Stock Market Outlook: Back to a More Volatile Normal?

It’s Tax Scam Season. Here’s When to Call Shenanigans

Business Deductions That Even the Smallest Businesses Can Claim

Running a business can be expensive. Everything comes at a cost, from keeping the lights on to buying inventory. Luckily, you may be able to deduct several business expenses to reduce your taxes. Even super small businesses with no or few employees can benefit from these deductions.

11 types of deductions

Below are 11 common business deductions you might be able to claim, even if you are a sole proprietor or own an extremely small business.

If you plan to claim deductions, you must have proof that you actually deserve those deductions. That’s why it’s important to know how to prepare for an audit. If the IRS ever questions you, you must be able to show records of your expenses. Save your receipts and show your math.

1. Rent expenses

If you rent the property where you conduct your business, you might be able to deduct the rent expense from your business taxes.

If you have a home office and you rent the place where you live, you might also be able to deduct your rent payments. However, you can only deduct the percentage that applies to your home office. Also, if your home office is part of another living space, you probably can’t use this deduction. For example, if your desk is in your bedroom, you may not be able to use the rent expense deduction.

2. Utilities

You can deduct the utilities needed to run your business, such as water, electricity, gas, phone, and trash.

If you run your business from home, you may be able to deduct a portion of your utility bills. For example, you can deduct a portion of your electric bill that corresponds to the percentage of space your home office takes up. Or, if you use a cell phone for both business and personal use, you can deduct the business use of your phone.

3. Repairs

You might need to make occasional repairs to your office space to keep your business operational. The cost of repairs is deductible.

Home-based businesses can also deduct repairs. However, you can only deduct home repairs made in your home office.

4. Office supplies

Any office supplies you use for your business may be deductible. For example, you may be able to deduct the cost of pens, paper, ink cartridges, staples, desks, bookcases, and more.

5. Office equipment

You might need to buy a new computer, copier, fax machine, or other type of office equipment for your business. All these items are deductible.

Because office equipment can be expensive, you might not be allowed to deduct the entire cost in one year. You might need to know how to find depreciation expense.

6. Taxes

Some federal and state taxes may be deductible from your business taxes. For example, you may be able to deduct employer and real estate taxes. You might also be able to deduct licenses and regulatory fees.

7. Insurance

You might be able to deduct your insurance premiums. For example, you can deduct liability and workers’ compensation premiums.

8. Software

Boxed, downloadable, and online subscription software may be deductible if you use it for business purposes. For example, your online accounting and payroll software subscriptions may be deductible.

9. Advertising

You can deduct many common advertising and promotion expenses, such as business cards, phonebook ads, website costs, internet advertising, and more.

10. Consulting fees

At some point, you probably need help from an accountant, lawyer, or other professional. The consulting fees you pay to these professionals may be deductible.

11. Education and training

If you pursue any education or training to maintain or improve your skills, it might be tax deductible. You might be able to deduct trade shows, conferences, books, DVDs, etc. You cannot deduct education that is unrelated to your business.

As part of education, you may be able to deduct your subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, and trade journals. Of course, these should be related to your business.

The post Business Deductions That Even the Smallest Businesses Can Claim appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Business Deductions That Even the Smallest Businesses Can Claim appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Mike Kappel.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2Fc0UWY
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

6 Reasons Your Business Will Fail in 2018 (And How to Save It)

Sad businessman standing near sales chart

Running a business is about managing a lot of moving parts. From legal considerations to bookkeeping to HR, there are about a million things to consider and a million things that can go wrong.

And the statistics bear this out: only about 50% of small businesses make it to their fifth year. So what is it that puts your business at risk?

Below we’ll take a look at the six reasons your business will fail this year, and what you can do to save it.

1. People Don’t Need Your Product

This one seems obvious: your business will fail if people don’t need what you’re offering. Assess your future clients’ needs, see what your competitors offer, understand what it is that’s lacking in your competitors’ product or service, and figure out how you can deliver that missing element. This process is known as defining your unique value proposition, and if you don’t understand how to create a product that’s new, different, and necessary, your company will eventually fail.

This means getting out there and actually talking to future clients. Share your ideas in-person with focus groups and use social media and email marketing to solicit feedback via surveys.

2. You’re Not Competitive in Your Market

Understanding your market is also a critical step to take before you open your doors. If your passion is baking, you may want to open up a bakery, but what is the market in your hometown? Is there already a bakery? How successful are they? Do they have a particular focus (wedding cakes, donuts, decorated sugar cookies) that is similar to what you hope to do?

If your town is already well-served by the local bakery, you can either think of ways to offer your own spin on things (create a bakery that focuses on French pastries), consider another market (open up in the town down the road that’s bakery-free), or think about pursuing another small business idea that still speaks to your passion (create your own line of baking tools for the home chef).

3. You Lack a Plan

One of the most challenging things for first-time small business owners is creating a plan. If you’ve never run a business before, it’s likely that you’re overwhelmed by all of the aspects you need to consider.

If you’re at a loss on where to start, consider turning to a site like Bplans for a basic template. Building up a team of trusted advisors is also key. Find a lawyer with expertise in your chosen field, a CPA who knows your state’s tax laws, and advisors and mentors in your sector who can help you along the way.

It’s also important to remember that a business plan should be a living document. Your vision for your business should change as your business grows, so you need to be ready to revisit and revise your plan on a regular basis.

4. You Don’t Have the Right Team

Assembling a team that is dedicated, smart, driven, and hardworking will be key to your success. However, finding and attracting the best talent can be a challenge, particularly when you’re a young company with limited resources.

First of all, understand what the going rate is. This list from Angel.co offers you insight into benchmark salaries and equity stakes for various roles based on market and location, which will give you a sense of how you should structure your compensation packages.

It’s important to think beyond salary, too. According to the Society for HR Management, benefits are a key component in retention, with healthcare being the number one concern for most employees. They also note that as Millennials become a greater portion of the workforce, benefits like flexible work options and student debt repayment assistance will likely become more coveted.

5. Your Success Metrics Don’t Translate to Sales

You might feel proud that your company boasts tens of thousands of Instagram followers, but social media metrics are indicative of quantity, not necessarily quality. What really matters is that you have the right people following you–those who are actually going to buy your product.

Instead of focusing on amassing empty likes, work towards generating meaningful content across your social media platforms by creating shareable posts that will not only get the attention of current followers but also catch the eye of potential new clients. Offering perks to followers that will actually drive sales (such as coupons and first access to new products) or starting a contest to actively engage your followers will generate results that you’ll see on your bottom line.

6. You Can’t Figure Out Cash Flow

Mismanaging cash flow is one of the greatest risks to a small business. Addressing this issue begins with practical forecasting and goal setting. Speak with a CPA who understands small businesses and your sector in order to generate a realistic picture of what your business’s expected costs and earnings will be.

