4 Blog Mistakes: Reasons People Do Not Read Your Blog

4 Blog Mistakes: Reasons People Do Not Read Your Blog
Sign Documents Electronically With Adobe EchoSign
How Small Businesses Can Compete Against Big Brands in SEM
Why Your Small Business Has the Motivational Edge Over Big Companies
Basecamp Launches Its First Mobile App to Help You Manage Projects

Posted: 13 Feb 2013 11:00 AM PST

I am going to outline four blog mistakes and reasons people don't read certain blogs. This information is good for current blogs and those in the process of designing a blog.

You Give Me Nothing

When I go to a blog, I am often pulled in by the headline. My hope is that I am going to learn something new and/or be educated. I want facts I can use and ideas to enhance my creativity and work. It is very obvious that articles that educate pull in readers. Education should be a goal for all blogs.

When I go to a blog post that has basically rehashed ideas from another article (or articles) I have already read, I lose faith in the writer. A good writer comes up with their own ideas and suggestions and those are the writers I want to see.

I am perfectly fine with someone making points about another article and putting their own spin on it, but if it is a summary of what I have already read, I get aggravated. My time has been wasted and I just don't go back.

As an editor for several blogs, I can tell you that rehashed content is not published because the lack of quality and uniqueness hurts the blog.

Point to Remember: If you want a successful blog, you have to offer something to your readers. Think of your blog posts as gifts. Gifts are unique and given to specific people with specific interests. Your blog posts should be focused on a specific audience and you should be giving something unique to those readers.

Your Site is Too Loud

You want people to see the best you have to offer. Sometimes clutter and colorful items on the site overtake the quality information you provide. You don't want this to happen.

I don't think I have ADD, but on certain websites I feel like I must have it. When I visit a website with too much stuff all over the page I get distracted to the point that my eyes cannot focus on the article I am trying to read (no matter how hard I try). My eyes constantly drift to colors, to the top or sides, and to ads that change often. I thought that this was just an issue I had for a while and then, through the years, I have had many friends, clients and industry acquaintances tell me they have the same problem.

I have a hectic work day and I am typically in a rush to read through things. The blogs that I read typically offer me, and my eyes, a clean and soft place to read. Clean blog layouts are almost comforting because I don't have to force myself to focus. Easy-to-read, informational blogs with unique content I return to often. Blogs can have a full sidebar of information and still offer an easy blog to read.

Point to Remember: I understand that many blogs need to make money and they have ads sprinkled throughout the site. There is nothing wrong with that, but if your ads are so distracting that people cannot read the quality you worked to create, then you don't have a shot at good traffic or making money anyway. Choose ads wisely or create ads that mesh well with your color scheme.

Text is Too Small or Font Is Difficult to Read

I know most people will say “just increase the size of the text” with the browser or computer when reading, but it is not always that simple. Sometimes text is so small that when you zoom in, you have to constantly work to read by scrolling up and down and side-to-side. I don't have time to do that (and it is irritating).

Another issue is, people choosing fancy fonts that look really nice, but are often difficult to read (especially when the font size is too small). There are universal fonts that work on all browsers and are known to be very readable on the Web. I recommend using one of those. You can always use font replacements and other techniques to add some customization to headlines, but the main text needs to be very readable.

Also, think about the background color of your site versus the color of your font. If you are creating something really unique, that is great. But ask at least 10 friends if they think the text is readable.

Point to Remember: Blogs with small text, difficult to read fonts and backgrounds that make reading difficult often push readers away. Make reading easy and pleasurable for your visitors.

There Are No Headlines

I absolutely cannot read a blog with many paragraphs and no headlines, or at least something else to break up the paragraphs. I have heard the same thing from many people and the importance of headlines has been written about often. I blog about headlines often because I think they are really important. Headlines serve multiple purposes for the reader and the blog itself.

Here are just a few:

They help with scannability.
The direction of the article is automatically clear.
Subjects in headlines can interest a possible reader.
They serve an SEO purpose.
They serve as memory devices (for the article itself and important tips).
They simply make things easier to read
They can be used to make your main critical points abundently clear.

