Category Archives: small business

Becoming an Expert in Your Niche Market

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For your business, it’s important to be considered an expert in your niche field. People trust experts: you will find bright people wanting to work for you, customers wanting to buy from you and other companies seeking to collaborate with you. According to the Nielsen Study, expert content are about 83% more effective than branded content in generating brand awareness.

One of the biggest challenges of establishing yourself in a niche market is to prove to your audience that you really are indeed an expert in your niche.

talk to the experts

What is an expert?

Before we delve into how you can become an expert in your niche market, let’s hit the basics.

Clearly, the first component of being an expert requires someone who knows the subject well. In addition to knowledge, an expert is someone with experience in that particular field, having utilized that knowledge. Typically, this is someone that has credibility gained through an audience that trusts them. In the online realm, this often translates into followers on various social media platforms as an indication of this trust.

What is a niche?

A niche business is one that focuses on smaller, but specific and well-segmented target market. They are created by identifying needs and wants that are poorly being satisfied by other companies, if at all. As a strategy, a niche business is essentially “the big fish in a small pond.”

Becoming an expert is easy. Simply know more about something than the people you are talking to. The big question: how to pick that particular niche? The narrower your niche is, the easier it is to become an expert.

When searching for a niche, look for a distinct and specific set of needs that someone has and aim to find a solution to completely satisfy them.

Where can you present your expertise?

The big task is proving your expertise to your audience. It’s important to make them aware that you know what you are talking about in order to earn their trust. The only way for them to realize your knowledge in your niche is to share it with the world. Some common platforms include blogs, forums and social media tools like Twitter or Facebook.

If you want to extend your audience, you could reach out to other expert bloggers to guest blog on their platform, thus getting your business’s and your name out there as much as possible.

How is credibility built?

Anybody can voice their opinion about a topic, but people are inclined to listen to an expert’s opinion. So where does the line between blogger and expert lie? Here are a couple ways that you can cultivate your expertise:

Find your passion

First and foremost, you should have a strong interest in your niche. This is what distinguishes a good website from a great one and what keeps you motivated to produce quality content. Your passion shows in your work and followers will react to that.

Know your niche

It’s important to know exactly who you are targeting. Here’s the perfect niche formula:

Your Target Audience + What You Offer + Your Appeal to This Audience = Big Time Value

Being an expert is important, but knowing the questions that need to be answered is even more so. Your customers are the backbone of your business’s success, so get to know exactly who you are targeting by doing the research and documenting your findings.

Hang out in forums that your target market will likely be in and create customer profiles. According to Control, a SaaS company that offers customer intelligence for small businesses, you should keep updating your research since your primary target audience changes as your business grows and evolves. Once you know your customers better, you can easily address their problems and predict their behaviours.

Map out your business model

With the digital age at it’s peak and the marketplace competition saturated, you want to really perfect your model and create a unique selling point. Get your product, service and content creation plan polished so that your audience views you as an expert solution. Keep in mind that quality is always better than quantity.

Put in the 10,000 hours

I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase in some form: “You can be an expert at anything with 10,000 hours of practice.” Practice makes perfect and the only way to be an expert is through experience. You may not begin with much knowledge, but anyone can become an expert if they are willing to put in the hours. So keep persisting, growing and learning from your mistakes.

Keep expanding your knowledge

Find out what research has to say. Discover who the leaders and influencers are in your niche and follow them on social media. Hit the bookstores and libraries and subscribe to the newsletter of your competitors. Keep brushing up on your skills by surfing the internet and staying current on industry news and market trends related to your field. This can give you a better grasp on your market and inspire new content. Learn from experts firsts hand and broaden your knowledge by going to events and workshops, you might even find a mentor along the way.

Believe in yourself

There are many qualified people out there who are too timid to believe that they are worthy of the title of “expert.” However, by shifting your vision and self-belief by acknowledging your experience and knowledge in your field, you can easily position yourself as an expert solution. The old adage: fake it until you make it, stands true in becoming an expert. Have an opinion and articulate your views as if you are an expert — even if you don’t quite believe so yet.

Takeaways

The digital market has changed dramatically over the past couple years and will continue to do so. The best way to survive this transformation?

Become an expert.

Being an expert can drive your sales up as it means that you have followers that trust in the products or services that you provide, making it easier to establish customer loyalty. In addition, it means that you have the knowledge and experience to produce quality content and react to the changing markets. Keep learning and sharing your knowledge and in no time, you will have no problem establishing yourself as an expert and growing your business.