From there, you need to make sure that you keep your books organized and avoid taking on too much debt. There are lots of great software programs out there to keep you organized; QuickBooks is best used in conjunction with hiring a traditional bookkeeper, while options like Bookly offer comprehensive bookkeeping services all online.

To avoid excessive debt, you’ll want to be careful about the loans you take on. Understanding the full cost of your loan and how much income you’ll need to generate to make it worthwhile is key. Loan calculators provide you with a comprehensive picture of what a given loan will cost.

Understanding some of the greatest challenges facing other small businesses can empower you to avoid those pitfalls yourself. Asking for feedback—from clients, trusted advisors, and your employees—is one of the best ways to learn about your business’s unique risks so that you can address them head-on and find success for many years to come.

The post 6 Reasons Your Business Will Fail in 2018 (And How to Save It) appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post 6 Reasons Your Business Will Fail in 2018 (And How to Save It) appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Meredith Wood.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2GPf8Kq
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

What Is a Solo 401(k)?

The perks of self-employment are plenty, but there’s at least one significant drawback: the lack of an employer-sponsored retirement plan like a 401(k). Enter the solo 401(k), or what the IRS calls a one-participant 401(k). Designed for self-employed workers, this account mimics many of the features of an employer-sponsored plan, without the drag of working...

The article What Is a Solo 401(k)? originally appeared on NerdWallet.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2gWSMP2
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

You Should Max Out Your 401(k), Right? Not So Fast

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Like entering a hot dog eating contest, getting a tattoo on your face — or even maxing out your 401(k). The last one may seem incongruous; after all, numerous studies show Americans feel they aren’t saving enough for retirement. And if you’ve read any personal...

The article You Should Max Out Your 401(k), Right? Not So Fast originally appeared on NerdWallet.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2hCvDle
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

What Is a 401(k)?

Quick facts about the 401(k) A 401(k) is a tax-favored retirement savings account offered by employers Individuals can contribute up to $18,500 a year ($24,500 if age 50 or older) Some employers offer the choice of both a traditional 401(k) and a Roth 401(k) You can contribute to both a 401(k) and an IRA in the...

The article What Is a 401(k)? originally appeared on NerdWallet.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2nKe419
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

Getting a Tax Refund? Use It on Home Improvements

Planning a Wedding? Start With the Budget

Is Email Marketing Obsolete?

Do you think email marketing is so last year? After all, there are so many other options for reaching out to prospects and customers now. You can use mobile marketing, SMS text messaging, Snapchat, livestreams, Instagram Stories—the list is endless.

Given all these bright, shiny toys, the concept of sending customers emails may seem as old-fashioned as writing a letter—with a fountain pen—and sending it Pony Express.

If you think email marketing is too old hat to bother with, consider these statistics:

• A whopping 89% of people check their email daily, according to a study by Fluent.
• Seven in 10 internet users would rather have businesses communicate with them by email than any other method, reports MarketingSherpa.
• More than half (53%) of consumers have purchased something from a retailer after receiving an email about the product.
• For every $1 businesses spend on email marketing, they enjoy an average return on investment of $38. No, that’s not a typo. Thirty-eight dollars.

One reason email marketing is so effective is that most people rely on email for workplace communication. Even if an office uses Slack, texting, or some other form of interoffice communication, they still use email at some point. Since they don’t want to miss an important message from work, Americans are constantly checking their email.

Smartphones haven’t freed us from email—they’ve tied us to it even more closely. The majority of emails are now opened on a mobile device, not on a desktop. That means even more opportunity for your business to make an impression.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

Finally, there’s one key reason to stick with email: It’s a marketing channel that you own. What do I mean by that? Well, social media is a great marketing method for many small businesses. In fact, some entrepreneurs don’t even bother to have a website—they do all their marketing on social media.

That’s risky business, because despite all the work you put into gaining and maintaining your business’s social media followers, you don’t own those connections. In fact, you don’t even control them. Social media companies decide how many of your posts your followers can see—or if they even see your posts at all. One change to a social media algorithm can wipe out years of work building a social media following.

With email, however, it’s different. When customers agree to get emails from you, you’ve got a direct, one-to-one connection. No one can stand in between you and your customer, and the success of your email marketing is limited only by your expertise—not by some algorithm.

How can you make your email marketing a success? Here are some tips:

• Looking good: Mobile email viewing dominates, so your emails need to look good on a mobile device.
• Keep it short: A couple of photos (at most) and a few short paragraphs are all you need.
• Action, please: Put your call to action near the top of the email; don’t make readers scroll down to get your message.
• Easy does it: One or two links or buttons in an email is plenty. Make them eye-catching and easy to click on.
• Learning curve: Tap into the analytics tools your email marketing service provides. You’d be amazed at what you can find out—from who opened what email when, and what they clicked on, to which emails drove the most sales or generated the most engagement. Based on this information, you can segment your email subscriber lists to tailor information to what specific users want.

Rumors of email’s death have been greatly exaggerated—it’s still alive and kicking, and can breathe new life into your marketing efforts if you use it right.

RELATED: 3 Types of Attention-Grabbing Marketing Emails to Help You Connect With Customers

The post Is Email Marketing Obsolete? appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Is Email Marketing Obsolete? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Rieva Lesonsky.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2sQFTvN
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

What to Buy (and Skip) in March

You probably won’t find any pots of gold at the end of a rainbow this month, but you will find plenty of deals on popular product categories. Navigate this month’s shopping with the help of our guide to what to buy (and skip) in March. Buy: Floor sample mattresses New mattress models usually arrive in...

The article What to Buy (and Skip) in March originally appeared on NerdWallet.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2GMWvqy
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

How to Buy a House That Hasn’t Been Built Yet

10 Lessons for Entrepreneurs I Learned From Being a ‘Shark Tank’-Type Judge

I recently had the privilege of being a judge at the U.C. Berkeley Venture Capital Investment Competition (the “Competition”). This program was hosted by the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Association and the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program (affiliated with the Haas MBA School at U.C. Berkeley).

The Competition was terrific, bringing together Berkeley-Haas and U.C. Berkeley graduate students to expose them to the venture capital industry and early stage startup companies. The event lasted a full day and was expertly administered by the Competition Executive Committee (particular kudos to Adeeba Khairzad, Esmond Ai, Rhonda Shrader, Neha Ruikar, Neha Dobhal, Ludwig Schoenack, Terence M. Kelly, and Dmitriy Berenzon for helping to put on a great event).

The Competition consisted of real, interesting startups that were currently seeking funding, pitching their business ideas to the student venture capital teams. The startups competing were Intento, Jobwell, Mooqita, World Hearing Organization, and ZoneTap. I particularly liked the potential of the World Hearing Organization to revolutionize the hearing aid industry.

After the initial pitches, the student venture teams dug deeper into each startup investment opportunity through due diligence reviews and interviews with the entrepreneurs. The student venture teams also engaged in a mock negotiation of a venture capital term sheet with the entrepreneurs.

