What if, I told you that you could boost your business growth by making one simple change?

For most people, that sounds too good to be true. Trust me on this. The strategy is very simple and not something that’s exactly ground breaking or a never-before-revealed strategy.

The simple trick that would remove the bottleneck for business growth is- let go of the mentality that you have to do everything yourself.

This is applicable to small business owners in particular.

Why You Need to Let Go of the DIY Mentality

Why do you think companies have different departments- finance, marketing, sales, procurement and so on? Why do they even have marketing and sales as two different entities? After all, can’t marketers sell without the need of a sales team?

It so happens that everyone has their own set of skills. And it’s best to let people exercise their skills in a way that produces maximum ROI. Imagine what would happen if you ask the CEO to do marketing, payroll, people management, and so on?

If it’s a very small company, some people might be able to do it. But it most cases, it would turn out to be a complete disaster.

Your role, as a business owner, is to ensure that your company generates profits and provide a product or service that is highly valuable for your customers. Would you spend time making your product or service better or would you want to spend that time micro managing others or even doing all the menial stuff yourself?

The answer is obvious- you should focus on stuff that adds value to your business. And outsource the stuff that you don’t have expertise in.

The Biggest Mistake Business Owners Make

I have had several small business owners come to me asking for advice on how to do keyword research, build links, do content marketing, design websites, etc when they also have a business to run.

Do you see the problem here?

Your focus shifts from your core competency to something you have no expertise in.

And the biggest reason small business owners have for trying to do it all by themselves? Hiring people is too costly and I will be better off doing it myself.

If you really can pull it off, then good. However, most business owners end up with half-baked knowledge of everything and wasting months of their time with nothing to show for their efforts.

Can you relate to that? If yes, you should immediately stop trying to be jack-of-all-trades. Accept that fact that you can’t do everything on your own and need help.

How do I calculate the ROI of Hiring Someone Else?

It’s pretty simple- really. Here is what you need to do. Try to answer the questions below

1. How much is the lifetime value of your customer? (Lifetime value is the total revenue you can generate from one single customer as long as they are with you)
2. What is the current conversion rate? (If 100 people visit your site and 2 people take the desired action, then conversion rate is 2%. If 50 people visit and 10 people take the desired action, then the conversion rate is 20%)
3. How much more business can the consultant you hire bring you? (If you are looking for someone to do SEO, then factor the increase in visits to your site and multiply it with the average lifetime value of customer. If it’s less than what you are paying for the consultant, that’s positive ROI)
4. If you are hiring someone to improve your conversion rates, what conversion rates will they produce? Is the revenue you are going to generate from the increased conversions more than what you need to pay them?

ROI= [(Lifetime Value of Customer*Number of New Visitors*Conversion Rate)- (Cost of Hiring Consultant)]/[Total Amount Invested]*100

Sometimes the value cannot be measured objectively. The reason being, you’ll be getting much more value than simple increase in sales. Is the consultant going to help you draft a content strategy? Will he be writing articles on your blog on your behalf? Is he going to hand hold you throughout the process and help you learn along the way?

Common Pitfalls While Hiring Consultants

#1: Setting the wrong expectations

It’s great if someone can help you increase your bottom-line. However, are you expecting someone to revive your almost bankrupt business and turn it into the next Apple?

You have to set the right expectations- Tell the consultant or the agency what exactly you are looking to achieve by hiring them. Is it higher search engine traffic, better conversions, overall guidance, or something else?

#2: Constantly changing requirements

If you are not a developer, and you hire a technical person to set up your website, it’s common for you to misjudge the time and effort the other person has to put in to set it up. I have had clients who started with turnkey templates and kept requesting for tweaks until the site turns into a completely new one (not part of the original contract).

Do yourself and your contractor a favor. Don’t change your requirements midway or keep requesting additional “favors”. If you genuinely want to test better ideas, be ready to pay extra for the additional effort put in by the person whom you hire.

You need to aim for a healthy business relationship as you can never know who’ll come in handy, and when! I have referred web design clients to my clients who have hired me for SEO. That’s a win-win scenario because they reciprocate the favor.

#3: Not having a backup plan

It’s great to take the help of someone experienced. However, there are many cases where things can go wrong or might not work as expected.

A couple of times, I have hired developers for my projects and they went missing in the middle of the project or they couldn’t deliver what they promised.

If I had bet all my stakes on that single contractor, my whole project would have been ruined.

Hired someone to do SEO on your website? What if the SEO project did not give you the expected returns? It might be because of the consultants fault or might be because of some other factors that couldn’t have been helped.

Always have a backup plan as to what you will do should this not work out.

#4: Going cheap (Higher price does not equate to better results either)

As a business owner, you’d want to keep the costs low.

There is a famous quote in the interwebs “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. While it’s not always true that low cost means less quality, most of the time, when you try to cut costs, you end up paying more in the long run.

I had a client who used to pay 200$/month to his previous SEO person. When I heard 200$ per month, I was quite surprised, especially when my client told, his rankings has been good. Come Google algorithm update, it didn’t take much time for my client sites rankings to take a deep sea dive.

The damage was too much that using the same domain and filing a reconsideration request was simply not worth the time and effort. And we started off with a new domain name.

Not all businesses can afford to change domain names once they feel the heat of spam links (result of cheap SEO). Would you want to take such risks for your business?

That being said, there is no guarantee that agencies who charge an arm and a leg would do a good job either. I know agencies who charge thousands of dollars for something which would hardly take an hour to do and they don’t provide stunning results either (However, the usually don’t do black hat stuff which might get your site in trouble in the future).

Here are some aspects of marketing you should get expert opinion for

1. Link building
2. Content strategy
3. Pay Per Click Marketing
4. Technical SEO issues (Hire someone to do a SEO audit for your site)
5. Conversion optimization
6. Website development and maintanance
7. Social media strategy
8. Email marketing strategy

Here are some aspects of marketing you can do yourself

1. Keyword research
2. Blogging
3. On page SEO
4. Social media activities
5. Customer support
6. Email creation and follow-ups

Over to You:

Do you do everything yourself or do you outsource your business tasks? Let me know via comments your experience with hiring external help to grow your business.

What is the most important part of a business?

Is it the product? The employees? The business plan?

Any one of these could be the right answer, but the answer that should pop into your head first is the customer. It’s the age-old adage, “The customer is always right.” But, in this case, the customer is always seeking information, and if they find your website has the best information, you’ve got a sale and a customer that will keep coming back when they need your service. The customer is what makes your business continue to operate. They keep you in business, and without customers, you’ll have no product, you’ll have no employees, and you’ll have no business plan.

So how is it that we get and keep customers?

In the world we live in today, in a world that is dominated by the Internet and where everyone seems to be linked into the World Wide Web, anyone can sell anything at any time, whenever they want. So how do you know whom to trust? How do you know that the company you are about to use is the right one?

Marketing is not like it was in the days of Mad Men. Those rules don’t apply when it comes to the Internet. Mass marketing might work for larger corporations, but for small businesses, it’s all about targeted marketing. This is where 80/20 rule comes into play (the theory that 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers). This is where the content of your website (articles, blogs, video, podcasts, etc.) comes into play.

Having a website is not the endgame when it comes to content marketing. Having content is not the endgame when it comes to content marketing. These are good starting points, but the key to a building trust with a customer base is having great content. You want the customers to come to your website because they know they will either a) learn something new or b) get the information they are looking for.

The reality is that people are browsing the web for information more than ever. When people do a Google search, wouldn’t you like them to find your website, to find the information you’ve put out there for them to find? When people find your site with the information they are looking for, they see you as a leader in that line of thought. You want to answer the questions they didn’t know they needed the answer to.

As David Meerman Scott says in his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR, “Content brands an organization as a thought leader”.

He also says, “Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through content, and smart marketers now think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.”

Selling products will happen naturally when you have customers that trust you to be a source of information. So now we’ll take a few minutes to show how to get your content into the hands of the people that are looking.

Articles and Blogs

Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are great ways to get your content to a lot of people, fast. By putting you a link to your new article or blog post on Facebook and Twitter, you know that your content is going to reach the people that are interested; after all, they are following you for a reason.

As was said before, people search Google all the time to find the information they are looking for. The way to make sure your new article or blog is found at the top of Google is to make your content keyword-rich. This should be supported by a keyword-rich website. While this may take a little SEO knowledge, it is worth it in the long run to make sure you are creating something that is not only friendly to your reader and customer, but also to Google’s little engine bots.

