have a tendency to stay-on depending on the degree of their viral status.

Good Backlinks

You also need to make sure that our blog receives links from highly ranked sites. Websites with a high Domain Authority (D.A.) rating, need to link to your site. It can be done by submitting articles on reputed websites with high PR ratings.

You also need to submit your links to directories, but you must be very selective at that. Some directories are categorized as bad, and you don’t want to be associated with them; it is not a good idea to either ‘link to’ or get links from those sites.

Embrace Social Media

It is always a good idea to create social media profiles across channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,YouTube, Pinterest and Google plus. Posting regular updates gives search engines something to crawl about, and hence keep you on top of their results.

Social media is not exactly a sales generator, however when you search for a company, its social media profiles are also shown in the results. This means that although they don’t directly affect the Google ranking, they definitely appear in the search results and hence are a welcome source of traffic.

Social media also helps you to generate a one-to-one relationship with your online audience. They will get to know more about your product and services before trying them first hand. Online reviews on social media, help customers take better decisions before buying your services.

Link to Previous Content

Give references to previously written articles via hyperlinks. This act of linking to your previously written blogs increases your authority on the subject. Interlinking these blogs is also good for SEO. You can also channel traffic from one blog to another, thus increasing the visit-length, which again is good for SEO.

Following the above SEO tips, will keep you in good terms with search engine bots and get your website visible on the top of search engine results.

How to Get more Followers on Instagram

Creating a good number of followers in Instagram requires patience, consistency and quality content. Then you can reap the benefits of the fastest growing social network.

Having created an account on Instagram, one of the fastest growing and popular photo sharing social networks is a great feeling; especially when you realize that it is a great marketing channel with 5 million active Australian users. However, shortly after making your first posting, you may realize that your reach is limited. That is because you don’t have any Instagram followers in the first place. So, here are a few techniques to get them.

Choose a Theme for your photos

If you are a sports photographer, you may choose the best photos you have clicked in your chosen sport. You can have a hashtag for yourself where you post them. People, who follow you, will come to expect the best sports pictures from you every day; so don’t experiment by posting your personal photos once in a while. However, you could definitely post photos depicting you at work. That way, your Instagram followers will know how your company goes about its daily work, and the process involved.

Have a Great Profile

When people come across your profile on Instagram, they will immediately make a decision based on its look and feel. So make sure that your profile looks impressive; include your best photos and delete the bad ones. Pick 20-25 of your best photos to go with your profile; it’s all about quality and not quantity.

Put on your Best!

Always go back and delete the photos which look outdated, or meaningless. Make it a point, to post only your best photos on Instagram. You don’t want to lose your audience just because of a couple of randomly clicked snaps.

Use Existing Channels

In order to get your first set of 50-100 followers, you may start with existing channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You may also email all your address book contacts about your new Instagram account and the kind of photos to expect in their feed.

Connect with other Instagram Users

Once you have connected with your known contacts, it is time to connect with the rest of the world. Do not resort to short-cuts and get cheap followers for a price. It is better to live with ’10 persons you now, rather than be with 100,000 strangers, whom you don’t know. It is also futile to have 20 hashtags embedded in your tweet in order to attract different audiences.

However, you can check out the pictures posted by other Instagram users and like and comment on them. It must contain sincere appreciation. Show genuine interest and tell them what exactly you liked in their design or picture posts. Chances are that they will check out your profile and if appropriate, they will follow you in return.

Regular Engagement : the key to getting more followers on Instagram

Once you have a list of followers, you must keep them engaged. Keep posting photos regularly. Always remember that quality takes precedence over quantity. If you get some positive comments or even likes, take a note of it and remember to thank you.

Getting more followers on Instagram is all about quality and engagement; there are no shortcuts. Once that is achieved, you are ready to move onto the next step and that is Instagram marketing.