The judges, who consisted of seasoned venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, sat in on all of the startup pitches, the due diligence review sessions, and the mock term sheet negotiations. The judges’ role was to pick a winning student venture team, taking into account all the relevant factors.

All of the student venture teams were terrific, particularly the winning “Alpha” team consisting of Andrew Briggs, Alibek Dostiyarov, Amy Fan, Matthew Bond, and Max Kubicki. They stood out because of their targeted due diligence questions, their technology savvy, and their strong presentation skills.

Here are some of the most important things I learned from being a part of the Competition:

1. Be Prepared to Come Before Very Savvy People When Pitching to Investors

The Haas-Berkeley student venture teams were much more sophisticated and technology savvy than I expected. They quickly understood the key elements of the startups’ underlying technology—including artificial intelligence, internet, apps, SaaS, and more. They were also particularly smart about sales and marketing issues the startups would face.

2. Most Startup Entrepreneurs Can Do a Better Job With Their Pitch Decks

Each entrepreneur had a 15-minute time slot to pitch their company using a PowerPoint pitch deck. All of these pitch decks could have been better, addressing some of the following key issues more completely:

• What is the mission and vision of the company?
• What is the big problem you are trying to solve?
• What is the addressable market opportunity for the company? (Investors want to see that the company has the potential to grow very big in a large market.)
• What key traction has the company obtained to date?
• What proprietary technology does the company have that will help it stave off competitors?
• What is the go-to-market strategy?
• What is the business/revenue model?

For tips on developing strong startup pitch decks, check out How to Create a Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing.

3. Selling Is a Two-way Street Between Startups and Venture Capitalists

Naturally, the startups were all in “selling” mode trying to impress the venture capital teams about their potential prospects. But the best venture teams were also in selling mode—explaining to the entrepreneur who the venture team was, their relevant experience, and how they could help the entrepreneur become successful. Some of the venture teams jumped into due diligence questions without much of an introduction. In the real world, it’s important for both sides to build mutual rapport and respect.

4. Startups Must Be Prepared to Answer Hard Questions About Competitors

The startups frequently received questions about the competitive landscape for their business. These questions included:

• Who do you see as your principal competitors?
• What differentiates your company from those competitors?
• If Google or Amazon decided to go into your space, wouldn’t they just crush you?
• How do your competitors match up on price and functionality?

Entrepreneurs have to thoroughly understand their competitors and be able to clearly explain why their startup has advantages over those competitors.

5. Startup Entrepreneurs Must Understand Complex Financial Issues

As a startup, you must keep on top of your expenses and learn how to thoroughly understand financial statements and budgeting. Many startups have failed because the entrepreneur wasn’t able to adjust spending to avoid running out of cash. Establishing a detailed, month-by-month budget is important, and this budget must be regularly reviewed.

Understanding your financial statements will also help you answer questions from prospective investors. Here are some financial statement questions you can expect to get from potential investors:

• What are the company’s five-year projections?
• What are the key assumptions underlying your projections?
• How much equity and debt has the company raised; what is the capitalization structure?
• What future equity or debt financing will be necessary?
• How much of a stock option pool is being set aside for employees?
• When will the company get to profitability?
• How much cash burn will occur until the company gets to profitability?
• What are your unit economics?
• What are the factors that limit faster growth?
• What are the key metrics that the management team focuses on?
• What are the anticipated gross margins?

6. Startups Should Focus on Getting Adequate Capital Rather Than Be Overly Concerned About Dilution

The entrepreneurs made the following mistakes about the capital-raising process during their pitches:

• They asked for too little capital that would not last them long enough to get to a meaningful milestone for the next round of financing.
• The entrepreneurs worried too much about dilution of their equity ownership.
• They had unrealistic expectations on the valuation of their company, especially the companies that were pre-revenue.
• They didn’t appreciate that their company would likely have to go through multiple rounds of equity financing in the future.
• They didn’t appreciate how difficult it is to raise capital and the lengthy time period typically required to close a financing round.
• They didn’t have a clear and concise explanation of how the capital raised would be spent and what progress would be made with that capital.

7. Startups Must Understand Venture Capital Term Sheets

Both the venture teams and the startups struggled with some of the provisions of the venture capital term sheets presented. This is understandable, as venture term sheets can be highly legalistic and complicated. There is no real “standard” term sheet for a venture capital equity investment and a number of points often get negotiated.

Here are some of the key points that were negotiated by the venture teams with the startups:

• What will the pre-money valuation of the company be?
• What size will the company’s stock option pool be, and will it be computed before or after the financing? (Venture capitalists argue that the pool should typically be 15%-20% of the company and be computed as part of the pre-money valuation of the company.)
• Will the form of investment be a convertible note or will it be a preferred stock instrument?
• If preferred stock is the investment vehicle, what is the liquidation preference? Is the preferred participating or non-participating?
• How will the Board of Directors be configured so as to not relegate total control to the management team?
• What veto rights will the venture capitalists receive? (VCs will typically insist on approval rights on future rounds of financings, a sale of the company, and other major events.)
• Once the term sheet is countersigned by the startup company, it will typically be subject to a “no shop” provision preventing the company from talking to other potential investors, unless approved by the venture capital fund. The time period for this no shop provision is negotiable, usually between 30-45 days.
• A hot button issue for the founders will be whether their existing stock in the company will be subject to a new vesting schedule to ensure their continued participation in the business. Founders will often request that they be given vesting credit for time already spent in the business.
• VCs will expect other standard terms, such as pre-emptive rights; drag along rights; information and registration rights; and rights of first refusal/co-sale on sales of stock by the founders.

8. A Startup’s Management Team Is a Critical Component

Many venture capitalists will proclaim that the strength of the management team is the most important factor in determining whether or not to invest in a startup.

The venture teams in the Competition did not generally do sufficient probing of the management teams to make sure they were passionate, dedicated, and had relevant experience.

Here is the type of due diligence often done on the management team:

• Who are the founders and key team members?
• What relevant domain experience does the team have?
• What motivates the founders?
• What key additions to the team are needed in the short term?
• Why is the team uniquely positioned to execute the company’s business plan?
• Does the team have any issues with prior employers? (See, for example, the issues arising out of the Waymo/Uber litigation.)
• What background checks (schools, prior employers, references, past misconduct issues, etc.) should be performed?
• Are there any public statements on social media made by any of the team members that are problematic? (Note that the New York Times recently hired and then fired someone within seven hours because of the discovery of inappropriate comments made on Twitter.)

9. Startups Should Have a Strong Marketing and Customer Acquisition Strategy

The startups and the venture teams did a very credible job on the issues of marketing and customer acquisition.

The types of good questions that were asked included:

• How does the company market or plan to market its products or services?
• What is the company’s PR strategy?
• What is the company’s social media strategy?
• What is the cost of a customer acquisition?
• What is the projected lifetime value of a customer?
• What is the typical sales cycle between initial customer contact and closing of a sale?