And also, with any great article or blog post, other people will link to it. Once your article or blog post goes live, try pitching it to other blogs in hopes that they will reference it or link back to it on their website. This helps to build credibility.

Video and Podcasts

Many companies are now using regular podcasts (radio-like audio files) and video posts to get their information into the hands of their customers. Don’t be confused by the name “podcast” – anyone can subscribe to a feed and listen, whether they have an iPod or not.

Podcasts and videos are a great way for companies to put a face with the brand. For podcasts, you can inject them into appropriate articles on your site, place them on iTunes for anyone to subscribe to, promote over social platforms, or dedicate a new page on your site specifically for the audio. Again, though, when naming the files, be sure that everything is keyword-rich. Google will love it.

Videos are very similar. You can put them in relevant articles, promote them over social platforms, or dedicate a page on your site for videos. Rather than post them to iTunes, though, you can set up your own YouTube channel and post them there.

Never forget that quality is so important when it comes to the content on your website. Quality brings in customers and providing quality content on a regular basis will garner trust with the customer base. When you’ve got good information, you don’t need to advertise your products within the content of your website. The content itself, the website as a whole becomes the advertisement for your brand, your products, and your image.

Lance Trebesch is the CEO of TicketPrinting.com & Ticket River which offers a variety of event products and ticketing services. After nineteen years of Silicon Valley experience, Lance found the key to happiness is helping customers worldwide beautify and monetize their events with brilliant print products and event services. Listening to his customers and learning about how they plan their events – ranging from concerts to fundraisers has helped him gain insight and expertise on how to host a successful event that he is always eager to share.

If there is one thing small business owners get frustrated when it comes to SEO is- ranking their business websites for their desired keywords.

And, to rank websites, you still need one thing.

Links; lot of high quality links.

So, for all you DIY small business owners out there, here is a detailed guide to aid you in your link building efforts.

How to Develop the Mind-set of a Link builder?

Before you dive into the link building opportunities, it’s crucial that you get into the shoes of a link builder and develop a link building mind-set.

#1: Accept Link Building is Hard

Yep.

It’s hard; Very hard.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it quickly and would be ranking for all the keywords they want to rank for.

This is precisely why SEO consultants charge an arm and a leg to get your rankings up.

The first step to approaching your link campaign is to accept the reality and be ready to fight the odds.

#2: You Should Have a Strategy

Imagine you want to cook a pie.

Unless you get the right ingredients in the right proportions, you are not going to make an awesome tasting pie.

Similarly, link building needs to be planned and executed. You need to know what you are aiming for; quantitatively as well as qualitatively.

#3: Provide Value to Build Links

Just because you have a website, people are not going to link to you.

You need to provide immense value for someone to link to you. Make it a win-win situation for people and you have a website that attracts tons of links.

#4: Get Your SEO Basics Right

Unless you have your search engine optimization foundation right, you are not going to achieve tremendous success with your link building efforts.

Ensure that your foundations are strong before you start to build links.

#5: Stay Up-to-Date

With Google releasing updates like Panda and Penguin (and more to come), you need to be on top of your link building game to achieve SEO success.

There are always some new link building strategy that works tremendously well; until Google finds people starts abusing the opportunity and de-valuing such links (Article directories, profile links, directory links, etc. are very good examples).

#6: Focus on Building Relationships

Your main focus, when you reach out to other website owners, should be to build a long lasting relationship which could turn out to be lucrative link opportunities.

Forget about quick wins. You could score a quick link by commenting on a website once and forgetting about it. However, if you are a valuable contributor who regularly contributes to the community, chances of the blog owner linking to you, when you reach out to them, is high.

Right- Now we can move on to the interesting part- securing links and link opportunities out there.

 33 Ways to Build Links to Your Small Business Website

#1: Your Own Website- Internal Links

I am amazed at the fact that most people simply ignore internal links when it comes to link building.

All other sorts of link building are not directly under your control. However, when it comes to your business website, you are in total control. You decide which page links to which other page and what anchor text you should be using.

In no other link opportunity do you get such level of control.

Start identifying key pages on your own website and start interlinking them. Optimizing navigation bar, sidebars, and footers are easy places to start with.

Even though internal links do not carry the same level of authority as external links, you can still optimize them and rank pages for low competition keywords solely by improving internal linking and perfecting on page SEO.

#2: Local Business Profiles

These are easy wins.

You can create profiles for your business on a variety of websites online.

The beauty of these profiles, in addition to the fact that they send customers your way is, the link juice they provide.

With Google integrating local results very much into their search results, some of these business profiles such as in Google+ page is becoming mandatory.

Here is a list of sites where you can create profiles/listings for your business: source.

#3: Blogging & Content Marketing

I am a huge fan of content marketing (otherwise why would I dedicate my whole blog to the topic?)

Not only is content marketing helpful in building trust, it also helps gather links naturally.

If you write good content for your business blog, chances of users picking it up and linking to it are huge.

And it’s far easier to get links to an article on your website that talks about “top 10 toy gifting ideas” than to get links to your toy e-commerce website.

An added benefit to blogging is that the more content you create, the higher the number of web pages Google can index and send traffic to.

You might want to give my article on business blogging mistakes to avoid a read before you start your blogging efforts.

#4: Citations

Do you have an alert set up for your business name on Google so that you get notified whenever someone mentions your business name on the web?

If not, go do it now!

These not only help you monitor brand reputation, these are also link building opportunities.

Most people who refer to businesses, don’t actually link to them for a variety of reasons. If you spot such opportunities, why not reach out to them and request for a link?

#5: Utilize Social Media

So you have a business presence on Facebook and Twitter?

Good. It’s time you start using them to gather links to your website.

Have you utilized the opportunity to link to your business website from Facebook page and your twitter account? If not, go do it now. It can’t get easier than this.

Now, why don’t you explore social media sites outside of the popular networks?

Pinterest, MySpace, etc. are some of the social networks you can get links from.

Just because you opened a social media account does not mean that you scored an easy one. Be active and engage your audience.

You’ll gain brand recognition and might as well gather links at the same time.

#6: Guest Posting

Guest posting is hot now- probably for a very good reason; it works!

It’s one of those link building opportunities that can give you tremendous value over time. Not to mention the additional traffic and leads it can send you if you choose the right blogs.

Choose high quality blogs that are relevant to your business when trying to build links via guest posting.

Here is an excellent resource list to securing links via guest posting.

Remember: Too much of anything, when it comes to SEO, can be dangerous. Don’t risk your website by focusing only on guest posts. It should be a small part of your overall link building campaign.

With most businesses turning to guest posting as a way to build links, it’s only a matter of time until Google catches up with the guest post spam and devalue links you get from low quality and less relevant sites.

So, always target sites that publish high quality content, has strict editorial guidelines, and which are relevant to your business.

#7: Request Links from Customers

Do you have a great product that your customers absolutely love?

There is a good chance that a small percentage of them would have a blog or other sorts of web presence.

Request your customers to link to your business website. In exchange you could give them a small incentive- like a 10% discount on their next order.

That’s a win-win. You get a link as well as the next order while your customer gets a bargain.

#8: Request Links from Your Vendors or Partners

Most businesses have some sort of vendors or partners. And these partners and vendors might have websites as well.

Look closely as to whether they link to their existing customers from their website. Check for client pages or partner pages. If they already have such a page, it would be an easy link opportunity you have up for grab.

#9: Create a Tool or a Web App

People love tools.

Create a relevant tool that people would find useful.

If you are a real estate firm, you could build a tool that helps people calculate their mortgage payments and plan their future.

You could even build a web app that helps them keep track of their payments, with additional features like email notifications, automatically syncing to the bank to download mortgage payment details and so on.

Tools are extremely useful to people and hence it’s easy to get links to them. So if you don’t have the resources to build such a tool, you could always outsource it to sites like oDesk.

A side benefit of using tools is that they can help you generate business leads as well. Check out the marketing grader app from Hubspot. It’s a useful tool and also a lead generation machine for Hubspot.

#10: Design Galleries

Do you have a site which looks awesome? Then submit your site to design galleries which feature good looking websites. It sends traffic to your site as well as provides quality links.

Here is a list of design galleries you can submit your site to: http://www.beautifullife.info/web-design/100-best-website-galleries-to-submit-your-creative-design/

#11: Referral programs/Affiliate Programs

Nothing like sharing your profits with someone who sends leads your way, right?

You could set up referral programs (affiliate programs) and get people to link to your site.

Note: If you are using third party sites like shareasale to track affiliate commissions, then you’ll lose ink juice you get from affiliate links.