Point to Remember: Headlines and supporting images are always good for readability and for creating a spot in the memory of a reader's mind. Think of your readers and what headlines would attract their attention. Test headlines out to see how effective they are.

Four Quick and Simple Things to Change

The four blog mistakes and reasons I outlined can be fairly simple to change. I know some clients, friends and social pals have wanted to avoid creating a whole new blog design and they made changes like these that worked well. However, there were some blogs that just needed a whole new look – and the new "look and feel" has paid off.

If you are serious about blogging, please give the reader something fantastic and make it easy for your readers to see what you’re offering.

Overwhelming Photo via Shutterstock

The post 4 Blog Mistakes: Reasons People Do Not Read Your Blog appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Sign Documents Electronically With Adobe EchoSign

Posted: 13 Feb 2013 09:00 AM PST

Emailing sales or service contracts is now a regular part of nearly every business. The sticky part is getting real signatures. Adobe EchoSign is out to make that smooth and fluid for small business owners who want to improve their operational efficiency.

This digital electronic signature solution from Adobe EchoSign helps in signing, but also in tracking and filing. It supports signing by email (e-signature) or by fax. Yes, there are still many businesses that use fax machines. You can even hand write or sketch your signature via mouse. Plus, there’s an iPad, iPhone, and Blackberry app.

adobe echosign

As you can see in this screenshot above, the first dashboard gets right to the point. You can’t forget what to do because Adobe makes it drop-dead simple. “You Send, They sign, You’re Done” really captures it. If you look toward the bottom of this screenshot, you see that you can add your own signature as well as other options such as verifying the signer’s identity with a password.

Note, you can also allow someone to fax it back by clicking that radio button. With that option, the recipient(s) prints the document, signs by hand, and faxes it back to EchoSign using an included cover sheet. The document is then converted to PDF and filed in your account. That is pretty sweet, I think.

adobe echosign

After sending my first test document, as you can see above, I appreciated the low-key way that they asked me to upgrade. I could easily skip with a simple click of “No thanks.” Well done.

What I really liked:

There is a free version that lets you perform five transactions a month. This includes uploading, altering, and resending.
I am a longtime Adobe Acrobat user and have had the full paid version of Acrobat for years, so I loved that it would let me integrate into PDF forms. One would expect this, of course.
There is an attached audit trail and a sequential signing workflow. Sounds complicated, but this is big if you have multi-department or multi-step signing needs. You could create this in Acrobat, too.

What I would like to see:

An Android app for the “other” smartphone platform. As mentioned, apps are available for the iOS and Blackberry platforms if you work in either of them.

I'd like to see them devote more effort on the mobile front. I could not sign into the iPad version, and thus test it, when I know that I typed in my password correctly. Repeatedly. The mobile app gets low marks in iTunes and with just a bit of effort, they could fix all that.

Overall, the web version rocks and Adobe has done some excellent work to make this elegant and pain free. You can use it for free, forever, or if you have more substantial needs, go Pro at $14.95 per month.

This is a worthwhile addition for the busy small business owner who travels a lot or who simply wants to organize and automate their document signing process.

The post Sign Documents Electronically With Adobe EchoSign appeared first on Small Business Trends.

How Small Businesses Can Compete Against Big Brands in SEM

Posted: 13 Feb 2013 07:00 AM PST

Competing against a bigger brand in search engine marketing (SEM) can be tough – they get all the name recognition and the top ad placements, and in many cases, users may have already established purchasing accounts through them (looking at you, Amazon). The good news is, there are actions you can take to compete with the big guys and still turn a profit.

Break Down Bidding with Localization

Even if your business is currently targeted to the entire country (or world), there are likely going to be specific geos where you may do better than others. Additionally, many bigger brands are likely to use one single bid for an entire targeted area, and you can use this to your advantage.

Using the dimensions tab in AdWords, you can easily pull a geo report at varying levels of granularity. For this example, we'll look at major metros:

Can you spot the outlier?

