Blogging For Business

Feb 2, ’11 12:27 PM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories market and sell

bloggingbusiness

For many small business owners, blogging is not merely a hobby. It can be one of the most effective ways of generating exposure for a business without spending a lot on advertising. Well-written blogs will attract visitors from all around the world and people using search engines will easily find your business.

Blogging need not be a time-consuming task for a small business owner. If you set aside an hour per week to add content to your website it will soon grow as a resource. Just make sure that the content you choose to add is relevant and useful and not simply something designed to try and trick the search engines! Write for visitors, not for Google.

The great thing about corporate blogging is that it allows you to reveal more about the human side of your business. People reading your blog will get to know you and therefore feel more confident about purchasing items from you. Trust is a key factor in convincing someone to buy from a small business for the first time, and demonstrating your expertise and providing useful information is a great way to build a reputation within your industry.

Blogs are also great if you want to use search engine optimisation to help people find your business more easily via the search engines. Search engine optimisation means changing your website so that it is easier for the automated search engine to understand the content of your website and direct the right people to it. Filling your website with excellent blog content will greatly help the accuracy of the search engines.

Frequently updated websites will also be favoured by search engines. This provides even more impetus for a small business to establish a blog and keep it regularly updated. People will find your website more easily because of the topics that you are talking about, then they can comment on posts or subscribe to your blog via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so that they know when it is updated.

Blogging is also a great way to attract more visitors to your website, and increase search engine visibility, as if you provide really great content other bloggers may link to it, creating not only more direct visitors but also link backs which are valuable for search engine optimisation.

As you may have guessed, I love to blog! But more than that I think that all businesses should be blogging to increase their business clout. Have a look at this article about Who Needs A Blog – and if you need any advice just leave me a comment.

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How Important Is Business Integrity?

Oct 20, ’10 8:30 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Customer Service, be successful, market and sell

How important is business integrity to your business? Would you risk your business integrity for a headline, media coverage or to pull in a new customer? How about the people who work for you – what would they do? If you haven’t asked yourself this question, perhaps you should.

Your own personal integrity, as a small business owner, can guide your organization’s integrity; as a business owner your staff look to you in order to find the expected way to behave. However, the organizational integrity of your business is also reliant on those you have working for you – everyone from customer service to marketing and PR could, possibly, jeopardize your businesses’ integrity.

After following #CommsChat on Twitter this week (a discussion based on marketing and PR) a significant amount of the discussion came back to how important the truth was when it comes to PR and the damage it could cause to a business if their PR was unreliable, or worse still, lied to get results and headlines.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the participants in #CommsChat held the reputation and integrity of the business, whether their own or a clients’, at the top of their priority list. But, some excellent points were made regarding the impact that having an “anything for the headline” attitude can have.

Business integrity and reputation is something that is built up over many years, but can also be destroyed incredibly quickly with one bad decision or half-truth. Publicity is crucial to every business, however, as social media changes the way we work and build relationships, ‘spin’ generated to create a newsworthy story can backfire at best and, at its worst, can cause devastation for a business.

Social media creates not only a transparency to the way we all do business, but also a means for reputation to be devastated in mere hours. Reputation, integrity and honesty are more important in business than ever before.

So, how can you gain publicity without the spin? Create a newsworthy story; help a charity, run a training course or release a great new product. As well a making it more important than ever to ensure our PR campaigns are transparent, social media also means that we no longer need headline grabbing stories to secure publicity – get people talking about your business on social media and the results will surprise you.

Building relationships on integrity, trust and reputation and instill a corporate integrity throughout your business to ensure your employees do the same is vital and the rise of social media is making this both more important, and easier, than ever before.

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The Best Way To Grow A Business

Sep 8, ’10 7:30 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories How to ..., market and sell, start-up in business

Word of mouth

No matter what the size of your business, growth is what is important. Whether you want to expand locally, nationally or even internationally, growth is the only means to do so. But what is the best way to promote business growth?

Last month T-Mobile, as part of their ‘Business Sense’ campaign, carried out a survey on business growth, via the social networking site, Linked In. On of the polls carried out asked participants what they feel is the most important factor in driving business growth.