#12: Coupons

Everyone loves bargains. Some people are obsessed with it.

The rise of coupon sites is a proof of the market size. So why not provide a deal to your customer, make extra sales, and at the same time earn some links from these coupon sites?

For a list of coupon sites, refer this article.

#13: Hold Contests

Contests are a smart way to get links to your website. Even though sponsoring contests is not a very good idea as stated in my article on how not to build links, running a contest can be a good way to gather links.

It’s a value add to your readers and you get compensated for it with links.

Note: The easier you make it for your readers to participate in the contest, the more entries you’ll receive. And never ask people to link to your website with anchor texts. Usually contests work well for businesses with an established audience.

#14: Give Testimonials

Did you use a product recently and absolutely loved it? How about giving the business a testimonial?

Most businesses will gladly accept your testimonial and might even consider putting your testimonial on their website with a link back to their site.

Don’t think that just because you love Google search engine, if you send your testimonial, you’ll get a link from Google.

Reach out to local small businesses that are more likely to publish your testimonial.

#15: Press Release

No, I am not talking about writing a press release for the sake of getting links and submitting it to 100 PR distribution sites.

Google has already clarified that links from press release websites are treated differently compared to normal links you acquire/earn.

When you think about press release, think about putting a news angle to your story. What will make reporters want to cover your story and link to your site?

If you don’t have anything newsworthy to say, better not do press release.

You could also use HARO to secure links by responding to requests from journalists. Sign up for alerts relevant to your area of expertise and pitch your ideas when something relevant turns up.

#16: Niche Directories

I know I said directories are not worth it. But sometimes local, niche directories can add value to your link building diversity.

Some local directories relevant to your niche can even drive quality traffic toy our website.

Here is how you can find relevant directories

1. Go to Google
2. Choose a keyword combination from the list below
3. Sort and filter relevant directories

Keyword Combinations

• <keyword> directory
• <keyword> directory <state>
• <keyword> directory <country>
• <country> directory
• <state> directory

If you run a real estate business in Hawaii, then you’d choose

• real estate directory
• real estate directory Hawaii
• real estate directory USA
• USA directory
• USA small business directory

#17: Forums

Some of my best clients have come from forums which I have been part of.

Forums are a great way to share knowledge, attract customers, and gain some links.

Forum links usually come from signatures as most forums do not allow users to post self-promotional links within forum posts.

Note: Google has started devaluing forum links. Use it to diversify your link portfolio and try to avoid using anchor links when linking to your main site.

#18: Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is one thing. Comment spamming is something else.

If you comment to build relationships, you gain to stand future link opportunity, traffic, as well as a link in the comment section.

When you comment, never use keywords for links. Blog owners do not like people who comment for links and even if the comment is genuine most of them will mark you as spam.

#19: Q & A Sites

Ever participated in Yahoo Answers or Quora? These are Q & A sites where users can join and share their knowledge.

It’s also worth noting that Q&A links are higher quality links than comment ones since most of them allow in content links for citing sources.

If you provide in-depth answers, there is a good chance that you can drive traffic to your site as well.

List of Q&A sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_question-and-answer_websites

#20: Videos

With YouTube and other video sites exploding in popularity, videos have become mainstream.

With videos showing promise of gaining up to 1 billion views, imagine the kind of popularity your brand can get from video marketing.

The best thing about videos is that you can re-use the same video on multiple sites. And each of the video sharing sites will allow you to post links in the description.

List of video sharing sites: Wikipedia

#21: Product Reviews

If you have a product that people might love to review, why not reach out to them and offer your product or service in exchange for a review?

You could also search for people who are writing reviews about your competition and reach out to them for reviews as well.

When you approach people, you must always have in mind a win-win scenario. What do bloggers and site owners receive in exchange for the review? Is it affiliate commissions, free product sample, remunerations, or something else?

Buying links is against Google TOS. You risk getting banned. So never pay people for writing about you. If you do, ensure that these links are no-follow.

#22: PDF/e-book Hosting Sites

There are numerous sites that allow hosting PDF’s or e-books.

If you use Microsoft Word 2007 or later versions, you can easily convert word documents into PDF’s. If you don’t already have the save as PDF option, install the plugin for this functionality.

You can re-use the PDF’s for multiple sites.

#23: Sponsorship

Can you sponsor your local college events or a local meet up?

Most of these meet ups and colleges would have websites which you can leverage for links from the sponsor section.

#24: PowerPoint Hosting Sites

You can use Microsoft PowerPoint to create power point presentations related to your business and host them on PPT sharing sites.

Create useful PPT’s that solve a problem and not just an advertisement for your company. This will ensure that you get visitors from your presentations as well.

At the end of the presentation, ensure that you have a strong call to action to your site.

Bonus Tip: If you create PPT’s you can convert them to videos from within Microsoft PowerPoint. Use the save as video option. You can even add voice over to make the video more useful.

#25: Link Outreach

Do you know where your competition is getting links from? (Hint: use the SEOmoz Tool, Opensiteexplorer).

You could reach out to the sites linking to your competition and request for linking to your site.

Here is a very useful guide on link outreach: http://searchengineland.com/link-building-outreach-5-steps-to-maximize-the-value-of-every-opportunity-24687

#26: Buy Existing Websites

This is a very solid link building strategy.

Find websites that have been around for a long time and are no longer actively maintained. You could find these sites for sale on forums like digital point or flippa.

You could also reach out to these sites via contact form or whois data if you come across sites relevant to your business.

#27: Infographics

Do you have talented designers in house who can convert complex topics into easy-to-understand infographics?

Even if you don’t have in-house designers, you can always use web apps like visual.ly, infogr.am to create beautiful infographics with little or no design knowledge.

Provide an easy option easily embed the infographics on third party sites. Remember to give credit to your business on the infographic as well as link to your site below the image via the embed code.

Webmasters are much more likely to share/link/embed infographics that are useful rather than linking to commercial websites or even articles.

Here is your complete guide to infographics.

#28: Web 2.0 Sites

Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr, LiveJouranl, Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, etc. are all examples of web 2.0 sites that help you establish your online presence without the need of spending any money.

The beauty of these sites is that not only can you create good looking websites in a matter of minutes and be online, you can also create content and build links to your business website.

Web 2.0 is regularly used by black hat marketers to boost link authority to their main sites. Instead of misusing the service, provide genuine value by participating in the community.

Write good content, have a persona for each web 2.0 site you create, and even build links to these web 2.0 sites to increase their authority.

#29: Daily Deals Sites

Heard about Groupon- a daily deals site?

Similar to coupon sites, daily deals are also a great way to attract customers. You could provide a deal a day and attract lot of traffic to your business website. An added advantage to these is the ability to build links and citations as well.

#30: Event Listings

Are you conducting an upcoming event?

List them on event listing sites. These are good places to gain additional exposure to your event as well as build some links.

#31: Job Portals/ Job Boards

As your business grows, you’d need more employees to handle your business.

When you hire, why not post job listings on all the job portals and build links to your site at the same time? The benefits of such job postings are that there are a lot of sites that scrape popular job portals and re-post the jobs on their own site.

Now, that’s an unexpected bonus.

Tip: Don’t put your email address out in the open. Your inbox would be flooded with resumes and you’d take weeks or even months to sort out those resumes and find the few good candidates from the lot.

#32: Classified Sites

There are numerous classified sites out there like Craigslist, gumtree etc. that cater to a local audience. Why not tap into the classifieds sites to get links as well as traffic to your website?

When you have job openings, or other requirements, post on the classified sites to get backlinks to your business website.

Remember not to spam these sites. Keep renewing your classified ads (most are free to renew/re-post) if they are providing good ROI.

#33: Broken Link Building

This is a very powerful (but time consuming), method of building links to your site.

The basic idea is you find pages that link to your direct or indirect competition and if the links no longer work (your competition changes their website, goes out of business, etc.), you suggest changes.

While you request for changes, you can also plug your business and request for link to your site.

Since you helped them out, there is a good chance that the site owner will honor your request.

If you are looking for a guide on broken link building, refer this article.

Over to You:

I have obviously left out a lot of spam methods of building links like wiki blasts, tired link building, private blog networks and so on. If you have any genuine white hat link building opportunities, do share with me via the comment section.

Not just because it’s free and open source. It’s also a very powerful content marketing platform right out of the box.

The beauty of WordPress is that there is a huge ecosystem of developers supporting it. That means more features added to the core functionality.

