SMB Acceleration Show: Recent Episodes

SMB Acceleration

SMB Acceleration is a live interactive Small Business marketing show. Wayne and Kevin put their 40 years of experience in marketing to work, providing you with a high-level look at effective ways to improve the marketing of your small business. Small business owners can get an extra benefit by taking advantage of our on-air free small business marketing assessment. This free assessment is a quick analysis of your business website and social media profiles from a user experience, SEO, content & social media marketing perspective.

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In the second video of the series, Kevin goes into how he chooses a name for his new businesses and his process for determining what hosting and email to use.  

Kevin mentions his websites - http://insuranceadviser.org/ and https://webuyrealestateinc.com/ which he found using his expired domain process He attempted to use if for his latest project htps://warehousesforsale.org but couldn't find a suitable domain.   

In This Episode:

  • Finding Expired Domains (with old links)
  • https://www.expireddomains.net/
  • NameCheap - https://www.namecheap.com/
  • WPEngine - https://wpengine.com/
  • Google Suite for Business - https://gsuite.google.com/

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In this episode, Kevin, shares some insight into a new project and how he'll help small business owners looking to start a new website get started.

Kevin also shares a new project he is working on https://warehousesforsale.org/

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Wayne and Kevin talk innovative marketing strategies to implement when working from home for under $1,000

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Improving Your Operations While Your Business Is Closed

Strategies for Building a Website While Your Business Is Closed

  1. How to tell your brand story on your About Page
  2. Improving the content on your website
  3. Pulling the images from your existing website to the new one
  4. Best Practices for Your Contact Page

When and how to use a landing page?

Should I focus on mobile first?

Do I need an about page?

How do I connect my social media channels to my site?

10 elements of a killer landing page that converts

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Kevin and Wayne discuss ways to get yourself setup to work from home.

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Good Morning Philadelphia listeners on WWDB 860 and everywhere else via the livestream. This is Kevin O’Brien and Wayne Widdleton with the SMB Acceleration Show! Today we'll be talking about the importance of cash flow to your small business.

Here's the news we'll be talking about.

  • https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/347149
  • https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/wendys-just-declared-war-on-mcdonalds-breakfast-mcdonalds-response-was-brilliant.html
  • https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2020/03/08/google-announces-a-coronavirus-incentive-for-g-suiteand-other-small-business-tech-news/amp/
  • https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/salesperson-business-owner-credit-cards-cover-personal-hotel-travel%3famp
  • https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/03/kabbage-insights-hopes-to-keep-small-businesses-cash-positive.html

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Good Morning Philadelphia listeners on WWDB 860 and everywhere else via the livestream. This is Kevin O’Brien and Wayne Widdleton with the SMB Acceleration Show! If you miss anything or want more information visit our website - https://smbacceleration.com

Using Facebook Messenger as a Small Business.

  • For the small business owners not familiar with Facebook Messenger. What is it?
  • What are some tips to help a small business owner get up and running with Messenger quickly?
  • If you were starting a small business, how would you look to use Messenger?
  • For small business owners who are looking to run ads, would you recommend pairing Messenger with ad spend?
  • Beyond messenger what other tools or assistance does FB offer to small businesses?
  • Does FB offer any Messenger or Ad training or certification programs for users? If so how does a small business owner get started?

Small Business News We Covered In Today's SMB Acceleration Show

  • https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/hotels/2019/11/22/home-2-suites-mississippi-lets-guests-adopt-dog-right-hotel/4247171002/
  • https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/v/s/www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/2020/02/28/attract-new-customers-small-business-tips/amp/%3famp_js_v=0.1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%253D#ampf=
  • https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/small-businesses-are-pushing-trump-to-fight-chinese-counterfeits.html
  • https://hoodline.com/2020/02/the-hardest-easy-solution-to-sf-s-small-business-crisis-buying-the-building

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Be sure to stay tuned for the entire SMB Acceleration Show today, as we are going to be joined by Bart Mroz CEO of Sumo Heavy.

SUMO Heavy is a boutique digital commerce consulting firm with a core foundation of efficiency through process.

We build successful brands and create online retail solutions with proven results.

So if you miss anything today, you’re gonna want to be sure to download the podcast. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Google, Spotify, and more.

So be sure to stay tuned as we are going to get right into it.

In the News:

Small businesses coming up empty on internet searches

Though 90% of consumers use the internet to find local business, many have no website

https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/small-business-coming-up-empty-on-internet-searches

In a world where e-commerce and digital outreach are becoming commonplace in business, it’s rare to find a company without a website.

But according to a study by portfolio company Visual Objects, one-third (29%) of all 30 million American small businesses plan to create a website for the first time in 2020.