10. Startups Should Expect Questions About Their Intellectual Property

For many companies, their intellectual property will be a key to their success. The investors will pay particular attention to the answers to these questions:

• What key intellectual property does the company have (patents, patents pending, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, domain names)?
• What confidence do you have that the company’s intellectual property does not violate the rights of a third party?
• How was the company’s intellectual property developed?
• Would any prior employers of a team member have a potential claim to the company’s intellectual property?

Conclusion

All in all, the startups and the venture teams did a terrific job and showed a high level of sophistication and technology savvy. Congratulations to the U.C. Berkeley Haas School for putting on such a great competition!

Related Articles on AllBusiness.com

• 65 Questions Venture Capitalists Will Ask Startups
• 15 Success Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs
• Angel Investing: 20 Things Entrepreneurs Should Know
• 13 Key Employment Issues for Startup and Emerging Companies

Copyright © by Richard D. Harroch. All Rights Reserved.

Richard D. Harroch is a Managing Director and Global Head of M&A at VantagePoint Capital Partners, a large venture capital fund in the San Francisco area. His focus is on investing in Internet and digital media companies, and he was the founder of several Internet companies. His articles have appeared online in Forbes, Fortune, MSN, Yahoo, Fox Business, and AllBusiness.com. Richard is the author of several books on startups and entrepreneurship as well as the co-author of Poker for Dummies and a Wall Street Journal-bestselling book on small business. He was also a corporate partner at the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, with experience in startups, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, and venture capital. Richard can be reached through LinkedIn.

The post 10 Lessons for Entrepreneurs I Learned From Being a ‘Shark Tank’-Type Judge appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post 10 Lessons for Entrepreneurs I Learned From Being a ‘Shark Tank’-Type Judge appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Richard Harroch.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2CfSU6c
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

Optimizing Your Website for Speed: We Compare the 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins

My first article published on AllBusiness was about how to optimize your website for speed. Although website load speed is even more important today than it was years ago, this article will introduce you to the several WordPress caching plugins you can use to speed up your website load.

Over the years, I’ve mainly used W3 Total Cache plugin because it was the most popular option, but recently I have tried several others. As great as W3 Total Cache is, there might even be better caching plugins out there that are much easier to configure and deliver more optimal performance.

I have decided to test and compare the following six caching plugins:

• W3 Total Cache
• WP Super Cache
• WP Fastest Cache
• Cache Enabler
• Autoptimize
• WP Rocket

The tests will be conducted on two of our drastically different websites. One web page will be from a fairly simple content website. The other page will be from more complex website that uses various external JavaScript resources that are loaded via ads, social media boxes, and so on.

The complex website we’re testing on has four AdSense ad units and one Facebook share box. Even though it seems like it’s only five external JavaScript files at most, they load many dependencies. Each ad unit or social media box can load 10+ JavaScript files on its own. So as you can see, that can quickly add up when it comes to your overall page load time.

Plugins

W3 Total Cache

4.5 stars rating and 1+ million active installations, FREE, Premium Version: $99/Year

The first thing you will notice with the W3 Total Cache plugin is that it is a very complex and thorough plugin. It has heaps of options and thus it can be a little overwhelming. If you’re just trying to install, activate, and go, then this plugin is not for you.

It has over 15 different tabs and pages of settings which you can fine-tune. Although this is ideal for those looking for control, it is not a plugin I’d recommend anymore to an average website owner who just wants to activate caching on their website and go on with their day.

WP Super Cache

4.5 stars rating and 1+ million active installations, FREE

WP Super Cache is a much more manageable caching plugin for the average user. Even though it has seven tabs of options (with the Advanced tab being 10 pages long, it seems), there is an “Easy” tab which allows you to simply turn Caching ON or OFF.

If you’re trying to fine-tune settings, you can go to the Advanced tab and select specific options. WP Super Cache is great for the average user due to its ease of use and setup simplicity, but for the power user, W3 Total Cache is without a doubt the better plugin.

WP Fastest Cache

5 stars rating and 500,000+ active installations, FREE, Premium Version: $39.99

The WP Fastest Cache plugin is much easier to set up and go than the previous two plugins. There really aren’t that many options, however, and I’ve found it difficult to set up minification. Despite having turned that setting on, it still didn’t properly minify HTML code. That could simply be a bug or it might be an overlooked setting on my end. Despite that, the plugin performed at the top of the list.

If they work out the kinks and bugs in the plugin, I can see this being the go-to caching plugin for WordPress.

Cache Enabler

4.5 stars rating and 40,000+ active installations, FREE

Cache Enabler is a really simple plugin. There’s only four different options on the settings page and those include cache expiry, cache behavior, cache exclusions, and cache minification. So it is a very easy-to-use plugin for just about anyone.

The only bad part about Cache Enabler is that it simply does the caching. It doesn’t go into other techniques such as removing query strings from static resources, leveraging browser caching, and so on. So, in a way, that will cause it to score lower than previous plugins. However, it still ended up being pretty competitive with other plugins.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

Autoptimize

4.5 stars rating and 500,000+ active installations, FREE

Autoptimize is a great little plugin that is easy to use and it sort of does everything in one go. It’s a very simple plugin, but that also means you can’t really fine-tune it much. However, it seems like it does a great job at optimizing your website even without all the manual options of W3 Total Cache or similar plugins.

It also has one neat feature which I haven’t seen in other caching plugins: it gives you the option to select how to treat Google Fonts if they’re used on the website. You can just leave it as is, you can remove Google Fonts (that would speed up your website somewhat, but use standard system fonts), or you can also choose to merge those files with other font files so that it doesn’t always have to load it from Google’s servers.

Even though this plugin seems to load the least amount of resources, it proved that does not necessarily mean it will be the fastest. Sometimes it is a better idea to load multiple smaller files concurrently than to merge them all and load it as one bigger file.

WP Rocket

Not available for free on WordPress.org, $39

WP Rocket is the only plugin on this list that is not free and thus it really would need to blow all other plugins out of the water in order to be a worthwhile competitor. Although the plugin performed well in my tests (in many categories even #1 spot), the difference is not that great.

The plugin itself is super easy to set up and is similar to WP Fastest Cache, Cache Enabler, and Autoptimize. There are not many options to choose from and the ones you do have are pretty easy to understand. It’s a good plugin, but if you’re tight on money, then it’s a no-brainer. Choose one of the free plugins that are similar in features and performance and you’ll be much happier with your selection.

Results

Simple Website

Performance Ranking:

1. WP Rocket
2. WP Fastest Cache
3. Cache Enabler / Autoptimize
4. W3 Total Cache / WP Super Cache

Complex Website

Performance Ranking:

1. WP Fastest Cache
2. WP Total Cache / Cache Enabler / WP Rocket
3. WP Super Cache

Conclusion

It proved to be difficult to get a clear winner for this test, especially on the complex website. The reason for that is because the ad units load variable number of requests on each page load. So one user might load 120 resources while another user might only load 90. And that itself impacts the test quite a bit.