Plugins are one such method of extending the functionality of WordPress without writing code. And in this article, I’d like to share the top plugins you must have if you are running your business website on WordPress.

Top 9 WordPress Plugins You Must Have

#1: WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is the best SEO plugin out there with a hell lot of features.

Even if your theme has options for SEO, I’d suggest disabling the theme SEO features and start using WordPress SEO plugin.

If you already are using your theme SEO features, you can use this plugin to transfer the SEO data from your theme to the plugin.

It takes care of rel=canonical, pagination, XML sitemap generation, advanced per post/page indexing features, category meta and more.

Download it from the WordPress plugin repository.

#2: Gravity Forms

If you asked me whether I should pay for a contact form plugin a year before, my answer would have been NO! That’s right. A big freaking NO!

However, gravity forms for WordPress blew my mind.

It’s so robust and easy to use, I did not mind upgrading and renewing the plugin for another year (I have been using it for about 2 years now).

The best thing about the plugin is that creating contact forms is as simple as drag and drop. I can also create very complex forms with conditional statements and multi-page forms in less than an hour.

Gravity forms also gives additional add-ons which help us capture subscribers, create polls, quizzes, make order forms, do automatic calculations based on product price, add tax and more.

If that was not enough, you get API access with which you can extend the functionality.

Talk about flexibility.

Purchase it from the gravity form website.

#3: Google Analyticator

If you are running a small to medium business website, chances are, you’d be using Google Analytics for your website analytics.

If you are not using any sort of analytics, better get started now.

Most of the modern theme frameworks like Genesis from Studiopress have inbuilt features for adding analytics tracking without the need of plugins. If you don’t have a premium theme framework, this plugin will help you effortlessly add analytics without touching code.

It also has a lot of other advanced features (I doubt most business users might need them though).

Get it for free from the WordPress Plugin Repository.

#4: Digg Digg

You know social media is big.

And that’s exactly why you should use the digg digg plugin; to enable social sharing of your content.

Look at the floating share bar at the left of the article you are reading. That’s digg digg in action.

The plugin is also regularly updated and has a lot of additional features as well.

Go get it from the WordPress plugin repository.

#5: WP Super Cache

Your website needs to be insanely fast for two reasons.

1. Your customers love accessing fast websites
2. Google considers page load time in their ranking algorithm (The faster your site loads, the better it is for SEO)

WP Super Cache is one plugin that can make your site pretty fast.

It’s a bit complex to configure. It works just fine out of the box. If you are on a hosting company such as HostGator, they’d pre-install WP super cache with optimal settings for your WordPress installation.

If you are on a managed WordPress hosting provider like WpEngine, you won’t be able to use caching plugins. They have their own method of caching to make your website load fast.

WP super cache also has CDN support. I use WP super cache + Amazon CDN to serve my website content.

You can get the plugin from WordPress plugin repository.

#6: Akismet

You hate spam. So do I.

And spam prevention is one major headache if you are maintaining a pretty popular blog.

Aksimet comes bundled with WordPress installation. You’ll need to activate it using a key. You can generate it by going to the Akismet site.

You can still obtain it for free. Just drag the slider all the way to zero dollars and register.

#7: Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

Content marketing is great to engage your audience.

One sure shot way to connecting with your customers is via the comments section. What better way to help your customers when they post a query on your comment section.

What Subscribe to Comments Reloaded does is, notify the user whenever someone replies to their comment or comment on the post.

Users can opt-in or opt-out of receiving notifications resulting in higher engagement and lesser spam complaints.

Download it from the plugin repository.

#8: Backup Plugin

Even though most hosts provided backup solutions on a daily basis, it’s a good idea to have a backup of your own.

You could back up your blog database alone or the entire installation.

The plugin I use is WordPress Backup to Dropbox which allows me to back up my blog to my dropbox account. There are other paid plugins like Backup buddy that lets you back up to Amazon S3 and several other places.

Select a plugin based on what type of backup you need.

A note on backup buddy: Some HostGator users have complained that using backup buddy for backups cause HostGator to suspend their accounts for exceeding CPU limits.

As you know, shared hosting has a fair usage policy where they limit the CPU resources. If you’d rather not worry about all these, go for a managed WordPress hosting.

#9: Redirection

There are a lot of times when you’d want to set up 301 redirects or keep track of 404 pages.

Redirection is a great plugin to use in such a case. You can also use it to mask affiliate links and create cleaner URL’s.

Get it from the WordPress plugin repository.

Over to You:

What plugin do you use apart from the ones mentioned above? Do you have any additional requirements which none of the plugins solve right now? Let me know via the comments.

I consider myself fairly tech savvy. However, even for me, managing the technicalities can be a serious time drain and affects my business. I’m not talking about the time I need to spend if issues crop up. It’s just the time spent on ensuring everything goes smoothly.

And when a major issue comes (like you got hacked)? Let’s not get into it- the frustration level and time lost is too much to discuss without remembering the pain.
Why WordPress Specific Solution?

These days, most small business websites are built on the WordPress platform. Not only is it easy to set up your site, it’s also very cheap. I have previously written an exhaustive guide about creating your business website for under 100$.

You don’t even need to get a web developer to design a site for you. The availability of professional themes from the likes of StudioPress ensures that you can get started on a budget.

Advantages of Managed WordPress Hosting

Site Speed:

If you are an online business, or have an online presence and would like to drive lot of leads via your business website, you know how paramount availability and speed of your website is.

Let’s not even consider that fact that fast loading times help increase your sales (Amazon saw a 1% drop in sales when the site speed dropped by 1/10^th of a second). And also the fact that site speed plays an important role in search engine optimization.

You’ll be sharing server resourced with few other sites only and your site’s going to be blazingly fast. That means better response for your customers.

I have noticed that when my site loading time decreased from 1.3 seconds to 0.9 seconds, my page view went up by 15%. So faster page loads do help in engaging users more.

Automatic Updates:

Most managed WordPress hosts will auto update your installation.

That means, you no longer have to worry about updates to your themes, plugins, or even the WordPress core.

Everything’s done for you.

Security:

If there is one thing that drivers business owners nuts, it’s when they site gets infested with malware or site gets hacked.

Not only does this affect your site performance, but your customers will be affected as well.

Visiting your hacked/infected site means there is a high chance that your customer machines will be infected too. Most modern browsers show warning signs that the site is infected and will not let users visit the site.

SEO wise, infected sites, if left alone for long can result in lower search engine rankings.

Managed WordPress hosting solution providers usually tweak their servers to maximize security and employs additional firewalls and levels of protection for WordPress users.

Sites like WpEngine, guarantees that if you get hacked, they’ll help you resolve it free of cost.

Better Technical Support

Since WordPress managed hosting providers focus exclusively on WordPress, they are able to provide better technical support.

Even though most big hosting companies have excellent support team, wordpress hosting companies have more experts that know about WordPress and can resolve your issues faster.

WpEngine claims it has more WordPress experts per 1000 customers compared to any other hosting companies out there. That’s a breather if you are not a tech savvy WordPress user yourself.

Disadvantages of Managed WordPress Hosting

Just like any other thing, managed hosting does have its own hiccups.

Cost:

The obvious one first; Managed hosting is going to cost you much more than a low cost shared hosting.

You can easily run into hundreds of dollars a month if you have a large audience (Check out WpEngine plans to get an idea about how much it might cost you. They start from 29$/month onwards for up to 25000 visitors).

If you aren’t making much money now and would like to save every dollar possible, managed hosting might not be a good idea.

However, if you value your time and you can think you can make more than 29$ a month from the time you save by going with a managed host, it’s definitely worth it.

It’s all about the ROI. Decide for yourself.

Limited Access:

If you have the habit of playing with the server configuration, tweaking settings, upgrading OS, installing firewall, and analyzing server logs, then you might feel a bit limited when you choose a managed hosting.

These guys exist for a reason; to make website hosting as painless and as less technical as possible for the average online entrepreneur.

And do you expect managed WordPress hosting to be like your VPS server where you get full root access? Most of the hosts won’t let you do advanced customization unless you specifically request for it.

So if you want 100% control over everything that happens on your server, go with a VPS or a dedicated server.

Limited to WordPress:

Duh; was that something very surprising?

You need to use WordPress as your platform to be able to use them. That means no Vbulletin forums, no Drupal or Joomla and no static HTML sites.

If in the future you decide to upgrade to some other platform, you’ll have to move out.

Over to You:

Do you think managed WordPress hosting services are the real deal? Or are they just hyped up services that charge you an arm and a leg?