Questions for Bart:

  1. What’s the best platform for someone looking to start an ecommerce business?
  2. What advice would you give someone starting out with an e-commerce business?
  3. Would you spend any time on organic social media or SEO?
  4. What’s something you see that is missed by most people just starting out with e-commerce?
  5. What do you think abou Print on Demand POD
  6. For $1 day in Ads...what platform would you recommend someone using first?
  7. What are simple mistakes people can avoid when setting up their ecommerce brand.
  8. Help the listeners out….What’s 1 type of business you think is currently underrepresented on the web
  9. What’s 1 app or strategy that you recommend to any small business owner?

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Wayne and Kevin discuss the stresses associated with small business ownership in this week's, SMB Acceleration Show. 

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This week's SMB Acceleration Show is an interview with local Small Business Health Insurance and Employee Benefits Broker Joe Walker. Joe is the owner of Dignity Insured, just outside Philadelphia and shares his journey as a small business owner and his innovative insurance program for Amazon DSP 2.0 business owners.  

  1. How do small business owners get started offering employees health insurance?

  2. For business owners who may be offering some kind of employee benefits, how do they turn that into a complete employee benefits package?

  3. As a broker, what are the biggest ways you can help small business owners save money on employee benefits?

  4. Benefits of having an employee benefits broker

  5. Amazon FBA Insurance program - How Joe beats Amazon's preferred vendor by $100 per employee per month.

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We have a great show ahead today. We have an amazing guest, Birgit Leuders, who’s a solopreneur who's looking to grow brand awareness for her business while establishing strong marketing channels. 

About Birgit's Business: BirgitCare:

BirgitCare is a holistic approach to improving your well being through the interconnection of Body, Mind and Spirit. Treating the whole person rather than separate body parts, one’s Health and Well-being can greatly flourish.  At BirgitCare you will receive a customized wellness improvement plan based on a private personalized evaluation. A traditional observation tool called Iridology will be used during the consultation. A nutritional and physical lifestyle evaluation is also included with every initial visit and will help direct you towards improving you overall health.

Birgitcare’s approach is to help the body to utilize its own healing power.

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We have a great show ahead today. We’re gonna be building on last week’s show and get small business owners ready to accelerate their business growth in 2020.

Today’s show is going to be a focus on promoting your blogging efforts and the importance of the customer journey/buying experience to a business. 

So what is the Customer Journey?

Let Wayne explain...

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Hello this is Kevin O’Brien and Wayne Widdleton with the SMB Acceleration Show!

Before we get into today’s show….

We have a great show ahead today. We’re gonna be building on last week’s show and get small business owners ready to accelerate their business growth in 2020.

Today’s show is going to be a focus on creating images for your blogs and social media.

Blogging is still highly effective and still not enough businesses are utilizing this timeless strategy.

Incorporate Visuals - Wayne provides tips on how to create blog images. Should I use type in my posts? How do videos rate vs still photo’s? Where can I access free images if I can’t create my own? What platforms are best to use?

  1. Canva
  2. GetStencil
  3. PicMonkey
  4. Adobe Creative Suite - Mobile Apps.

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We have a great show ahead today. We’re gonna be building on last week’s show and get small business owners ready to accelerate their business growth in 2020.

Today’s show is going to be a focus on content marketing, specifically blogging.

Blogging is still highly effective and still not enough businesses are utilizing this timeless strategy.

Quick Reminder: Wayne is based out of the Allentown area and available to meet with small business owners throughout the Lehigh Valley to help them get started with blogging for their business.

Alright let’s get into in my opinion one of the foundations of growth content marketing and specifically blogging.

First, let’s discuss how small business owners can get started with blogging in 2020.

If you don’t have the ability to blog on your current website you’ll need to Decide on a blogging platform or a website platform which offers the ability to have a blog. There are numerous excellent options such as Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress, and Blogger.

It's all about Consistency and Content.

Local Small Business Blogging Topics

  1. Community & Local News
  2. Local Events
  3. Sponsorships or Volunteer Work
  4. Guides to Local Events
  5. Local Resource
  6. Review Local Businesses
  7. Interview Local Business Owners or Townspeople
  8. Best of Lists.

B2B Blog Ideas

  1. Interviews
  2. Book or podcast review
  3. Testimonials
  4. Industry News
  5. Company Events
  6. Your Employees

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Wendy Saltzman, 3-time Emmy award-winning news reporter & Founder of Philly Power Media, joins the show to discuss video marketing and how small businesses can get started producing video content in 2020.