Based on the simple website results, which is much less dependent on those external resources, the two fastest plugins ended up being WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket.

The main point to take away from this test is that any caching plugin will perform much better than not having one at all. But when it comes to different caching plugins, they all compare at a similar level. The difference is not great.

The biggest issue seem to arise when you’re loading many external resources, such as Google AdSense ads, which can cause hundreds of separate requests. The best way to optimize those would be to lower the number of ads on the page.

Another thing I discovered was that the Taboola ad unit widget can add almost 100 more requests and add 30+ seconds to the overall loading time. It seems like sometimes the widget loads faster, while other times it really comes to a crawl. I’m assuming it’s just a few suspect mixed media ads that are causing that, but until they provide a fix for that, it’s safest to remove their ad unit.

Some notes regarding each test:

• All tests were done using Cloudflare so that itself would have already sped up the website much faster than normal.
• Each result was tested three times, then averaged out.
• Each plugin was installed with basic options. I make no guarantees that they couldn’t be fine-tuned to deliver even better performance, but it was done this way due to time required to test each plugin.

RELATED: Improve Your Website Performance with These 22 Free Apps and Web Tools

The post Optimizing Your Website for Speed: We Compare the 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Optimizing Your Website for Speed: We Compare the 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Haris Bacic.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2op7dNh
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

6 Reasons Why Public Speaking Is Essential to Business Success

By Ashish Arora

Were you one of those kids that sat in the back of the classroom, hoping the teacher didn’t call on you? Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, is common and not necessarily one we grow out of in adulthood. In fact, this fear is considered the most common phobia in the world—yes, even more common than the fear of dying!

As business owners, it’s important that we overcome this fear and become better communicators. After all, communication is the backbone of human society. An ability to communicate is what allows us to share ideas, tell stories, and influence change. The ability to communicate effectively not only dictates our interactions with coworkers, investors, employees, and clients, it also has a tremendous impact on career growth and success in our chosen industries.

With this in mind, here are six reasons why public speaking is essential for your business growth:

1. Shows us how to inspire others

One of the most important skills public speakers can have is the ability to inspire others. And this skill is just as important offstage as it is onstage. Inspiring an audience of event attendees is a great way to keep them engaged, but inspiring coworkers and employees is how you get your team to share your vision and work toward a common goal, all while building a positive company culture.

2. Builds confidence

Public speaking builds confidence, and this comes in handy for self-promotion. Let’s face it, as business owners, we must be our own PR team. We can’t shy away from the limelight, but rather, should take every opportunity that comes our way to network and promote our business. Public speaking teaches us to feel comfortable when we’re pitching to investors, explaining our business model to lenders, or fielding questions from trade show attendees.

3. Teaches a valuable leadership skill

Public speaking is really about listening, and effective listeners make the best public speakers. When crafting a presentation, keep your audience’s questions and pain points in mind. Good listeners also make the best leaders. When you listen and understand your employees’ concerns, you can build a dedicated team. Also, truly listening to your customers will show you how to serve them better.

4. Encourages critical thinking

Public speaking forces you to become a better critical thinker. Preparing effective presentations requires research, reason, and the ability to analyze information from the viewpoint of your audience. Offstage, these critical thinking skills can help you improve the outcomes of your sales calls and uncover potential landmines during negotiations.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

5. Promotes soft selling

Public speaking is the epitome of “soft selling.” You may not be selling something directly during your presentation, but you certainly can convince an audience of your expertise and provide solutions to their problems. This type of selling is incredibly effective in real-world situations where overtly selling or being overly pushy is not welcomed. Public speaking ultimately teaches us how to sell our expertise.

6. Develops the skill of persuasion

The number one job of public speaking is to persuade your audience to recognize you as a thought leader in your industry. This power of persuasion is equally important offstage when you’re pitching a client, answering employee concerns, or convincing the editor of a local publication that your new product launch would make a great article.

If you’ve been avoiding public speaking because of fear and anxiety, now is the time to practice getting over it. As a bonus, if you embrace the skills you need to be a good public speaker, you can also leverage those skills to effectively grow your business.

RELATED: Overcoming the Fear of the Podium: 9 Ways for Entrepreneurs to Practice Public Speaking

About the Author

Post by: Ashish Arora

Ashish Arora is the co-founder of SketchBubble.com, a leading provider of results-driven, professionally-built presentation templates. When he is not working, he enjoys traveling around the world.

Company: SketchBubble
Website: www.sketchbubble.com
Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post 6 Reasons Why Public Speaking Is Essential to Business Success appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post 6 Reasons Why Public Speaking Is Essential to Business Success appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Guest Post.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2FoRipv
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

Optimizing Your Website for Speed: We Compare the 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins

My first article published on AllBusiness was about how to optimize your website for speed. Although website load speed is even more important today than it was years ago, this article will introduce you to the several WordPress caching plugins you can use to speed up your website load.

Over the years, I’ve mainly used W3 Total Cache plugin because it was the most popular option, but recently I have tried several others. As great as W3 Total Cache is, there might even be better caching plugins out there that are much easier to configure and deliver more optimal performance.

I have decided to test and compare the following six caching plugins:

• W3 Total Cache
• WP Super Cache
• WP Fastest Cache
• Cache Enabler
• Autoptimize
• WP Rocket

The tests will be conducted on two of our drastically different websites. One web page will be from a fairly simple content website. The other page will be from more complex website that uses various external JavaScript resources that are loaded via ads, social media boxes, and so on.

The complex website we’re testing on has four AdSense ad units and one Facebook share box. Even though it seems like it’s only five external JavaScript files at most, they load many dependencies. Each ad unit or social media box can load 10+ JavaScript files on its own. So as you can see, that can quickly add up when it comes to your overall page load time.

Plugins

W3 Total Cache

4.5 stars rating and 1+ million active installations, FREE, Premium Version: $99/Year

The first thing you will notice with the W3 Total Cache plugin is that it is a very complex and thorough plugin. It has heaps of options and thus it can be a little overwhelming. If you’re just trying to install, activate, and go, then this plugin is not for you.

It has over 15 different tabs and pages of settings which you can fine-tune. Although this is ideal for those looking for control, it is not a plugin I’d recommend anymore to an average website owner who just wants to activate caching on their website and go on with their day.

WP Super Cache

4.5 stars rating and 1+ million active installations, FREE

WP Super Cache is a much more manageable caching plugin for the average user. Even though it has seven tabs of options (with the Advanced tab being 10 pages long, it seems), there is an “Easy” tab which allows you to simply turn Caching ON or OFF.

If you’re trying to fine-tune settings, you can go to the Advanced tab and select specific options. WP Super Cache is great for the average user due to its ease of use and setup simplicity, but for the power user, W3 Total Cache is without a doubt the better plugin.