After months of research, finally I managed to come up with an alternative guide which should come close (if not the same) to providing the same features for your business.

The best part- you are in complete control of your website and you’ll end up saving thousands of dollars every year.

Focus on building your business while I take care of the tech stuff for you.

Before diving into this guide, I’d want you to understand one thing. Hubspot is a great tool. I have no objection against small businesses using the software. For businesses with thousands of dollars to spend on the platform every year, it’s a great tool. But most small businesses cannot afford that level of pricing- hence this guide.

For business owners looking for a hands-off service to implement the solution below, I have set up a service for you; more on it at the end of this post.

Understanding Hubspot…

The first step in building an alternative to Hubspot is to understand the real benefits the platform offers. It’s a great platform that integrates a lot of useful solutions for small businesses and provides it as a single package.

As with any other tool or platform, Hubspot or the alternative I am suggesting here is not a magic tool that will automatically increase your sales and revenue. There is still a lot of hard work to be done to achieve business success.

Enough of disclaimers and business coaching; let’s move on with our guide.

Hubspot Alternatives Guide: The 5 Components You Need

Component #1: Content Management System (blog)

At the core of Hubspot, it’s a blogging platform (or a content management system). Although it’s much more than a blog, the basic idea of inbound/content marketing is generate high quality content, build trust, attract leads, get them into your sales funnel, and convert them into customers.

With that thought in mind, the first thing you should have is a blog platform; and what better software other than WordPress to use for your blog?

Read my detailed guide on how to create your business website using WordPress for under 100$. I have included details on purchasing the right hosting, choosing domain name and also suggested plugins for your business website.

With Hubspot, you can create landing pages on the fly (although limited to what you can with the system). With theme frameworks, you can achieve the same effect. However, for advanced functionality, you might require coding help.

This is where plugins like Gravity forms come into use. The easily integrate it most service providers you might require. Even if there is some feature you want but cannot find using the default set up or the plugins I recommend, I bet there is a free plugin in the WordPress plugin repository.

Component #2: Lead Capture and Lead Nurturing

Capturing leads (emails of your prospective customers) is an important aspect of building your business.

In order to capture leads, you need an email marketing solution. If you are a small business selling your own product or service, I recommend using MailChimp as your email service provider.

If you are into internet marketing and act as affiliate for other people’s product, then choose Aweber since Mailchimp does not allow use of their software for affiliate marketing purposes. However, if you are the seller and you have other affiliates working for you, MailChimp shouldn’t have any problems.

I have worked with Bluehornet, Aweber, MailChimp, Madmimi, Sendy, GetResponse, and a couple of other low key email marketing solutions on a large scale. I can hands down say Mailchimp is the best among the lot. Best thing is Mailchimp has a forever free plan which lets you have upto 2000 subscribers for zero cost.

I’d suggest that you try Mailchimp for a month and if you feel comfortable, upgrade to their paid plan (Their paid plans have some cool features like Auto responders, time wrap which lets you deliver emails based on the users local time zone as well as batch delivery which lets you send emails in batches so that all emails don’t go out at the same time causing in a flood of traffic that might crash your site).

Lead nurturing is a fancy word for saying building up trust among your prospective customers so that they can turn from leads into paying customers. I have written about the importance of lead nurturing in the past.

If you can set up auto responders using your email service provider, or send custom e-mailers once in a week with useful content, you should be able to nurture your leads effectively.

Oh, and don’t worry about people who unsubscribe from your list. You want your list to be as clean as possible. Don’t worry about people who do not find value in what you are providing them with.

If you see people leaving a lot, you might want to re-think your value preposition and see if what you are giving them is genuinely of value or simply sales pitches disguised as valuable info.

Integration Guide:

• How to embed Mailchimp forms in WordPress
• Integrate gravity forms and MailChimp

Component #3: SEO & Social Tracking

Husbpot allows you to keep track of your rankings and how well your pages perform. Instead of Husbpot, I suggest you use SEOmoz.

SEOmoz is a SEO tool that lets you do much more than just track keywords and analyze on page SEO. It also let you do competition analysis, analyze your competitor backlinks, do in-depth twitter analysis using their newly acquire tool followerwonk, social media analysis, and do much more.

You can read my detailed SEOmoz review here.

Component #4: Analytics

This is one area where Hubspot shines basically due to the fact that they have a closed system where each of the components works really well with each other. Even though you cannot achieve the same level of awesomeness with free tools, you can come close enough.

The tool I use and recommend for analytics is Google analytics. It’s a free and a very powerful tool from Google. If you can do advanced customizations, then there is virtually nothing this tool cannot do. However, some of these maybe a bit advanced for beginners.

If you want things to be simpler, you can use KissMetrics which is another great tool. It’s not free though. If much of your sales happens offline, you’d be better off using Google Analytics (Even for completely online business, I still suggest Google Analytics. However, for advanced functionality you get in Hubspot, there is a learning curve for Google Analytics).

Integration guide

• Integrate Google Analytics with WordPress- use this plugin
• Integrate KissMetrics with WordPress

Component #5: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software

Not all businesses require CRM to manage their customer database.

However, it’s good to have a structured data about your existing customers and prospects to get better idea about your sales and marketing effort. It also helps you create campaigns tailored to your prospects present status (Have they just contacted you, are they almost ready to buy, and so on).

Hubspot does a nice job of integrating CRM and email marketing solution into a single platform. If you’d like to replicate the same with your custom website, you can go for any of the CRM providers out there, sign up with them, integrate them with your email service provider like MailChimp and set up email campaigns.

The catch here is that, it’s not as smooth as you’d come across in Hubspot. If you are new to CRM’s, I’d recommend Salesforce.com for people who already have a very profitable small business and is familiar with the sales cycle. If you want advanced contact management solution and not a full-fledged CRM, you can go for HighRise.

If you want things to be as smooth as Hubspot, you can opt for higher plans of CRM’s which lets you send mass emails to your prospects based on the data in your CRM. For beginners, I’d definitely not recommend it. Once you are familiar with the CRM and you are sure using a CRM justifies the cost, then you can move ahead and upgrade to a higher plan.

Integration Guide:

• Integrate Mailchimp with Salesforce- use this paid addon
• Integrate Mailchimp with HighRise

The Fine Print

Although I have provided a Hubspot alternative guide here, implementing this will not give you the same experience as using the platform with everything smoothly integrated. Well, that’s what you pay for when you are talking about thousands of dollars a month and a 1 year commitment.

The solution given above should be a very good solution for any business out there (and provides almost all the features of Hubspot minus the convenience of getting it everything in one place). As your business grows, you can upgrade to Hubspot if you feel it’s the right move.

Focus on building your business while I take care of the tech stuff for you.

For entrepreneurs who still think this is very technical and time consuming, I have set up a Hubspot alternative set up service. You can hire me to take away all the technical stuff from you while still saving thousands of dollars and your precious time.

What You Are Gaining With This Set Up

But using the above alternatives for Hubspot platform, you are gaining several advantages

• Save thousands of dollars each month. Put the money into improving your product/service or use it for hiring experts who can help you get more customers
• Complete control over your website. You decide how it looks, where it’s hosted, what features it has
• No long term contracts. With Hubspot, you have a one year contract. If you decide to change your course in between, having your own set up is easier

Over to You:

What do you think of the alternatives here? Have you tried the above set up and found the results to be better than your existing system? Let me know via the comments.

Fear of technology.

Now, I don’t blame such business owners. At one point of time, I was scared of technology too. Everything seemed so unachievable.

But, as you get acquainted with the system, things become smoother. Technology is not a scary big monster anymore. It’s your friend and your business partner.
In this post, I am literally going to hand hold you and walk you through each step to set up a business website using mostly open source/free software available out there.

The best part is, it won’t cost you more than 100$ to get started!

I have made this guide as less technical as possible. However, there are some jargons you still need to know. Whenever possible, I have provided clear explanations for technical terms as well.

So, let’s get started!

The Step-by-Step Guide to Setting up Your Business Website

Step 1: Domain name for your business (10$)

I am assuming you have a name for your business; something like Sam’s donuts is good enough. If you have a registered name like Sam’s Inc, that’s fine as well.

Whatever your business name is, you need a domain name for your business. A domain name is something like conversionchamp.com, Google.com etc.

These are simple to remember names that points people to the correct IP address (unique addresses assigned to computers on the web to help them communicate with each other) of the server hosting your website (A server is a computer that stores your website and makes it accessible to people who choose to visit it).