Questions Wendy Answered:

  1. What do you think is the biggest thing stopping more small business owners from using video in their marketing?
  2. What advice would you give for small business owners looking to get started with using video in their marketing?
  3. What type of topics do you think are best for business videos?
  4. For small business owners looking to commit to using video, what type of budget do you think they would need to get started?
  5. For business owners with really limited budgets, what recommendations would you make to help them shoot their own videos?

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LinkedIn

  1. Personal profile and business page
    1. Do businesses need both?
    2. What’s a good strategy to grow a personal profile?
    3. Should business owners be branding themselves on LinkedIn

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Kevin and Wayne explore the best ways for businesses to be using Social Media in 2020. 

Kevin makes a bold statement about Facebook, which leaves Wayne speechless. See if you agree.

Small Business Social Media in 2020

Let’s talk social media because it’s one area we’re constantly getting question.

First, should social media be a part of every small business marketing strategy?

Let’s talk about how small businesses should be using social media in 2020.

I guess the easiest way would be to go platform by platform.

Quick thought before we get into the platforms. I’ve always felt a blog is basically an extension of your social media strategy - what’s your thoughts?

  1. Facebook

    1. Business page strategies for 2020

      1. Should organic still be used?
      2. Paid strategies that won’t break the bank
      3. Facebook Business Manager
      4. Instagram
        1. Wayne’s recent breaking followers for his profile - what he found changing up his stratgy
        2. What types of items should be created

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  • Getting Started with using email for your small business
  • How to create your first contact list
  • Getting started with email marketing for your small business
  • First steps in marketing automation
  • Hubspot and MailChimp

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Good Morning Philadelphia listeners on WWDB 860 and everywhere else via the livestream. this is KO and WM with the SMB Acceleration Show

Remember if you If you miss anything this morning on the radio broadcast or livestream, you can catch the podcast on our website smbacceleration.com or anywhere podcasts are found.

If you’re a small business owner looking to accelerate their business growth, I recommend taking advantage of our Small Business Marketing Audit.

This deal is remarkable. As our complete marketing and branding audits usually start around $2,500.

You get the same great service for $99 if you request in before 12/31.

Just a quick sentence on it. This is the fastest way to get an enterprise level marketing audit for under $100 and 96% off the normal price.

Any questions about the audit or your marketing give us a call at 1-855-308-5825

Small Business Marketing News

  1. Adobe Analytics Findings on Small Business Saturday

    1. More people are shopping on their phones. Adobe said Sunday that smartphone revenue made up 41.2% of all e-commerce revenue on Saturday. That is up 22% from a year ago.
    2. Shoppers, many of them using smartphones, spent $3.6 billion buying online from small businesses on Saturday.
    3. Adobe Analytics, which tracks online sales, says that’s up 18% from a year earlier
    4. NY Post Article
    5. These are the top goals American small business owners want to achieve in 2020 -https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/12/06/these-are-the-top-goals-american-small-business-owners-want-to-achieve-in-2020/amp/

The study of 500 US small business owners found their top objectives for 2020 include substantially increasing revenue and growth and reaching new customers.

Restaurant Choice - How Next Gen Voice Assistants need to improve Customer Experience - choosing a bad restaurant instead of a good one

Every report in Analytics is made up of dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions are attributes of your data.

For example, the dimension City indicates the city, for example, "Paris" or "New York", from which a session originates. The dimension Page indicates the URL of a page that is viewed.

Metrics are quantitative measurements. The metric Sessions is the total number of sessions. The metric Pages/Session is the average number of pages viewed per session.

The tables in most Analytics reports organize dimension values into rows, and metrics into columns. For example, this table shows one dimension (City) and two metrics (Sessions and Pages/Session).

:

Users: People interact with your property (e.g., your website or app)

Sessions: Interactions by a single user are grouped into sessions.

Hits: Interactions during a session are referred to as hits. Hits include interactions like pageviews, events, and transactions.

A single user can have multiple sessions, and each session can have multiple hits, as illustrated below:

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As we mentioned before the break, There’s a few things we wanted to bring up this week that we didn’t get to touch on in last week’s show on using video to market your small business.

  1. YouTube is 2nd largest search engine in the world
    1. Importance of understanding the type of searches on YouTube. Lots of people looking hot to do things/answers to questions.
    2. Why an ad budget should be used for every video. Even $1 - $3
  2. Optimizing your Youtube videos.
    1. When you’re done shooting the video make sure that you rename the filename with relevant keywords (ideally you will using the keywords in your title of your blog post, but you may not have decided on this yet.).
    2. Youtube titles have a 100 character limit and the most important keywords should begin the video title. Some good words to include in titles are “How To” “:About” “Understanding”
    3. The video description field allows for a maximum of 5,000 characters. The description should include a summary of the video along with a link to additional resources like the Industrial Investments website, any relevant links mentioned in the article,
    4. Tags can use up to 120 characters, so it’s best to start with the most relevant tags and then add them in order of importance.
    5. Add annotations
    6. Create a “channel trailer” explaining the video blog (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3026513?hl=en%20feature)
    7. Update all your email signature files with a link to your new video podcast episode Add a new Link To Your Video In Your Email Signature
      1. If using GMail/G Suite it’ll show a thumbnail for a video link.