New York is coming in at almost double the cost per action (CPA) of the top two metros (Los Angeles and San Francisco). In this case, you may want to either exclude New York entirely or move it to its own campaign in order to better target bids to an area with more competition (cost per click (CPCs) are nearly double that of San Francisco CPCs).

The prime advantage offered here is, while it's great for you take this approach at such a granular level, many larger brands advertising across a huge number of verticals may not see a big enough impact on localization to warrant adding that layer of complexity.

What this means is you can pick and choose priority geos where it makes sense to bid higher and actually beat out the bigger brands.

Stress Your Competitive Edge

You may see a bigger brand's ad in the same auction as yours and think it is the result of significant testing. That might be true – but that testing was likely done on a very large scale. This is to say, their testing may have been an ad template applied to an entire vertical. What works overall for a vertical may not necessarily be what works for a single brand – e.g. iPads and Kindle Fires may both be tablets, but they are generally targeted to two very different audiences.

In the case of lower-cost products, it may make sense to emphasize low prices or sales. Whereas with more costly products/brands, a better selling point would be a lifetime guarantee or generous return policy.

It is also critical when considering ad copy to acknowledge where your company may fall short of a bigger brand. (Ship time and price are common areas that you may not be able to compete on.) However, if you are a specialty retailer, such as an online hockey store, then chances are your selection and expertise will greatly outweigh that of a major brand.

In the ad copy, you can emphasize the newest equipment that you just got in stock courtesy of your connections to industry reps, or mention that you have live chat standing by to help people with their selections. This also helps to set user expectations before they even click – if you stay away from mentioning prices or sales, they are less likely to bounce from the page in the event they don't see rock-bottom prices.

This ultimately leads to an increase in conversion rates, which allows you to bid your ad up to a higher position.

Manage Cost Per Click Effectively

With many smaller accounts that I take over, one thing I notice almost every time is that budgets and CPCs are not managed to an optimal level. Often, I will see campaigns that hit their budget cap consistently every day.

Budget caps are a great safety net; they prevent overspend and allow you to test CPC limits without breaking the bank. However, it is far more optimal to manage budget and daily spend via adjusting your bids.

To start with diagnosing a budget-capped campaign, I always first check to see what time of day it is going offline (note: this requires using accelerated delivery in the campaign settings, otherwise you will just have to guess). Go into your budget-capped campaign and then get over to the dimensions tab. Under time, you can choose hour of day:

If you are budget-constrained, you should see fewer than 24 rows of data here. It may stop as early as 4PM. When operating on a fixed budget, this is sub-optimal as you are limiting your potential number of clicks in a day.

For example, say you have $20 to spend on a vertical per day. At position 2, you can get 20 clicks at $1 each and cap out at 6PM. At position 2.5, however, you might get 25 clicks at $.75 and come in just under budget for the day, having run ads all 24 hours of the day.

There is a delicate balance, however, between making your bids too low and losing volume versus adjusting to the right level and maximizing available spend.

Take Advantage of Star Ratings

One thing you will notice with almost all big brands is that their seller ratings are featured alongside their ads:

Did you know these are pulled from a variety of review sites by Google intermittently, and then automatically added to your domain's ads as long as the domain being reviewed matches up? These are known as Seller Rating Extensions, and I have noted they're frequently missed out on by small businesses, for whom I would argue they matter most. (Here's the official AdWords support article.)

In the case of small businesses, reviews can help build confidence in a site/etailer that a customer may have otherwise not been familiar with. Users can be paranoid with regards to whom they provide credit card info to, and as an small business, having those seller ratings in place can help with customer's trust levels.

To get these ratings, I have advised clients to pick 1-2 review sites they already have a profile on and drive users to those sites for a short period of time after purchasing. The cutoff is relatively small. You only need 30 total reviews with an average rating of 3.5 stars or higher.

Tying it all Together

At the end of the day, there is no silver bullet to competing with the big names on AdWords. Every vertical is going to have a different experience and it takes hard work and experimentation to become, and remain, competitive.

Through some more advanced segmentation, bid management and ad copy selection, you should eventually be able to gain a foothold in your respective niche, and hopefully that will be just the beginning.