Enough of tech talks; It’s time to choose a domain name.

Let’s assume you run a donut business called Sam’s donuts. You’ll need a domain name that closely matches your business name. You could go for domain names like samsdonut.com or samsdonutshop.com or just about any variation you like.

Remember not to confuse people by choosing names which does not match your business name or confuse it with some other popular brands.

You might have noticed something like .com, .org, .net towards the end of domain names. These are referred to as TLD’s or Top Level Domains. .com’s are the most popular and whenever possible go with a .com version unless your website is hyper targeted to a particular country (samsdonuts.co.uk if your donut business is in UK).

I register and host all my domain names with Namecheap. They are wonderful and have amazing customer support. I’d steer clear of GoDaddy if I were you. All you have to do is head over to Namecheap and enter the domain name you want. Check if it’s available. If so, follow the steps outlined and purchase your domain name.

If you do not want people to see your registration details, consider opting for whois privacy. First year privacy protection is usually free with Namecheap.

Step 2: Hosting your business website on the internet (80$)

Now that you have your domain name, you need a computer where you can save your website and make it available to the public. These computers are called servers and companies offering them are usually referred to as web hosts or web hosting companies.

The company I recommend is HostGator. I have used 15+ web hosting companies in the past and HostGator is one of the best shared hosting companies out there. Although you needn’t worry too much about the type of hosting out there when you are getting started, it’s good to know that during the beginning stages, you’d be using shared hosting.

Shared hosting means you share the computer with other website owners. Advanced versions of hosting come in various flavors such as VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, Cloud hosting, grid hosting and so on. To keep things simple, let’s not get into all those.

HostGator is simple to sign up with and has a very helpful and knowledgeable support staff. All my queries have been answered within 12 hours. You don’t need to register domain again. You already have one registered during step 1.

I never recommend registering domain and hosting with the same provider. For security as well as fail-over reasons, always go for different providers.

Warning: Don’t be tempted to go with web hosts that charge you less. Even though getting a great deal is good, you wouldn’t want to sacrifice the availability of your site (If a customer comes to your site and it does not load, you lose a sale!). I have been tempted to go with cheap hosts and have paid the price for it.

Step 3: Installing the greatest content management system out there- WordPress (OK, I am biased somewhat)- Free

You need to install WordPress on your hosting account. I am assuming you are hosted with HostGator. So head over to the cPanel (You should have received your cPanel login when you bought the hosting).

Watch the video below for installing WordPress using HostGator.

If you don’t already have an existing website, make sure that you do not install it in any subfolder. Install WordPress inside your main folder. This way, the blog will be accessible directly at samdonuts.com and not on some subfolder like samsdonuts.com/wp/.

If you are new to WordPress, I suggest you start here: http://codex.wordpress.org/New_To_WordPress_-_Where_to_Start

I highly suggest getting yourself familiar with WordPress since you’d be using this platform a lot.

If you already have hosting and you do not have cPanel or other easy means of installing WordPress, you can download it from WordPress.org free of charge and install it on your own server. Here is how to do it: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Step 4: Secure your WordPress installation

You need to pay attention to security. You don’t want to get your business website hacked, would you?

Here are some tips to secure your WordPress installation

1. Never use admin as the user name. Use random names like johnsmith38 as your username. You could also use your name, business name with additional characters so that hackers cannot easily guess your username
2. Use a secure alphanumeric password. Don’t use the same password you use for other websites/services
3. Don’t install Plugins/themes which you do not trust
4. Update WordPress and other plugins/themes regularly
5. Delete unnecessary files such as unused plugins, themes, media files and so on

For more tips on securing WordPress, read this article.

Step 5: Make your website more usable

I don’t like to call WordPress a blog platform. Although it’s mainly a blog platform, it can be so much more. With the vast number of paid and free plugins available, you can turn WordPress sites into a site with almost any functionality you want.

Make sure you give my article on website usability a read.

Although WordPress is highly usable right out of the box, you can make it even more useful by doing a few minor tweaks and additions.

First thing I’d recommend you to do is to get a good optimized theme framework like Genesis installed on your blog. I am using the Genesis framework and the Generate theme from StudioPress on my blog conversionchamp.com. You can choose from a variety of turnkey designs to use on your site.

I’d suggest installing the following plugins as well to make your site more awesome!

If you are new to installing plugins on WordPress, follow this guide: http://codex.wordpress.org/Managing_Plugins

1. Gravity Forms (Paid) – The best contact form plugin out there. You need to have a contact form on your site to let users get in touch with you. The plugin also works with a host of other services and let’s integrate them seamlessly with your website
2. Wp Super Cache (Free)- Caching plugin to help speed up your website
3. Aksimet (Free) – Spam prevention plugin (Come pre-installed with WordPress). You need to activate it separately
4. WordPress SEO (Free) – If you do not use a framework like Genesis, you’d need this plugin for SEO purposes
5. XML Sitemap Generator (Free) – A free sitemap plugin.
6. Digg Digg (Free) – Enable sharing of your posts on social media (See the floating sidebar on the left on this page? That’s the thing!)

You should also set up Google analytics on your website for tracking your visitors. If you are using genesis framework, it’s very easy. It has a built in option to add analytics tracking code (Find this option Genesis >> Theme settings >> Header and Footer Scripts. Just enter the analytics code in the header section). If you are using a generic theme, use this plugin.

Step 6: Set up lead generation system

You should capture and nurture leads on your website. No matter how many people visit your site each day, you should begin lead capture as soon as possible (ideally from day 1).

Lead capture refers to getting people to sign up for your newsletter. The software I use and highly recommend is MailChimp. If you are an affiliate marketer, you should avoid Mailchimp and use Aweber instead.

Both are easy-to-use software and can provide a very robust and affordable email marketing solution. They both offer lead capture forms that you can create on their platform and easily embed on your site.

If you followed my recommendation and got Gravity Forms, then it’s even easier to integrate it with your WordPress installation.

If you are a small business, I’d recommend going with MailChimp. They have a forever free account which lets you store up to 2000 contacts.

Step 7: Set up ways to get paid

Your business needs cash flow to survive. So ensure that whatever product or service you are selling, can be bought easily from your website.

The easiest way to collect money from your site is to use Paypal. It’s free and easy to get started. However, if you want to be more professional and maintain more control over your payments, use credit card payment gateways. Read my article on yahoo about setting up credit card payment for your online business.

If you are into service business, I recommend using Freshbooks as your online invoice software (I use them and highly recommend them).

Step 8: Start creating high-value, high-impact content

What’s your site without great content?

So, it’s time to come up with a content marketing roadmap and create content that sells as well as provides value. You can also download my free e-book on content marketing to get a detailed overview of content creation, engaging users, and promoting your content.

Ensure that you have the basic pages up and running as soon as possible (about the company, contact page, product/service page, order page and so on).

Step 9: Ensure proper search engine optimization

Although creating content for your users should be your primary goal, you should also try and optimize your content for search engines. Read my keyword research guide and my on page optimization guide for better understanding of the topic.

Step 10: Market your business website

You have set up your business website. Now it’s time to let the world know that you exist. Read my guide on small business internet marketing to get an overview.

Does it end there?

No, it certainly does not.

Marketing your business should be an on-going process. You should keep tracking your important metrics and ensure that your site is optimized for conversions.

Over to You:

What are the challenges you are facing as a small business owner in setting up your business website? Let me know in the comment section.

• 55% more website visitors to their website- The more the number of people who visit your website, the higher the chances of making additional sales. Although visits does not directly equate to sales, if you optimize your site for conversions, most of the times it will turn out to be true
• 97% more links to your business blog- Let’s face it. Link building is hard work. As any small business owner about SEO and he’d point out how difficult it is to get links. And who wants to link to boring business pages anyways? Create interesting, share-worthy content and you’ll gain links
• 434% more indexed pages- The more the number of indexed pages, the higher the chances of people finding your business (Remember: Quality trumps quality. So if you think having 1000 low quality pages on your site is going to beat another site with just 10 pages but very high quality content, good luck!)

If I was paid 1 dollar for every time someone asked me about the type of content they should create, I’d have a few hundred dollars in my account that way by now.

I have tried to address the question in my article where I talked about creating content that sells. I’ll try to cover the topic of business content creation in more detail in this article.

What kind of content should I create for my business website/blog?

Whether you have a website or a blog, the type of content that you create should serve one single purpose- to inform your users. It can be about your company, about your price structure, service guarantees or even articles that provide no B.S solution to their problems.