Overall, 64% of participants felt that word of mouth was the most important factor for driving business growth, with advertising coming second with 21% and a great website third with just 14% of the votes.

As the poll was specifically asking about the initial start up period, it is easy to see why the percentage was so high; people buy from people so word of mouth is a great way to grow your business.

In fact, when the data was segmented in to company size it became apparent that this figure rose to 88% of enterprises and 83% of large businesses that felt word of mouth was crucial to business expansion.

I am a great believer at looking and learning from big businesses in order to help succeed as a small business; and in this case I believe the big businesses have it spot on – word of mouth is absolutely vital to successfully grow a business. Although I would place significantly more emphasis on the importance of a great website; no matter how much people talk about your company and people visit your website, if your website is difficult to navigate or hard to read visitors simply won’t convert to customers.

Word of mouth is a significantly more successful marketing tool than advertising; not only that but it is also cost-effective; which is a necessity for business start-ups. Word of mouth best comes from existing customers; excellent customers service and products will turn customers in to fans who will talk about your business to their friends, family and business network.

Make sure that your customer service is up to scratch, though. Just as word of mouth can have a tremendously positive effect on your business, if something goes wrong it can be devastating. Therefore, always ensure you listen to disheartened customers and deal with their problems to the best of your ability – and where possible turn a negative in to a positive.

Always give your customers the chance to leave testimonials about your business; encourage users to visit your Facebook Business Page or to Tweet you about their dealings with your company. Potential customers trust other customers, and many turn to Social Media to engage with previous users of services. Make sure your business is there!

The Business Sense survey is not only interesting, but also gives small businesses an advantage of big businesses. More often than not there is so much red tape to negotiate that big businesses find it difficult to achieve the level of customer interaction necessary to generate word of mouth around their businesses.

So, in a world where the opportunities were once all in the hands of the big business, now, the most beneficial business growth tool is at the feet of the small business – grab it with both hands and grow your business.

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The Most Influential Small Business Twitter List

Oct 13, ’09 11:20 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Marketing/PR, market and sell

If you are interested to follow small business twitter bloggers, here is a great list for you and it takes only one ‘click’ to follow them all.

The nice thing about this list is, that I know most of the included bloggers for years – so I can promise you won’t be disappointed, if you are after business tweets – after all ‘yours truly‘ is included too.

Twitter is an essential small business marketing, customer care and business networking tool – you need to be on it today.

This list was put together by @trustesmallbiz – thanks for that guys.

Sign up and then follow these great business tweeters @ tweepml.org

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Social Networking is the New Sales & Outsourcing for Small Business.

Dec 9, ’08 11:05 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Blogging, Marketing/PR, Outsourcing, Sales, market and sell, outsource effectively, use online IT

Using social networking sites for small business is as essential as being able to write an invoice in todays largely online based economy. It will help you to extent your business network and provide for two important business functions all at the same time:

Outsourcing – by networking you will get to know peoples skills, see their previous work, work with them on a per project basis and with that timeshare professionals;
Sales & Marketing – by networking you will find new clients, offer advice, become a trusted business partner and make money.

You always need to take care when doing business online, but you can get references from others, see their work and work out a payment plan, based on completion stages of the project.

Here are the social networking tools I use the most:

LinkedIn – it’s a business social network with over 30 million users.
twitter – is about micro-blogging and has over 2.5 million users.

I also use facebook, but have not made much off it so far. I only have limited time, so I focus on the best social networks for me.

Why not sign up today and join me and millions of others in the new and fast developing social networking business environment. –ST.

UPDATE 2008-12-10: If you want some proof have a look at this on enterprisenation.com – a social network.

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Small Business Lists – 14 Tests for Mailing List Sales

Jun 30, ’08 4:40 PM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Business Checklists, grow your business, market and sell

If you are not sure whether your product is appropriate for selling on a mailing list, here are some useful criteria to check:

Easy to Understand – The value of purchasing your product is immediately clear
Unique – It is unlike anything else on the market
New – It has only recently been released and needs exposure
Problem Solving – It has a new solution to an everyday problem
Simplistic – It only has one main function and solves the problem entirely
Aesthetically Pleasing – It is nice to look at and will display well in catalogues
Durable – It will not be easily damaged during shipping
Year-round Appeal – It is not a seasonal product with limited appeal
Safe – There is no foreseeable danger to consumers
Wide Appeal – There is a sizeable target market for the product
Quickly Manufactured- There is no long production process involved
Affordable – Sub $100 products sell best in catalogues
Mailing – Standard size products are easiest to ship in bulk
Patented – You need to have some sort of copyright to protect your idea

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Don't Sell. Solve a Problem.