WP Fastest Cache

5 stars rating and 500,000+ active installations, FREE, Premium Version: $39.99

The WP Fastest Cache plugin is much easier to set up and go than the previous two plugins. There really aren’t that many options, however, and I’ve found it difficult to set up minification. Despite having turned that setting on, it still didn’t properly minify HTML code. That could simply be a bug or it might be an overlooked setting on my end. Despite that, the plugin performed at the top of the list.

If they work out the kinks and bugs in the plugin, I can see this being the go-to caching plugin for WordPress.

Cache Enabler

4.5 stars rating and 40,000+ active installations, FREE

Cache Enabler is a really simple plugin. There’s only four different options on the settings page and those include cache expiry, cache behavior, cache exclusions, and cache minification. So it is a very easy-to-use plugin for just about anyone.

The only bad part about Cache Enabler is that it simply does the caching. It doesn’t go into other techniques such as removing query strings from static resources, leveraging browser caching, and so on. So, in a way, that will cause it to score lower than previous plugins. However, it still ended up being pretty competitive with other plugins.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

Autoptimize

4.5 stars rating and 500,000+ active installations, FREE

Autoptimize is a great little plugin that is easy to use and it sort of does everything in one go. It’s a very simple plugin, but that also means you can’t really fine-tune it much. However, it seems like it does a great job at optimizing your website even without all the manual options of W3 Total Cache or similar plugins.

It also has one neat feature which I haven’t seen in other caching plugins: it gives you the option to select how to treat Google Fonts if they’re used on the website. You can just leave it as is, you can remove Google Fonts (that would speed up your website somewhat, but use standard system fonts), or you can also choose to merge those files with other font files so that it doesn’t always have to load it from Google’s servers.

Even though this plugin seems to load the least amount of resources, it proved that does not necessarily mean it will be the fastest. Sometimes it is a better idea to load multiple smaller files concurrently than to merge them all and load it as one bigger file.

WP Rocket

Not available for free on WordPress.org, $39

WP Rocket is the only plugin on this list that is not free and thus it really would need to blow all other plugins out of the water in order to be a worthwhile competitor. Although the plugin performed well in my tests (in many categories even #1 spot), the difference is not that great.

The plugin itself is super easy to set up and is similar to WP Fastest Cache, Cache Enabler, and Autoptimize. There are not many options to choose from and the ones you do have are pretty easy to understand. It’s a good plugin, but if you’re tight on money, then it’s a no-brainer. Choose one of the free plugins that are similar in features and performance and you’ll be much happier with your selection.

Results

Simple Website

Performance Ranking:

1. WP Rocket
2. WP Fastest Cache
3. Cache Enabler / Autoptimize
4. W3 Total Cache / WP Super Cache

Complex Website

Performance Ranking:

1. WP Fastest Cache
2. WP Total Cache / Cache Enabler / WP Rocket
3. WP Super Cache

Conclusion

It proved to be difficult to get a clear winner for this test, especially on the complex website. The reason for that is because the ad units load variable number of requests on each page load. So one user might load 120 resources while another user might only load 90. And that itself impacts the test quite a bit.

Based on the simple website results, which is much less dependent on those external resources, the two fastest plugins ended up being WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket.

The main point to take away from this test is that any caching plugin will perform much better than not having one at all. But when it comes to different caching plugins, they all compare at a similar level. The difference is not great.

The biggest issue seem to arise when you’re loading many external resources, such as Google AdSense ads, which can cause hundreds of separate requests. The best way to optimize those would be to lower the number of ads on the page.

Another thing I discovered was that the Taboola ad unit widget can add almost 100 more requests and add 30+ seconds to the overall loading time. It seems like sometimes the widget loads faster, while other times it really comes to a crawl. I’m assuming it’s just a few suspect mixed media ads that are causing that, but until they provide a fix for that, it’s safest to remove their ad unit.

Some notes regarding each test:

• All tests were done using Cloudflare so that itself would have already sped up the website much faster than normal.
• Each result was tested three times, then averaged out.
• Each plugin was installed with basic options. I make no guarantees that they couldn’t be fine-tuned to deliver even better performance, but it was done this way due to time required to test each plugin.

RELATED: Improve Your Website Performance with These 22 Free Apps and Web Tools

The post Optimizing Your Website for Speed: We Compare the 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Optimizing Your Website for Speed: We Compare the 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Haris Bacic.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2op7dNh
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

Is Email Marketing Obsolete?

Do you think email marketing is so last year? After all, there are so many other options for reaching out to prospects and customers now. You can use mobile marketing, SMS text messaging, Snapchat, livestreams, Instagram Stories—the list is endless.

Given all these bright, shiny toys, the concept of sending customers emails may seem as old-fashioned as writing a letter—with a fountain pen—and sending it Pony Express.

If you think email marketing is too old hat to bother with, consider these statistics:

• A whopping 89% of people check their email daily, according to a study by Fluent.
• Seven in 10 internet users would rather have businesses communicate with them by email than any other method, reports MarketingSherpa.
• More than half (53%) of consumers have purchased something from a retailer after receiving an email about the product.
• For every $1 businesses spend on email marketing, they enjoy an average return on investment of $38. No, that’s not a typo. Thirty-eight dollars.

One reason email marketing is so effective is that most people rely on email for workplace communication. Even if an office uses Slack, texting, or some other form of interoffice communication, they still use email at some point. Since they don’t want to miss an important message from work, Americans are constantly checking their email.

Smartphones haven’t freed us from email—they’ve tied us to it even more closely. The majority of emails are now opened on a mobile device, not on a desktop. That means even more opportunity for your business to make an impression.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

Finally, there’s one key reason to stick with email: It’s a marketing channel that you own. What do I mean by that? Well, social media is a great marketing method for many small businesses. In fact, some entrepreneurs don’t even bother to have a website—they do all their marketing on social media.

That’s risky business, because despite all the work you put into gaining and maintaining your business’s social media followers, you don’t own those connections. In fact, you don’t even control them. Social media companies decide how many of your posts your followers can see—or if they even see your posts at all. One change to a social media algorithm can wipe out years of work building a social media following.

With email, however, it’s different. When customers agree to get emails from you, you’ve got a direct, one-to-one connection. No one can stand in between you and your customer, and the success of your email marketing is limited only by your expertise—not by some algorithm.

How can you make your email marketing a success? Here are some tips:

• Looking good: Mobile email viewing dominates, so your emails need to look good on a mobile device.
• Keep it short: A couple of photos (at most) and a few short paragraphs are all you need.
• Action, please: Put your call to action near the top of the email; don’t make readers scroll down to get your message.
• Easy does it: One or two links or buttons in an email is plenty. Make them eye-catching and easy to click on.
• Learning curve: Tap into the analytics tools your email marketing service provides. You’d be amazed at what you can find out—from who opened what email when, and what they clicked on, to which emails drove the most sales or generated the most engagement. Based on this information, you can segment your email subscriber lists to tailor information to what specific users want.