Enough of preaching; now that you know providing value to your users should be the ultimate aim of your content creation strategy, let’s dive right into the planning and execution part.

Finding the right topics to write about…

Isn’t it funny that most business owners don’t know what to write about when they start blogging for their business? I am sure if customers come and ask you questions, you’d be able to pull it off very well. Then why not replicate the same thing over at your business blog as well?

Create content that answers your customer questions.

Create content that educates your users.

Create valuable content that can convert visitors into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into brand advocates.

What if I do not know what my customer needs to know?

If you don’t have a full fledged sales team or have several years of experience interacting with your customers, chances are, you are not fully aware of all your customer concerns.

In such cases, make you of proper keyword research. If you do it properly, you’ll be able to generate content ideas that could potentially last you for years even if you write articles every single day.

Combine the power of keyword research with your hands on business and customer experience, you have a killer combo!

7 business content creation tips to rock your business blog and generate high quality leads

#1: Write content which your customers can relate to

If you are a real estate agent, you’d want to create content that revolves around buying a house, selling it off, re-financing, and other topics which your customers can relate to and would like to read about.

If you are going to write article after article about the state of real estate industry, how to become a real estate consultant or even analysis of the real estate market with fancy charts and figures, most users are going to get bored and not pay attention.

#2: Create a resource hub

Dave from Oahu-Scuba.com does this perfectly.

If you look at his blog, you’d see valuable content that his scuba diving readers would want to read about. Not only does his content connect with his readers, it’s also helpful for them.

It’s an absolute goldmine for people who are new to scuba diving. His blog is slowly becoming a hub for scuba divers- both experienced as well as newbie divers.

Disclaimer: Dave is one of my content marketing clients.

#3: Ask your readers

At least 75% of the article ideas I come up with are based on reader feedback.

When someone downloads my e-book, they are sent a welcome mail. Inside the mail, I encourage them to reply to me with their business concerns and try to help them out as much as possible.

From the interaction my emails generate, I can come up with hundreds of blog topic ideas to write about. Not only is this a great idea generation exercise, it’s also pre-validated – I know that my readers would like to read about the topic I have in hand.

#4: Don’t obsess over negative feedback

There are times when you receive negative feedback for content you create. Sometimes it might be regarding the writing style or people disagreeing with your thoughts.

Your goal should be to put out content that you believe will help your audience. You cannot please everyone all the time. I strongly recommend Hostgator for a small business web hosting. Just because one or two people might have had bad experience, it doesn’t mean I have to withdraw my recommendation (Millions of others have positive experience).

There will always be people who disagree with you. Just don’t let negative feedback bog you down. If you receive constructive criticism and you think you made a mistake, accept it and move on. If not, let trolls be trolls!

#5: Start small. Aim big

When you are starting your business blogging efforts, you’ll always have to start small. Most small businesses cannot afford to hire tens of paid bloggers and thousands of independent contributors like the Huffington post.

Even if you can come up with only one article a month, go ahead. Get started with your content marketing roadmap and follow the plan. Sooner or later, you’ll be able to turn your business blog into a resource hub.

Aim to be the thought leader in your industry. Not just another business that blogs!

#6: Don’t be afraid to ask for help

Smart business owners know that seeking professional help when required is the right way to go about doing your business.

Trying to do everything on your own is most probably going to be a disaster.

You may be good at writing content. If you are finding it difficult to create a content marketing roadmap, why don’t you hire an expert who can tap into their expertise and help you out in a matter of days instead of week of months when you take the DIY route?

#7: Use the language your audience uses

Educational books put me to sleep. It’s full of jargon’s which I can hardly understand. Same is the case with most research papers.

Do you think it would be fun to read blog posts that read similar to research pieces that put you to sleep?

I don’t see how that’s fun- not for me at least.

I’d rather read something else which uses the language I understand and can easily connect with.

Stop using third party, business tone in your blog posts. Be casual and write as if you’d speak to your ideal audience.

If you are in a B2B sector where your audience is mostly C level executives, then going too casual may not be the route you want to take.

The message is simple- Write as if you’d talk if you come face to face with your ideal target audience.

Over to You:

What type of content are you creating for your business? Share your thoughts with me in the comment section.

Create unique content.

Create engaging content.

If you have already embraced digital marketing or thinking about taking your business online, these are some of the statements you probably hear all the time.

If you have been reading my blog for some time, you’d have noticed a similar pattern here as well. I advise small business owners to create valuable content all the time.
With most businesses starting to embrace content marketing, the demand to showcase the effectiveness of this marketing method also increases.

And how do you show that content marketing works?

By creating content that drives sales and increases business profits.

Now, the question remains. How do you come up with content that increases sales? Isn’t content supposed to be informational and not sales oriented? Isn’t sales copy supposed to sell the products and services?

While traditional means of marketing still works, the demand for pull marketing where you don’t have to chase leads through cold calling or advertising is increasing. With Google focusing on ranking websites with great content, the demand for content generation is also on the rise.

In this post, I’ll guide you through 7 simple tips that will help your business start creating content that sells, starting now!

7 Powerful Ways to Create Content That Sells

#1: Create Content That Solves Real Problems

Before you start creating content, think from the user’s perspective. Why should a user spend time consuming your piece of content? Everyone is busy and do not have time to waste. So what’s in it for them?

Your content should solve pressing problems your audience is facing. It must provide solutions that can help them overcome their problems.

After all, you are in business because your product or service helps others overcome their problems and makes life easier for them.

Let’s assume you are a realtor. What kind of problems does your client face? Are they confused about buying new house vs. an old one? Do they require information regarding choosing the best neighborhood according to their needs? The possibility is endless. Create content that helps people overcome obstacles and make their life easier.

magnetocommerce.com implements CTA effectively by asking people to sign up for their webinar.

#2: Create Content That Drives People to Take Action

What good is content if it fails to get people to act?

Did you help a person choose between top loading and front loading washing machine? If you sell washing machines, wouldn’t it help if they bought washing machines through you?

Every piece of content you create should have a primary call to action. It can be as simple as sharing your post on Facebook, subscribing to your newsletter, download your free e-book or even submitting a sales enquiry.

#3: Create Content That Excites People

You don’t have to create breathtaking videos or write controversial articles to excite your readers.

A simple how to guide that helps people solve their problem in a unique way which they never thought of is still exciting for most people.

If you are in the business of selling cameras and lighting, how about creating an educational video/article which explains creating a DIY lighting kit for videographers for under 100$ as opposed to spending thousands of dollars for a professional kit? That definitely sounds very exciting to me!

Target your customers and create exciting content for them to consume and engage with you. Whether you are creating fancy videos, infographics, or just about any piece of content you can generate, make it exciting.

Your audience should feel thrilled to consume it.

#4: Create Content That Educates

See how BHphotovideo.com is educating users via their insights blog

The problem with most business owners is that they tend to create content that is self-promotional in nature.

While it’s good to tell your audience that you managed to achieve huge benefits for your customers, doing it over and over again turns off the reader.

Instead of simply tooting your horn by saying that you helped Client ABC achieve 125% business growth in 3 months, publish a case study. Not only will the case study help your audience try out new things, it will also boost your brand loyalty.

#5: Create Content for Your Ideal Customer

See if you can answer these questions

• Who’s your ideal customer?
• How old are they?
• What’s their gender?
• How often do you see them purchasing from you?
• What’s your ideal customer’s average household income?
• How long will a prospective customer take to convert into a paying customer once they get into your sales funnel?

In short, create a persona of your ideal customer.

Once you identify your ideal customer, create all content for that single customer. It’s easier to talk to a single person rather than trying and talking to a crowd.

#6: Utilize the Power of Crowdsourcing

You know you should create content that solves your customer’s problems. However, how do you know exactly what bugs them? Sure if you run a car showroom, you may know that they need a car, they are confused about choosing a car, or even about the price.

But do you know that some of your customers want detailed comparison of 3 different car models in your showroom? Did you know that they might go for a higher end car with automatic transmission instead of manual if they knew the difference between the two?

In order to solve customer problems, you have to dig deep into their minds. The best way to do this is to talk with the sales/client servicing team. They are the ones who regularly hear objection from customers.

Understand the problems your customers are facing and create educational content around them. Once they understand the benefits and the value your product or service provides, it will be easier to close the sale.

Get your whole team to participate in the content brainstorming process. You’ll be surprised with the amount of content ideas you can generate with this approach.

#7: Utilize Different Mediums

Video vs. image vs. text: which works better for your audience?