Top 4 Everyday SEO Tools for Small Business 

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Getting SEO right is the first step to a successful digital strategy for any organization. If correctly implemented, it will lead to higher page rankings on search engines, better site visibility, increased organic traffic, as well as improved advertising efficiency. These, in turn, translate to increased revenue and business growth. However, despite SEO being useful, many small businesses do not enjoy these obvious benefits for a couple of reasons.

Some are not conversant with the strategies, while others mistakenly presume setting a Search Engine Optimization campaign is a one-time set-and-forget thing. A successful SEO campaign involves continuous careful planning and implementation. Fortunately, there are many helpful digital tools business owners can use to understand and improve their online marketing efforts. Some of these tools include;

· Google Analytics

· Semrush

· Ahref

· Open site explorer

 

1. Google Analytics

It is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. This Google tool gives business owners the means of assessing the performance of their digital marketing campaigns. It offers valuable information like where the site visitors come from, how they ended up on the site, what attracted the visitors to the site, the keywords that they used, the content they loved, as well as the marketing tactics that resulted in the most leads and conversions. Furthermore, the tools support the multiple viewing of Google Analytics, exportation of reports to different formats like PDF, CSV, TSV, XML and much more.

Armed with such statistics, it becomes easy for small business owners to determine whether or not the website meets the desired objective. To get this free useful tool, a business owner simply needs to set up a Google account and install the Analytics tracking code to his or her website or blog.

Small business owners should log in daily in their google analytics account and keep an eye on the performance of their keywords this helps the entrepreneurs to create a successful ongoing content strategy for the site through constant brainstorming.

2. SEMrush

Even though SEMrush’s designers had SEO professional in mind when creating this useful SEO tool, small business webmasters can also benefit significantly from it. The way it works is that one inputs on the semrush.com platform, the URL of the website under consideration. The platform will then generate a list of keywords for which the site in question already ranks on search engines and an estimate of the number of times people searched those particular keywords in a given month. Subsequently, a business owner can decide whether or not a particular keyword is worth optimizing. So weekly check your keyword position and that of your competitor.

SEMrush users concur that it is one of the leading competitive research tools in the digital world. It is a superb way of monitoring and researching the competitor’s ads in that when combined with the competitor’s website data it is easy to study, understand and defeat the competition. The tool comes in two versions of free and premium. The paid version naturally contains more superior features including the ability to perform more searches daily.

3. Ahrefs

Any seasoned webmaster would attest to the importance of backlinks in as far as web traffic generation and web page ranking goes. The higher the number of links directing to your website, the higher the chances of traffic. The links, however, must be natural to ensure they are not flagged by Google algorithms such as Penguin, subsequently affecting the page rankings. Thanks to the Ahrefs tool, a small business owner has access to a full backlink tools suite. It contains useful features like the Site Explorer, Position Explorer, Content Explorer, Position Tracker, Crawl Report and Ahrefs Alerts. Aherf back link index is far superior and updated very frequently. So check if you are getting backlinks.

These tools make it possible to assess if the website links come from legitimate sites, and remove those that come from illegitimate or spammy platforms. Furthermore, through Ahrefs, a person can conduct a competitor analysis to identify the source of the competitor’s backlinks and adopt the strategies that would lead to success.

4. Moz Open Site Explorer

Moz is another backlink tool, but it does other things as well. For instance, it offers small business webmasters several tracking tools for understanding better the website’s search engine landscape and determine the importance of a site. It does so by revealing the top ranking keywords on the site, the high authority pages, the number of backlinks, lists of URLs that direct to your site as well as the most recent links to your site or blog. Such information is vital for increasing the amount of outbound links that lead to the site. The tool has a user-friendly and easy to use interface. Just go to the moz.com website, input your URL and conduct a search.

But the most useful function of the open site explorer is the measurement of Domain Authority that since the demise of google Page Rank is rapidly becoming the standard. Domain Authority or often abbreviated DA is a measure of the domain strength. From 0 to 100 it tells how powerful and authoritative is your site. You can use for free and if you register you can get more searches for no money. Check it here.

moz

Domain Authority tells how powerful is your domain.

 

 

Conclusion

The above tools are relatively straightforward to use and include free versions. They are ideal for any small business owner who wishes to revamp his or her SEO campaigns and help the company achieve its profitability and growth objectives.