  3. Promoting Your Videos

    1. Email your mailing list (Become An Industrial Insider Insider List)
    2. Update your email signature to include a link to the video blog
    3. Share YouTube Video via email, Google+ and Twitter
    4. Upload video to Facebook page directly and share
    5. Update your Twitter profile to include the link of the latest episode
    6. Share your post image on Pinterest
    7. Share in any Facebook groups you belong to
    8. Buy Facebook Ads targeting a narrowly defined audience ($5 an episode)
    9. Buy Youtube Ads around relative searches ($5 an episode)
    10. Share on LinkedIn in groups, your status and to all your contacts

Break - We’re going to take a break...when we come back we’re going to be talking about a question Injabe for Wayne. It came up during Thanksgiving and I’d love to get his thoughts.

Before we go though, just a reminder if you miss any of the show you can catch it on our website smbacceleration.com or anywhere podcasts are found. Also, small business owners check out our listener special.

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  1. Shooting video with your phone

    1. Here are some quick tips:

      1. Shoot Horizontal not vertical - If you want people to be able to watch your video at full size on a monitor or TV screen, keep your smartphone horizontal when you are recording
      2. Keep it smooth and steady - Your smartphone is small and light, but it can be held surprisingly steady. The key thing is to use both hands, and lock your elbows into your body for extra stability.
      3. Use classic compositions - A good one to start with is the rule of thirds. Some phones allows you to activate a grid on the camera app. Now this doesn't always work in video mode, but you can flick to 'photo' while you get your shot set up. Where the lines cross in the frame are all good places to put something of interest, or if you're recording a person, position their head over one of these points.
      4. The light is your friend - Light is a wonderful thing, but it can be a friend or foe when shooting video. If you want to shoot better video, you need to know how to work, with the available light and use it to your advantage. When outdoors, try and find a position where the sun is evenly lighting the scene you want to record
      5. Don’t be afraid to mix it up - Whatever your subject, think about what other shots you can get to complement your master shot, and add to the story. It can be as simple as shooting your subject both from close up and further away, or getting someone to repeat a performance (like a cartwheel) a few times so you can capture it from a variety of angles. You'll end up with better video as you'll find better angles to shoot from.
      6. We’ll be writing a blog on this very topic that you can read by visiting www.smbaccleration.com

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Small Business CRM

  1. Current examples of excel + outlook.
    1. Limitations of this strategy
    2. Insurance company example of using a spreadsheet and comparative rater but no CRM.
  2. Do you need a CRM for your business?
    1. Hubspot
    2. ActiveCampaign
    3. MailChimp (debate whether it’s a crm or not)
    4. Google Drive + Forms?

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Gmail or G Suite?

  • In order to get the most out of Google products you need a Google account
  • G Suite for Small Business Email
  • Ease of use compared to Outlook
  • Collaboration on Google Docs
  • Version Control
  • Integration between Google products
  • If not G suite setup a Gmail for your marketing

Why Small Businesses Need to Advertise Digitally

  • Digital vs Traditional
  • Google Ads
  • Alternatives ad channels Yelp, YP, etc
  • Finding the right audience

Why Google Tag Manager Should Be Used By every Small Business

  • Setting up tag manager
  • Pixels
  • Analytics / Ads / call Tracking
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • HotJar
  • Hubspot / CRM

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Wordpress - Pros - powers 30% of sites on the web

  • Lots of free themes and plugins
  • Great number of paid options for plugins

  • Multiple options for Drag and Drop builders

  • Thrive Builder

  • WP Bakery
  • Divi
  • Gutenberg

  • Many more

  • Possible to find lots of options for developers.

  • Lots of functionality - plenty
  • Lots of documentation and How To articles available
  • Hosting can be cheaper monthly than Square/Wix

Cons - Requires an in-house marketing person familiar with WordPress or hiring someone or agency to maintain the site

  • Updating core files and plugins
  • Security Issues due to number of sites running WP
  • If not careful can end up with a lot of low quality pages being indexed. (Author / Tags / Category)

SquareSpace

  • Great option for businesses who don’t have a Marketing person
  • Integrates with Google Drive
  • Lowest priced version has design limitations
  • Integrates with Google Drive

Wix