Or does a hybrid solution work for your audience?

Depending on the demographics of your audience, different content platforms work differently. For some sites video does not work, while for others, it’s the best sales generation tool.

Always be ready to test different mediums and see works best for your audience.

Over to You:

How do you create content that sell? What are the challenges you faced during the process? Let me know in the comments.

Ideally, his income should have gone up and he should not have spent any time trying to chase leads because content marketing is supposed to help build trust and attract customers naturally.

Yet, his income went down and he was more frustrated than ever.

What went wrong?

Well, my friend thought that as long as you write extremely detailed articles each and every day, you are doing content marketing right.

That’s not true!

He is not alone in making this mistake. I have talked to several business owners who have embraced content marketing. Almost everyone who needed my help was doing it wrong (if they were doing it right, they wouldn’t need my help, would they?)

So, in this post, I am going to cover the most common content marketing mistakes businesses make and how you can avoid them.

10 Common Content Marketing Mistakes

#1: Not Knowing Your Audience

Let’s take the case of my web designer friend. Let’s call him Josh.

He was writing a lot of articles. But the problem was, he was not writing for the right kind of audience.

He was writing mainly about the technicalities of web design and how to build web applications.

While writing technical stuff is not a bad thing, not writing for your intended audience- you know- the kind of people who’ll pay you money, is wrong.

His target was small business owners. Instead of writing for the tech audience and his peers in the web design industry, had he wrote articles with small business owners in mind, he would have had much better success.

Take the case of conversionchamp as well. Most of the articles I write are aimed at small business owners (My target audience).

Although I do tend to write articles for my peers in the content marketing industry to help establish myself as an authority in this field, the numbers are far less than the posts I write for my audience.

Take away tip: Create useful content for your target audience. If you are unsure of who your target audience is, try to visualize your ideal customer and write for them.

#2: Not Having a Plan

Josh was writing article after article with no clear plan. He did not have any targets in mind nor did he have a way to measure the effectiveness of what he was doing.

Sounds similar?

Many business owners, when they start out, do not have a content marketing plan (I did not have when i started off too).

If you do not have a solid marketing plan, your chances of seeing positive ROI is close to Z.E.R.O.

Take Away Tip: Before you start creating content, ensure that you have a proper, well-thought out plan laid out. Attach milestones and set tight deadlines.

#3: Hosting Poor Content

As the name suggests, content is really the backbone of content marketing.

Whether you are creating articles, whitepapers, reports, videos, or any other sort of content your audience can consume, the quality of the content should be top notch.

The problem with a lot of businesses is that to save money, they outsource content creation for extremely low rates. Now what happens is, quality of the content is not up to the mark and your websites trust and conversions suffer.

I have seen people hire writers for less than 10$ an article. I am not saying that price shopping is bad, but when it comes to content, you need people who can inspire readers to take action.

Content is not just for search engines to index. It’s mainly for people to consume and act on it. So, next time, before you create mediocre content or plan to hire a cheap writer, think twice.

It’s not just about grammar and punctuations (web writing doesn’t necessarily need to adhere to these rules anyways); it’s more about getting people to do what you want them to do after consuming your content.

Take Away Tip: If you can create quality content, spend time creating content that is so much useful that your audience cannot resist sharing it. If you think you don’t have the content creation skills, hire someone who can do a good job.

#4: Ignoring Marketing

“Content marketing is so powerful that once you start creating useful content, you have to sit back and see the sales coming in”.

Utter B.S!

I am sick and tired of all those marketers who portray content marketing as some magic pill which is an easy way to make sales.

Yes, a sale is definitely the ultimate goal for all your marketing efforts.

However, thinking that content marketing is going to bring you a sale just because you created awesome content is simply wrong.

Sorry to bust the hype, but that’s the fact.

Even with excellent content, you still need to market it. Unless people find out about your content, it’s practically useless.

Using SEO strategies, email marketing, guest posting, PR, paid advertising, traditional marketing, and other means, you need to drive people to your content section. Once people start consuming and sharing your content, you start achieving the viral effect you require.

It’s not a hands-off process. However, when done right, it can be a lot less work than other forms of marketing.

Take Away Tip: Stop thinking that content marketing is some kind of magic pill. Even after you create great content, you need to work hard to get people to consume your content.

#5: Creating Content That Isn’t Valuable

I mentioned in one of the points above about why you shouldn’t create poor content.

Although, great content is good, if it’s not valuable for your audience, then you are wasting yours and your reader’s time.

Let’s assume that your audience is people who are looking to hire a lawyer. You can write all you want about the various laws in your country. I’m sure you can do a good job at it.

Does your audience care?

Is your content going to help them in any way?

Probably not!

Your target audience would not only find it boring, it’s also totally irrelevant for them. That’s not helping to build trust, is it?

This blends in with the need to know your audience. However, knowing who your audience is and knowing what they want to know about is the key to a successful content marketing strategy.

Take Away Tip: Try to create content that is valuable. Know your audience and write for them.

#6: The “Me mentality”

Almost every business, big and small, makes this mistake.

When they start blogging or use content marketing methods, their content is mostly about the company. How good they are, why people should choose them and things like that.

Well, does your audience care?

No.

You audience want to solve a problem and they come to you for a solution. They don’t want to read pages after pages about your company and how great it is.

Stop creating content that focuses on your company. Instead, start focusing on your customer’s problems and try to solve them.

Take Away Tip: Solve real problems your customers are facing. Give away as much information as possible. This will help build trust and create sales opportunities.

#7: Not Paying Attention to SEO

With content marketing being all the rage, businesses are forgetting to pay attention to getting the basics of SEO right.

Keyword research is still the most important aspect of SEO that you need to take into consideration before creating content for your audience.

Does it make sense to spend a lot of time and effort creating something people are not looking for?

Of course, at times, keyword research maybe a bottleneck. It does not always give you everything your customer wants to know about.

Ask your sales/support team about the kind of questions they regularly get. Chances are that you will get a lot of content creation ideas that will be useful for your audience.

Ensure the basic SEO is done right.

• Do keyword research
• Make sure the keywords are there in the meta title, page title, heading tags, body copy
• Try to build links from other websites to the page you want to rank for
• Interlink pages on your website using the right anchor text
• Don’t purchase links or get involves in black hat SEO techniques
• Don’t create duplicate content
• Use canonical tags if required
• If you rather spend time building your business, and let expert take care of search engine optimization, hire a SEO consultant

Take Away Tip: Content creation should be your focus. That does not mean you forget about SEO. Pay attention to the basics and ensure the post is optimized for search engines.

De-cluttered sharing option on conversionchamp.com

#8: Making Your Content Difficult to Share

Being able to share your content is one of the most effective ways to drive additional traffic to your content page.

Ensure that your content can be easily shared on mediums where your target audience is present. If your customer’s hang out on Facebook and Twitter, ensure that sharing options for these websites are present.

Too much of anything is bad.

Some people go overboard by providing hundreds of sharing options, thereby confusing their readers. Instead of trying to provide everything, identify the main channels where your content can get shared and focus on them.

Take Away Tip: Make it easy for your customers to share your content. Focus on those websites which will give you maximum ROI; website real estate is very important. So keep it de-cluttered.

#9: Not Being Everywhere

Many businesses think that content marketing = blogging.

Well, that’s not true at all.

Any marketing method you adopt to increase your sales funnel which ultimately leads to a sale with the use of content can come under content marketing.

This means that creating videos and uploading to YouTube, doing email marketing, hosting webinars, and even creating and distributing power points can be content marketing strategies.

Don’t limit yourself to blogging. Be everywhere. Create different sort of content and see what works best with your audience.

Blogging is still the best content marketing tool, but relying on one strategy alone is bad.

Take Away Tip: Don’t limit yourself to one marketing channel. Experiment with different channels and modes of interaction. Measure ROI of each method and focus on what works the best for your business.

#10: Giving In To the Hype

Too many people fall into the content marketing hype. They pull out all their marketing budgets and focus on content creation.

This is a wrong strategy to follow.

Use content marketing alongside other marketing methods. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket.

If traditional marketing works really well for you, focus on that. Create useful content on the side and see how well it works for you.

Take Away Tip: Don’t focus all your energy into content marketing all of a sudden. If a marketing channel works really well for you, focus on that. Content marketing is a slow process. Until you start getting a lot of sales via content marketing channel, don’t give up on other channels.

Over to You:

As a small business, do you make any of these mistakes? Are there additional mistakes you see businesses making? Let me know in the comments.