Today, with some banks limiting loans to small businesses, invoice factoring has emerged as an increasingly  popular means of alternative finance. Since factoring advances money on invoices owed to a company, it’s not technically “credit.”   So businesses can get their hands on much needed cash flow quickly, without going through some of the traditional bank loan underwriting activities.

This infographic by CBAC Funding below traces invoice factoring from ancient times, follows it through to persecuted Jews fleeing to Italy, touches upon its use to help trade with English colonists in America and highlights invoice factoring growth in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States.

It also explains invoice factoring, its benefits for small businesses and its ability to stand the test of time. The idea behind this graphic is to give you a sense of factoring’s place in history as well as its importance today to small businesses.

[Click here to see full size version]

The post Invoice Factoring Growth Up to the 21st Century appeared first on Small Business Trends.

If hustle was the key for traditional businesses to work, the hustle now has a new avatar. Earlier, it was pure hustle followed by the transaction. Today, it’s all about hustling with information. It’s more about informing, gaining trust, leveraging social media, amassing social proof, nurturing customers and then facilitating a sale.

For each of the steps in the modern buying cycle, content marketing plays a vital role. You probably know by now that content is at the heart of Internet marketing. Let’s see why companies should adopt a content marketing culture.

Companies Should Adopt a Content Marketing Culture

Culture Rules Behavior and Hence, Actions

What do Southwest Airlines, and Apple share in common? It’s culture. For each company, everything centers on culture. If Southwest Airlines is known for their legendary customer service and if Apple is known for designing some of the best lifestyle products in the world, it’s not so much about these companies making new products, innovating constantly and producing products and services that are world-class. There’s no mistake that these companies are the best in what they do; it’s just that they do it that way because they defined a culture to back up their businesses.

Culture, in a traditional sense, influences how people behave and hence act. It applies for businesses too. Content marketing needs a cultural backing because it envelops your business, involves everyone and it’s often the window of information exchange between the stake holders of your business and with your customers. Even small businesses such as WebpageFX, a Web design and development company, tries to breed culture as a part of growing up.

Culture Brings in Consistency

You’ll break rules, thwart the norm and almost always forget company policies. Culture, admittedly, is hard to break away from. You’ll occasionally slip and roll away but culture finds a way to bind production values, business ethics and core business philosophy. Further, culture brings in consistency.

People who belong to a particular culture almost always behave in a particular way. If you’ve applied that to business operations, product design and business processes, what do you get? The success of your content marketing depends on consistency and a content marketing culture helps you find that.

Culture Lends Voice

If a content marketing culture is a part of your business, everyone involved has a voice which finds its way into published content such as blogs, whitepapers, reports and books. This content will also make an impressionable mark on internal and external business communications.

Voice has character. Voice brings life. Voice is how your customers will come to recognize, value and relate with you. Businesses without a voice and hence, personality, character and values, aren’t businesses. They are more like short-term trading posts. Content marketing with a voice, which culture will find a way to define, gives your business some muscle. It lets you make a difference in style.

Have Culture; Will Differentiate

Your business creates products and services that are bound to solve a particular problem your potential customers have. Almost any business can do that. If so, how do you differentiate your business from competition? Customer service is one way. Your products and services are another way. The trouble with these differentiating points is that they are easy to replicate. Your competition can find a way to compete. They can’t, however, have the same culture as yours.

Just like every human is unique, every business with culture is special – one of a kind. Your competition can’t copy your culture; it can’t do things the way you do it. Culture now catapults your business to a unique stage of infallibility.

Culture is the Secret of Branding

Brands are created because promises are kept – consistently, repeatedly and unmistakably. Over periods of time, customers relate to brands; they come to trust these products. If you ever thought about how brands manage to achieve this level of consistency, the answer is culture again. Toyota cars don’t break down. McDonald’s Burgers almost always taste the same. Apple’s laptops don’t fail.

It’s possible to achieve this level of reputation only on the basis of working with a culture that clearly defines what each brand is supposed to achieve for businesses that depend on branding for profitability.

Provide a Unified Customer Experience

The better you serve your customers, the more they will buy from you. They will also spread the word about your business and they will come back more often to buy. To provide such customer experience is not easy though.

Culture gives your business a common ground to provide a unified customer experience. The logos, corporate branding kits and color schemes work to an extent. What customers finally take home is what they feel about your business. The ‘feeling’ comes from how you squeeze your business culture to provide a great experience for your customers.

Culture Demands Work

It takes a tremendous amount of work to run a business, to market your business, to provide customer service and to keep the wheels of business moving. How do so many moving parts come together? What’s that one thing that motivates employees, keeps business processes smooth and allows businesses to grow while keeping customers delighted? It’s hard work and it takes a lot more than task sheets and general management to make that happen. It takes years of ingrained culture.