Rumors of email’s death have been greatly exaggerated—it’s still alive and kicking, and can breathe new life into your marketing efforts if you use it right.

RELATED: 3 Types of Attention-Grabbing Marketing Emails to Help You Connect With Customers

The post Is Email Marketing Obsolete? appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Is Email Marketing Obsolete? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Rieva Lesonsky.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2sQFTvN
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

15 Essential Skills for Content Marketers—Do You Have Them?

Got content marketing skills? I sure hope you do, because your work in content marketing will probably require all of them—and maybe even a few you don’t already have. Whatever skills you don’t have now, you can learn over time.

The skills I’d recommend a content marketer to have are:

1. The ability to learn (and learn fast)

Content marketing moves fast. If you don’t like change and can’t adapt quickly, you may never be happy as a content marketer. On the upside, if you like learning new things, you’ll find your curiosity to be a major competitive advantage. It’s a good idea to try to learn a new skill, or a new software project, or a new content marketing tactic every few months. Smart marketers are always evolving.

2. Writing skills

If you could pick just one skill to succeed as a content marketer, becoming a better writer might be it. Even if you’re able to hire content creators, you’ll still need editing skills, or the skills to write a strategy document or a press release. You also may need to write emails, job descriptions, or even captions in a pinch.

The following graph comes from a study of technology marketers, but look at how high writing skills are rated—they’re even above content marketing skills.

Image source: Spiceworks

3. Project management skills

Content marketing has a lot of moving parts. There’s the analytics, the content creation, the content promotion, the content reformatting, the coordinating with other departments, the coordinating with influencers and outside experts and freelancers . . . you get the idea.

4. People skills

“It’s all computer-based now.” Ever heard that?

Bupkes. People are still the alpha and omega of business—from the people you manage, the people who manage you, to customers, vendors, and everyone else you encounter. Being able to communicate and perhaps even persuade people is an essential skill. And if you’re managing people, being able to get everybody to play nice is a critical asset, too. You’re going to need it in your content marketing work.

5. Analytics skills

You don’t need to be a data scientist to run a content marketing department. But you do need to be able to look at detailed reports and see what’s really important amongst all those stats and numbers. And if you work in a small team, you may end up being the one who prepares those reports. According to research from Parse.ly and Ceros, “Digital media professionals are expected to have a facility with data.”

6. Search engine optimization

Many content marketers often struggle with their search engine optimization skills. They know they need them, but the technical aspect of SEO can make people think it’s harder than it really is.

Image source: Conductor

7. Speaking and presentation skills

You don’t necessarily need in-person presentation skills (though they certainly do help), but it is important to be well-spoken in a webinar or podcast interview, especially if you’re in B2B. It’s great to be able to say, “I’d love to do a webinar” or to be able to say yes to a podcast invite.

And, of course, if your company has a webinar program, it’s likely you’ll be the webinar host, unless you’re running a large content shop and can have a staffer take over the role of host or facilitator.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

8. Design

Okay, maybe you can get by without this—there are services that let you outsource a lot of design work for barely $15 an hour. But boy, it’s helpful to be able to make a decent-looking blog post header image, or to slap together some social media images in a pinch.

Another really handy complementary skill: data visualization. It’ll help you with your analytics work and with your design tasks.

9. Storytelling

An ability to tell stories can help you come up with the best content ideas, and also help you refine content you already have. Storytelling can help you weave different content projects together so your marketing has a consistency to it, rather than being a chunky, disparate series of campaigns.

10. Research

If you want to create exceptional content, you will need some research skills. That includes both being able to research content on the internet and being able to research what your audience thinks and wants. If you aren’t able to do good research, your content will have a shallow feel to it and won’t likely connect with your audience.

11. Social media

Ever set up a Facebook page? Got 1,000 or more followers on Twitter? Those are just the starting points of social media skills. Managing a content marketing social media program is in another league. You’re going to need first-rate social media skills if you want to your content marketing to hum.

12. WordPress

Almost every content marketing program has a blog. And pretty much every blog is run on WordPress, which means having WordPress skills is pretty much essential. You don’t have to be a WordPress whiz, of course, but being able to format, post, and schedule blog posts is important. And if you still need help, you can hire a service like WP Curve to outsource some of your work.

13. Email marketing

Email is one of the most widely used marketing tactics. In our own WASP Small Business survey, we found nearly half of all small businesses use it:

Image source: WASP Barcode Technologies 2017 “State of Small Business Report”

There’s a reason for this: Email works. It gets the highest or near the highest ROI of any tactic, and it’s affordable. You could study it your whole life, but you could also study it for a week or so, dive in, and refine your skills from there. Campaign Monitor offers a good basic introduction if you’re a total newbie.

14. Content promotion and distribution

Lordy, do most content marketers need some help with this one! Either they don’t know how to promote their content, or they don’t want to—or they just can’t find time for it. But most of the content published is grossly under promoted.

So how do you learn this skill? Get some social media advertising experience, for starters. Then learn the ins and outs of doing influencer outreach. And test to find out what works best for your particular content niche.

15. Strategy

I’ve saved the most important skill for last. But “strategy” may not really be the best way to describe this skill. Sure, strategy is important, but simply stating what you want to do and writing it down is not really a skill. A practice, yes—and a best practice.

The skill comes from being able to take analytics data, audience knowledge, industry knowledge, and business goals and hammer them into an actionable strategy. That’s where all these other skills come together.

RELATED: What 10 Years of Content Marketing Did for This Startup

The post 15 Essential Skills for Content Marketers—Do You Have Them? appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post 15 Essential Skills for Content Marketers—Do You Have Them? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Brian Sutter.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2FnSzwS
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

The 8 Essential Elements of a Successful Blog Post

If you were to go skydiving and bet your life on a folded-up pile of nylon, you would first go over a checklist and make sure everything is just right with your gear.

The same principle applies to your blog content, if you don’t want it to crash and burn when it hits the internet. The following are eight critical elements that should be included in your blog posts:

1. Magnetic headline

If you’ve ever met with investors and made an elevator pitch—a quick two-minute presentation about your business—you know that the goal isn’t to get funding right then and there, but to deliver enough information so that the investors will want to hear more.

It’s the same with a blog headline. It has to:

• Give some indication what your article is about, and
• Make the prospect want to at least check out your first paragraph.

In other words, it needs to be magnetic—it needs to pull people in.

Sometimes adding emotional words to the headline will give it the added magnetism required. In other cases, the information you’re offering will, on its own, be enough of a draw. However, even when you’re presenting great content, spice up your headline with a word or two that will grab readers and make it stand out. People are moved to act by their emotions.

2. Compelling lead

I want to be very clear about how I’m using the word “compelling” here. In news reporting, a lead should pull together the important points of the news story. But that’s not necessarily true in a blog. The first sentence or short paragraph of your blog must compel visitors to read your second paragraph—you want to draw your readers in. Don’t take forever to get to the point, and make sure there’s sufficient build up so that readers will want to know more about the information you’re presenting and appreciate it once they understand your ideas.

