Small Business News

Author: John Rampton

Content marketing is one of the primary methods I use to grow my business. But constantly coming up with original content ideas can be a serious challenge.

Any new content I produce needs to meet a number of criteria. It needs to:

Offer a new or different perspective to the topic

Have a great headline that entices clicks

Cover a topic that my audience actually wants to know about

Do I hit the mark with every single article I write? No. But I have figured out some strategies that help me find great topics and create killer headlines, more often than not.

 

Read More at entrepreneur.com

Author: Elizabeth Maness

Can you keep a secret?

I think we should kick SEO to the curb.

With that in mind, there’s just one small catch. SEO is a constantly moving target, a field that changes so regularly that if you don’t have the time to keep up with it, the strategies you took the time to learn a year or a month ago could actually be hurting you if you haven’t stayed current in the field.

But here’s the thing – when it comes to creating content that truly goes viral, it’s not about the SEO at all. It’s not about keywords.

 

Read More at assistsocialmedia.com

Author: Dorie Clark

an hour ago

Don’t know what product or service you should be selling? That’s actually fine, says Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of the new book Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses.

“In most cases [early on], you don’t have the product or service right, anyway,” he says.

Instead, he recommends that entrepreneurs “flip the model on its head” and build an audience first, and only then figure out what to sell them.

 

Read More at entrepreneur.com

Author: Jennifer Grazel

In getting their messages in front of their target audience, financial services marketers face many challenges: ranging to government regulation to the rise of fintech to increased customer expectations. These challenges, however, haven’t stopped financial services marketers from embracing content marketing — and specifically content marketing on LinkedIn.

Many leading financial services marketers are using the LinkedIn platform to reach their audiences. Introducing “The Content Marketing 50: Financial Services Edition.” In this infographic, we’ve identified the 50 most effective financial services brands when it comes to using the LinkedIn platform to engage, educate, and inspire their target audience.

 

Read More at business.linkedin.com

Author: digitalmarketinginstitute.com

Ireland’s small businesses have far lower digital skills than other organisations, according to our recently published Digital Skills Report. We tested the skills of 622 marketers with a set of 52 questions across the core digital marketing disciplines of SEO, PPC, Email, Display, Social, Mobile and Analytics. The result? Small businesses scored a shocking 25% lower than medium-sized businesses and 22% lower than start-ups.

It makes sense: small business have less staff, fewer resources and often lower budgets.

 

Read More at digitalmarketinginstitute.com