Feb 14, ’08 11:11 PM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Customer Service, Sales, market and sell

A few days ago I wrote a post about listening to your customers before you sell your product or service. You may be able to make someone buy your product/service once, but for your customers to come back for more you need to do more.

No matter how good your are at selling, no matter how smooth, slick and high-pressure you are, the fact remains you can’t make someone buy. The only way is to solve peoples problems. Which problem does your product and/or service solve?

Easy-to-run online accounting software;
do the job in half the time;
lose weight while you sleep;
easy-to-prepare gourmet meals;
cut overheads.

You get the picture – the best way to sell is to solve. This will tell you that bombarding clients with facts about megabytes, speed, number of cylinders and so on, is not what is needed. Find out what problem your customer has, then talk about the benefits and solutions your product/service offers for the problem – that will get you a sale.

If solving is selling, what are your solutions? Let me know. ST.

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Don't charge by the hour!

Feb 12, ’08 2:32 PM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Marketing/PR, grow your business, market and sell

It always amazes me to see how many businesses still charge by the hour – it is a business killer. How do you like it if someone comes to quote for a job and then tells you he/she is charging you by the hour. You will have all or at least some of the following thoughts:

How many hours will it take, can I afford this?
I don’t know this person, I don’t know how good he/she is at what they do?
Great, I am taking all the risk here, he/she can take as long as they want and I’ll have to pay?

The truth is that charging by the hour is terribly customer unfriendly and is therefor very bad for your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants.

By charging by the hour you are creating so many barriers to doing business that your chances of securing the order is very small, if you are competing with someone who offers fixed pricing you have virtually no chance of getting the order. So if you work in an industry that charges by the hour and you need more work you know what to do.

In my experience you can charge more, if you charge a fixed fee and get organized. I believe that more accountants and solicitors loose work because they charge by the hour, the client relationship sours and then break down altogether.

Get rid of your timesheet – fix prices and bill your clients upfront – your customers will love you. ST.

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Does your small business make your customers feel good?

Nov 28, ’07 9:51 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Marketing/PR, Sales, Small Business / SOHO, be successful, market and sell

Have you ever wondered why people buy products and services from you or anyone else for that matter? Why do people love an iPod, why do they buy a Rolex watch? The reason is always the same, it makes them feel good. It helps people to feel calm and secure, or superior – these feelings are deeply satisfying to all of us.

Is that the only motivation why people buy, I don’t think so. The other reason is to avoid feeling bad. Feeling bad may have to do with feeling pain, losing money, loosing business, being hassled, feeling guilty and so on.

Bottom line? If your product and service does not do one of the two, you may have a problem. ST.

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Benefits, Not Features is what sells!

Nov 20, ’07 6:58 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Marketing/PR, Sales, be successful, market and sell

Many worries in a small business are centered about sales and the need to earn money in order to pay for over-heads like rent, wages and so on. Especially in a technology driven company this can often be a problem. Often you try to sell to your clients as if they are industry insiders who understand exactly what you are talking about. While in reality they are customers and don’t know what makes this widget so special.

You need to sell the benefits of the widget, that is what customers want, benefits. Know who you are talking to, if you are talking to an industry insider, tell him all the technical details, because he understands enough of the technology to understand the details, and then work out the benefits for himself/herself. If you are talking to a customer who wants to use your service or product to gain a benefit from using you, let him/her know what the benefit is.

One word about not being able to show a benefit, I would openly say to my client that there is no benefit from using our product, you may not get a sale, but you will get someone who will respect you and come back, because he/she trusts you. You may also get referrals this way.

By the way, woman are far more benefit talk driven than men. Or as my wife will say to me and my son, talking about the latest gadget, stop talking “klingon” (the star trek species)! ST.

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