3. Useful subheads

Subheads serve three purposes:

• They break up the type to make the page more visually appealing,
• They help your reader navigate to important sections, and
• They boost search engine optimization (SEO).

Disclaimer: Regarding my third point, it used to be we insisted on using keywords in one or more subheads, but this doesn’t seem as important anymore. I will explain this more in the next section when I touch on keywords; however, using descriptive phrases that capture your key “ideas” in subheads will probably help your SEO.

The first two points are always important. A long page of continuous type turns away a lot of potential readers. We’ll come back to this in the section on graphics. Also, once readers finish your article, they may want to jump back and go over a point; subheads should help this.

4. Informative and engaging body

The body is the “meat and potatoes” of your blog post. It can be about anything—from new, incisive observations that will revolutionize the life or business of your reader, or a funny story about what happened to you on the way to work yesterday. If you’re establishing your authority, you’ll want to author one kind of post; if you’re trying to develop a personal relationship with your prospects, you’ll want to author a different kind of post. The question is, “What’s your goal today?”

As I mentioned earlier, the old rule said you needed to include a sufficient number of keywords into the body of your article; however, recent experience and research has shown that keyword usage and density is far less important to Google today. Google’s algorithm is smart enough now to understand what you are writing about and index your articles properly for searches. Therefore, if you’re doing a good job explaining your topic, Google will understand; you don’t have to riddle it with robotic keywords.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

5. Appealing graphics

It’s a great idea to include graphics in your blog posts to illustrate points and break up text within the body of articles to make your pages more visually pleasing. Google measures the time spent on your pages, so your graphics, typography, and color scheme should work together to encourage visitors to stick around. Also, when you promote your content on social media, you should include a strong graphic.

6. Powerful call to action

Almost every blog article should have some kind of call to action, which can take a variety of forms and achieved through different tactics. Your first step is to decide what action you want your visitors to take. It might be to make a comment. It could be to read another blog on your site, or to check out a product or service you offer. You also could get a prospect’s contact information by offering exclusive content in exchange for an email address.

7. Relevant internal link

Do you like free advertising? We all do, right? This is one reason you should include links to other articles on your site in every new article you write. Would a real estate salesperson just show one room of a house to a prospect? Of course not, and remember, one of your main goals is to get people to stick around your website.

Further, internal links have always been considered good for SEO. I think they benefit your SEO because they increase the number of pages per visit and time visitors are on your site. I don’t think that the mere fact you include a link is very important; what’s important is visitors see the link as relevant to their visit, click on the link, and spend time on the resulting page.

8. Good meta description

The meta description is the snippet Google displays in search results. Left to its own devices, Google will grab the first sentence or two from your article. This, however, may not always be the best way for your article to appear in search results.

All of my previous points concerned what visitors see on the web page—this point is different. The meta description is in HTML code. If you have a WordPress site, a plugin like Yoast lets you easily compose your meta description separately so you can fine tune it.

You spend a lot of time creating written content for your website. Even if it takes a few extra minutes to go through the eight points I’ve mentioned here, it will be time well spent. Good blog posts have long life spans, so your efforts will pay for itself several times over.

RELATED: How to Make Money With Your Business Blog

The post The 8 Essential Elements of a Successful Blog Post appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post The 8 Essential Elements of a Successful Blog Post appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Megan Totka.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2EOC6k7
via Nebula Biz Local Loans

6 Reasons Why Public Speaking Is Essential to Business Success

By Ashish Arora

Were you one of those kids that sat in the back of the classroom, hoping the teacher didn’t call on you? Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, is common and not necessarily one we grow out of in adulthood. In fact, this fear is considered the most common phobia in the world—yes, even more common than the fear of dying!

As business owners, it’s important that we overcome this fear and become better communicators. After all, communication is the backbone of human society. An ability to communicate is what allows us to share ideas, tell stories, and influence change. The ability to communicate effectively not only dictates our interactions with coworkers, investors, employees, and clients, it also has a tremendous impact on career growth and success in our chosen industries.

With this in mind, here are six reasons why public speaking is essential for your business growth:

1. Shows us how to inspire others

One of the most important skills public speakers can have is the ability to inspire others. And this skill is just as important offstage as it is onstage. Inspiring an audience of event attendees is a great way to keep them engaged, but inspiring coworkers and employees is how you get your team to share your vision and work toward a common goal, all while building a positive company culture.

2. Builds confidence

Public speaking builds confidence, and this comes in handy for self-promotion. Let’s face it, as business owners, we must be our own PR team. We can’t shy away from the limelight, but rather, should take every opportunity that comes our way to network and promote our business. Public speaking teaches us to feel comfortable when we’re pitching to investors, explaining our business model to lenders, or fielding questions from trade show attendees.

3. Teaches a valuable leadership skill

Public speaking is really about listening, and effective listeners make the best public speakers. When crafting a presentation, keep your audience’s questions and pain points in mind. Good listeners also make the best leaders. When you listen and understand your employees’ concerns, you can build a dedicated team. Also, truly listening to your customers will show you how to serve them better.

4. Encourages critical thinking

Public speaking forces you to become a better critical thinker. Preparing effective presentations requires research, reason, and the ability to analyze information from the viewpoint of your audience. Offstage, these critical thinking skills can help you improve the outcomes of your sales calls and uncover potential landmines during negotiations.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• How to Create A Great Investor Pitch Deck for Startups Seeking Financing
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

5. Promotes soft selling

Public speaking is the epitome of “soft selling.” You may not be selling something directly during your presentation, but you certainly can convince an audience of your expertise and provide solutions to their problems. This type of selling is incredibly effective in real-world situations where overtly selling or being overly pushy is not welcomed. Public speaking ultimately teaches us how to sell our expertise.

6. Develops the skill of persuasion

The number one job of public speaking is to persuade your audience to recognize you as a thought leader in your industry. This power of persuasion is equally important offstage when you’re pitching a client, answering employee concerns, or convincing the editor of a local publication that your new product launch would make a great article.

If you’ve been avoiding public speaking because of fear and anxiety, now is the time to practice getting over it. As a bonus, if you embrace the skills you need to be a good public speaker, you can also leverage those skills to effectively grow your business.

RELATED: Overcoming the Fear of the Podium: 9 Ways for Entrepreneurs to Practice Public Speaking

About the Author

Post by: Ashish Arora

Ashish Arora is the co-founder of SketchBubble.com, a leading provider of results-driven, professionally-built presentation templates. When he is not working, he enjoys traveling around the world.

Company: SketchBubble
Website: www.sketchbubble.com
Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post 6 Reasons Why Public Speaking Is Essential to Business Success appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post 6 Reasons Why Public Speaking Is Essential to Business Success appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Guest Post.

from neb biz feed 1 http://ift.tt/2FoRipv
via Nebula Biz Local Loans