“I still eat rice and beans. I just use brown rice now,” said Annya Santana of Menos Mas, a wellness company that speaks to African-American and Latinx communities.
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Sunday, December 2, 2018
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Wellness ‘For the Culture’
“I still eat rice and beans. I just use brown rice now,” said Annya Santana of Menos Mas, a wellness company that speaks to African-American and Latinx communities.
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Export Opportunities for Small Businesses and Help for Getting Started
Professional jugglers often start out by keeping three balls sailing through the air at once. Then they start adding balls.
That’s not a bad picture of the current state of U.S. global trade negotiations. For a while it seemed like we were trying to cut new deals with every nation on earth. Fortunately, some of those have been settled—more or less—including Mexico and Canada by replacing NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) with USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), and a new deal with South Korea.
The balls still in the air include Japan, the European Union (EU), and the United Kingdom (UK), and the elephant in the room watching all of these negotiations is China. I won’t venture a guess as to where we currently stand with China on a trade deal—that’s above my pay grade.
I mention these shifting sands of global trade, because exporting is one of the best ways to grow any business—small, medium, or large. Further, one of the trading partners mentioned earlier—the UK—may be on the cusp of presenting U.S. businesses with some fantastic opportunities.
Current events junkies have probably been following the drama around Brexit, the British exit from the European Union. Will it be a “soft,” fully negotiated exit, or will it be a hard Brexit, that leaves many of the t’s uncrossed and the i’s undotted with respect to trade and relations between the British and the EU?
Keep a close eye on Great Britain
I’m singling out Great Britain because we have so much in common with the Brits that it makes exporting there easier than, say, South Korea, where the language, culture, tastes, and styles are often radically different than ours. For example, if the Brits wind up with a hard Brexit, cheese from the continent could increase in price by as much as 74%.
That certainly creates some opportunities for the U.S. dairy industry, including smaller artisan cheese makers. The problem for many small business owners is they don’t know how to get started. Fortunately, there is help for the wannabe exporter.
FedEx has been pretty aggressive in developing the information and systems small business owners need to start exporting. The company has created a significant “How to Export” resource on its website that includes videos, interactive guides, webinars, assessments, and more. The FedEx guidance drives home the fact you need to have a complete plan before you start packing boxes and sending them overseas, or across the borders.
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- The Complete 35-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
- 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
- 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
- 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
More resources for your exporting aspirations
One of the best and least expensive ways to get moving on that plan is to turn to resources like SCORE, Export.gov, and the various Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) located around the country.
We all know SCORE as the organization that teams up business owners with mentors. The group also has workshops, webinars, and a large library of advice articles, some of which cover topics related to exporting. However, connecting with a local mentor who has exporting experience, could be the single most powerful way to give you the confidence and know-how required to jump into selling outside the United States.
Export.gov is, as the name says, all about helping U.S. companies get into the business of exporting. Along with a wealth of information and “how to” guidance, the site links to the U.S. Commercial Service, which for a fee will identify contacts, arrange meetings, and even attend those meetings with you. You’ll find contact information for U.S. Export Assistance Centers here.
SBDCs are “powered by” the Small Business Administration and they offer services in more than 900 different locations around the nation. Check with your nearest SBDC to see what kind of help is available to facilitate your entry into exporting. SBDCs offer a lot of information in exporting, including the nitty-gritty details, and ins and outs of financing.
And, speaking of financing, there’s one more important resource many of you will want to become familiar with: the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM). Its mission is to support job creation by facilitating the export of U.S. goods and services. Since many banks are reluctant to lend money to new exporting ventures, the EXIM assumes credit and country risks.
I suspect business growth is going to be a major concern in the coming years. We’re currently enjoying a short “sugar high” from the tax cuts, but what comes next? See if selling outside the United States might be your “next big thing.”
RELATED: Planning to Go International? Tips for Setting Up a UK Business Presence
The post Export Opportunities for Small Businesses and Help for Getting Started appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post Export Opportunities for Small Businesses and Help for Getting Started appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Megan Totka.
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Mobile Search Is Evolving—Is Your Business Keeping Up With the Changes?
Organic traffic will always be of the utmost importance to businesses and brands across the globe. With mobile usage on the rise and mobile-first indexing now in effect with Google, focusing your time and efforts on securing top mobile search rankings is more important than ever before.
As we all know, we are simply playing in Google’s arena and rules can change at anytime. Industries and markets can also disappear overnight. Google doesn’t need to have a reason to act the way it does—it simple does as it likes.
It’s not enough to simply have a website or blog with quality SEO in place; it’s also about knowing what works, what methods to stay away from, and also how your competitors are getting the upper hand.
With all this in mind, we are going to cover some of the more important questions, comments, predictions, and best methods to consider when focusing on mobile search—all of which are provided by industry experts and brands that already have these methods in motion.