The post How Small Businesses Can Compete Against Big Brands in SEM appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Why Your Small Business Has the Motivational Edge Over Big Companies

Posted: 13 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

motivational edge Are you looking to hire employees this year, wondering how you can keep the employees you do have from heading off for greener pastures, or struggling for ways to keep them motivated?

Sometimes it seems like small businesses are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to hiring, motivation and retention, compared to big corporations that can offer higher salaries, posh benefits plans and luxurious settings. But a recent article by McKinsey (targeted, ironically, at big companies) points out the advantage small businesses have that they may not realize.

McKinsey looked at how business leaders can develop and encourage top performers in their workforce and found that, while both IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence) are important skills for bringing out the best in your team, what truly matters is the "meaning quotient" (MQ) – in other words, offering them the chance to do work that's meaningful to them.

How can you create meaning at work?

McKinsey makes three recommendations that are far more easy and natural for a small business to implement than a big one:

Don't Just focus on How a Person's Work Benefits the Company

Focus on how it benefits four other elements:

Society as a whole.
The customer.
The work team and the individual worker.

When you drill down to the individual level, whether that's the customer or themselves, employees become more motivated. In a smaller business, it's easy to think in terms of smaller groups and units and to see how what you do on a daily basis affects those around you.

If Steve in fulfillment doesn't pull his weight, Cindy in shipping suffers for it.

Let Employees Write Their Own "Lottery Ticket"

In other words, let them choose what they want to work on and how they want to improve themselves and the company.

While you can't give employees unlimited freedom here, you can (and should) encourage them to think about what aspects of your business they want to learn more about, what new skills they want to develop, where they want to be next year and the year after – and how this can benefit your business.

Motivate Employees with Small, Unexpected Rewards

Can't afford to give a big bonus at year-end?

The good news is maybe you don't need to. McKinsey cites studies that show smaller, random rewards given at unexpected times can prove just as effective.

In fact, because they never come to be seen as expected, such "surprise" rewards can be even more valuable in motivating workers. A thank-you note, small gift or random afternoon off are examples of ways to motivate with the unexpected.

Of course, the bigger picture when it comes to creating meaning at work is that as a small business owner, you're closer to your employees. You can learn what matters to each of them, and what meaning they find in their jobs – whether that's solving customers' problems so they leave with a smile, meeting increasingly higher sales quotas every quarter, or helping the others on their team.

Then, you can make sure each person gets more of what gives his or her work meaning.

How do you create meaning at work in your business?

The post Why Your Small Business Has the Motivational Edge Over Big Companies appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Basecamp Launches Its First Mobile App to Help You Manage Projects

Posted: 13 Feb 2013 03:00 AM PST

Over the past several years, countless project management and productivity apps and services have launched. Many have failed or fallen into obscurity, some are still around and fighting for more customers, and new ones are still launching regularly. But one project management platform that has stuck around and remained relevant since its launch in 2004 is Basecamp.

Now, the platform is launching its first official iOS app to help its users manage projects from their mobile devices without the use of third party apps.

basecamp mobile app

From the app, users can check on the progress of each of their projects, discuss updates with other team members, post comments and upload files, as shown in the photos above.

Though the platform has already been available on the mobile web and through third party apps like Lodge and Everest, the availability of an official application can help users ensure they're getting a quality app with full access to their Basecamp projects.

The app is free but requires an existing Basecamp account, which range from $20 to $150 per month. The basic plan allows you to manage up to 10 projects at a time with 3GB of file storage, and the largest plan allows you to manage unlimited projects with 100GB for file storage.

Basecamp has made a couple other changes in the past year, including a complete redesign of its web app and a new app called Basecamp Personal that allows for users to manage personal projects instead of just business projects.

Basecamp continues to offer the option to use its original version, Basecamp Classic, for those who have older browsers that don't support the new version or just prefer the older one for whatever reason. However, the official iOS app only supports projects run on the newer version of Basecamp.

Basecamp is run by 37signals, which also runs contact management app Highrise and group chat app Campfire. Basecamp was first launched on the web in 2004 and has helped users manage over 8 million projects to date.

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