Selling to Small Businesses

I often get asked, “How does one find small business blogs, so my company can reach out to the small business community?” There are a number of techniques for identifying small business blogs that attract the audience you want to reach. The technique I am going to cover today is called “Follow the Leader.” If [...]

Jeremiah Owyang writes about the many challenges of a widget strategy.  He lists about 18 different problems with using widgets to market.  Among them:  high costs to create widgets; and low value to users. His post is well thought out.  And I agree with a number of the points. I would add this thought, however:  maybe [...]

The Internet can be treacherous if you are a vendor faced with a disgruntled customer.  If a consumer doesn’t feel that his or her complaint has been satisfactorily dealt with — boom!  The entire dispute (at least the customer’s side of the story) ends up on the Web for the world to see.  Oh, and you can [...]

Are you building a community of readers and customers and participants?  That’s important, because a community is central to a strategy of reaching out to the small business market.  True, your ultimate goal has to be to sell your services and products to small businesses.  But to do that you first have to think about engaging them.  Engagement is [...]

A friend and colleague writes me wanting suggestions for a topic niche that is not already saturated, for a small business site. His company plans to start a blog for business owners and managers. They are trying to stake out territory on a topic that is not already covered thoroughly. In fact, he raises a point I’ve [...]

Due to my packed schedule in August, it has taken me until now to find Anne Holland’s excellent post for corporate advertisers about calculating a blog’s reach and influence. She outlines six criteria for advertisers to look at when determining if an independent blog is a good fit and good prospect for advertising or a sponsorship.  Perhaps [...]