Big mobile SEO misconceptions
Search engine optimization (SEO) can almost feel like black magic at the best of times, so it’s perfectly understandable that so many entrepreneurs suffer from so many misconceptions, especially when it comes to the “mobile-first” approach which Google has been taking and will continue to take in 2019.
Many business leaders have a fundamental understanding that their websites need to be reasonably accessible from mobile devices, but from there, the details get fuzzy. “Most entrepreneurs think making their site responsive and load fast are enough to address mobile SEO,” says MailShake and Ramp Ventures co-founder Sujan Patel. “But that’s really only scratching the surface. Entrepreneurs need to focus on the mobile experience and adjust their strategy based on what call to action a mobile user is going to take.”
But it’s not like load times are inconsequential either. Startup growth consultant Roy Povarchik asserts that it’s not just about content; the technical aspects are just as important. “On mobile, everything is on the go,” he says. “Patience is the one thing your users and customer don’t have. Every second that your page takes to load, if your button is a bit too small—whatever delivers a bad experience—creates frustration, which leads to bad site engagement. Google cares about that, especially on mobile.”
The most common misconceptions about mobile SEO really come down to scope and what “mobile first” really means. “Entrepreneurs are conflating the concepts of mobile indexing, mobile crawling, and mobile UX,” says Dan Shure of EvolvingSEO and the “Experts on the Wire” podcast. “Google is not only taking the content it finds on the mobile version of your site as the primary source of content, but it’s also using your mobile site for link discovery, crawling, and accessibility.”
So your first step is to get on the level with what mobile SEO really means, what the mobile user experience is all about, and what Google is really prioritizing with its mobile-first initiative.
The power of user experience
Google’s mission has always been “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This refers not only to the actual content itself, but also how it is presented. A website with the best information, but a terrible layout, will not win many favors. The user experience (UX), which includes such considerations as navigation, usability, and page load times, mustn’t be ignored. For example, mobile web pages that load in under three seconds are likely to rank higher than those that take longer.
“The first thing you need to do is to align your mobile SEO and UX optimization strategies,” asserts Agente Studio Managing Director and Partner Andrew Terehin. But what does that actually mean? Terehin highlights the importance of “thumb-friendly navigation” where you’ll need to pay attention to details like “button sizes or reachable menus with up to seven items.”
But mobile UX optimization is about more than design. “Great UX is what makes you stay on a site, engage with it, consume its content, and spend more time on it,” says Povarchik. He also points out another key difference in the user experience on desktop and on mobile. While we are perfectly comfortable navigating around multiple pages on our desktops, users generally don’t want to do that on mobile, “so we might be seeing sites that have fewer pages actually ranking better.”
Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:
- The Complete 35-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
- 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
- 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
- 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
More big changes
If you’re trying to anticipate where mobile search is headed in 2019, you first need to understand how Google has been approaching its mobile-first indexing and algorithm updates: deliberately and incrementally. In fact, many websites are still not included in Google’s mobile-first index, and some may never be.
What’s more, with the rise of voice search, it matters less whether your site ranks on page one of the search results than it used to. Now it’s all about optimizing to appear in the “answer box” above the top result, because that’s what Google Assistant reads back to people in response to their queries.
Then there’s the evolution of “local search,” where Google discerns searchers’ intent to find information relating to a location near them. Elliott Davidson, CEO and founder of Contrast Digital, believes that Google “will put more emphasis on proximity and also show more listings like featured snippets. This means readers’ questions will be answered directly in the SERPs, and in turn reduce click-through rates on mobile.”
This has been a growing challenge for many site owners, as readers are getting the answers they want without actually clicking through to the website itself. For featured snippets, answer boxes and voice search, your ability to surface in the search results hinges on your use of “schema” tags in your content’s source code.
“Schema markups are going to be more important than ever, since Google is focusing a lot on its knowledge cards and giving the user the answer right on the search page, ” predicts Povarchik. “Sites that can leverage that will get much more traffic and attention than sites that don’t.”
Where the ball is going
From choosing the right fonts to optimizing image sizes, ensuring that you provide the best possible mobile user experience will be critical if you want to gain, retain, or improve your mobile search engine rankings. The ongoing mobile search algorithm rollouts next year will have a dramatic impact on rankings, and you don’t want to be caught with the short end of the stick.
RELATED: Designing Effective PPC Landing Pages for Mobile Devices: Advice From Real Experts
The post Mobile Search Is Evolving—Is Your Business Keeping Up With the Changes? appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post Mobile Search Is Evolving—Is Your Business Keeping Up With the Changes? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Zac Johnson.
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Wellness “For the Culture”
“I still eat rice and beans. I just use brown rice now,” said Annya Santana of Menos Mas, a wellness company that speaks to African-American and Latinx communities.
from neb biz feed 1 https://ift.tt/2SoOEFd
via Nebula Biz Local Loans
from neb biz feed 1 https://ift.tt/2SoOEFd
via Nebula Biz Local Loans
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