"We blog so you don't have to!"
Just ran across this statistic from Hubspot: How much business blogging is best? To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t. The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the … Read more
Leave it to my alumni magazine (The University of Texas at Austin) to offer an insightful look into a major pet peeve of professional writers: Over-use of the word “I.” In years of editing thousands of works of film criticism, this has been perhaps my biggest pet peeve. (And yes, I’m aware that I’m breaking … Read more
We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again: The way you get people to pay attention to you in the blog world is not by writing about yourself but about writing about what people are interested in. The Intuit Small Business Blog recently published an interview with Chris Brogan, who puts it in simpler … Read more
Loved this interview with Michael Stelzner on the subject of offering web visitors free content, courtesy of the Intuit Small Business Blog (which we edit). The #1 takeaway is right here: “Your content needs to be commercial free,” Stelzner says, drawing from the core argument of his book, which has won rave reviews from all … Read more
Today’s consumers are smart, savvy, and more sophisticated than ever when it comes to buying things. The internet has made comparison shopping trivially easy — but it’s also opened the floodgates for all kinds of hazards: Spam websites, shady fly-by-night merchants, and shoddy knockoff products galore. The result is that if you’re lucky enough to … Read more
Recently I did a little math and calculated that I had written or edited some 15,000 blog posts in my career to date. That’s a mammoth number… and it’s taught me more than a few lessons about what to do and what not to do when writing a blog post for your business. Today I’m … Read more
Dale Carnegie said it best: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Attracting new customers and retaining existing ones requires more than simply pushing out marketing messages and waiting for results. Consumers are … Read more
You’ve seen them on Twitter and maybe even Facebook — they’re denoted by the pound sign, immediately followed by a term. Hashtags are tools used by Twitter users to ensure tweets are grouped with other tweets on the same subject. A tweet about issues relating to small business, for instance, might be followed by #smallbusiness. … Read more
When business owners think about social media marketing, they often focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. But many forget that YouTube is a strong marketing avenue too, providing potential for improving search engine placement and reaching new customers. Active YouTube members know that establishing a presence on the site centers on creating a YouTube channel. … Read more
If your small business is still grabbing images from basic Google searches for your website, you may be forced to pay. It’s no secret that Getty Images and other copyright holders have been sending payment demands to those illegally using photos. The news has many small business owners scrambling to find sites where they can … Read more