Content marketing, like marketing itself, is not just the work of marketing department; it’s everyone’s work. Effective content marketing is everyone’s work. When all
stake holders wrap their heads around content marketing, it begins to show results. It creates an impact. Profits come from the reach of this impact.

Culture Gets You Firing on All Cylinders

Get together and work for a common cause and it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities of such collaboration. Business takes more than the need to make money, to provide employment and to trade. It requires a commitment to excel. You can have no half-hearted attempts in business. You can’t keep customers if they remain neutral about their feelings towards your products and services.

To get the equation right, you’ll need to fire up on all cylinders. You need gumption, zeal and a habit of excellence. Since your content marketing strategy also involves effort to get all this happening for you, culture gets you to the firing zone. It’s the spark that lights up the cylinders. It pushes the pistons.

How does your business culture influence the way you run your business? How deep does your content marketing culture and strategy go?

Content Photo via Shutterstock

The post 8 Reasons Companies Should Adopt a Content Marketing Culture appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Have I lost my mind? No.

I’m talking about an age old practice that multinational corporations employ every day. I’m talking about acquisitions.

There is a way to guarantee a long term boost in traffic with a single, and relatively simple, action – buy a blog that already has traffic, and redirect it your site. Major bonus points if you hire the blogger too. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

Blog Acquisition: A Surefire Growth Strategy

Step 1: Find a Blogger

Big time advertisers understand the value of a celebrity endorsement, and the psychology of trust doesn’t change just because you’re operating in the digital world.

It’s not uncommon for content marketers and SEO professionals to hire “ghost writers” to work for them. There’s nothing wrong with that practice. But for some strange reason, many of us have fallen into the trap of thinking we need to own every aspect of thought leadership ourselves.

The reality is that Huffington Post will feature articles by Bill Maher and the New York Times will hire economist Paul Krugman. They do this because working with trusted people is a great way to build trust. It’s a practice that adds credibility to the brand.

The great thing about online marketing is that you can scale down concepts like “celebrity endorsements” and “acquisitions” until you reach something that fits your budget.

Maybe your brand can’t afford Paul Krugman, but you can probably afford to hire a blogger with a few thousand visitors each month. All you need to do is pay them better than they can pay themselves. The truth is, most bloggers aren’t that great at monetizing their blog. It’s simply not their specialty and ads don’t pay all that well.

Step outside the marketing bubble. You don’t want to hire a blogger who is a “marketer.” You want to hire a blogger who is passionate about subjects that your target audience cares about. So don’t turn to Textbroker or Elance to find your match; turn to Google or Twitter:

• Do an Internet search for your topics with “site:wordpress.com,” “site:tumblr.com,” or “site:blogger.com” to find popular, amateur bloggers.
• Try digging through some of the deeper pages in the search results for hidden gems.
• From the Google search bar, click “More,” and “Blogs” to limit your results to blogs.
• Search Twitter for popular tweets on your subject.
• Check out FollowerWonk to find influential tweeters in your key subjects.

Look for blogs with a decent domain authority in OpenSiteExplorer. Look for a fair number of comments and social media activity. In other words, qualify your prospects the same way you would if you were looking for a guest post – only with even more rigor.

Obviously, you will also want to ask whether the blogger is a good fit for your brand culture. This is more important than any other metric. The better the fit, the less difficulty you’ll have with integration and management later on.

Step 2: Buy the Blog and Hire the Blogger

This is where things can get a bit hairy. Don’t assume that just because you can pay the blogger better than they can pay themselves that they’ll just hand everything over without any questions. You’re end goal is to hire the blogger as well as import their blog to your domain. If you’re hiring the right kind of blogger, this can be scary for them.

Remember, they’ve poured years of work into their blog and care about it deeply. The thought of doing it for a living, or even for a little extra cash each month, is probably very exciting to them, but they will have reservations. They don’t want you to suck all the fun out of it, and they don’t want to see their baby become some corporate tool.

For things to go smoothly, you’ll want to make sure to accommodate their needs. Let them keep most of the control over the content of their blog, let them keep their personal brand and try to keep the same feel of the original blog. If you feel the need to micromanage everything the blogger does, you probably chose the wrong blogger to work with.

It’s a good idea to get something signed in writing that will assure both you and the blogger that their needs are going to be met and their concerns won’t be an issue.

Ideally, the blog will exist on a folder of the main site, not on a subdomain. This can cause some uneasiness for some bloggers, so it’s up for debate and you’ll need to use discretion. Generally speaking, however, if the blogger is unwilling to accept moving their blog directly to your site, the cultural differences might be too much of an issue. Search engines, and most people, will treat a subdomain as a separate entity. Since the goal is to grow your website and your online audience, it’s usually better to avoid subdomains.

There are countless stories of redesigns that ruined websites (goodbye Digg), so tread carefully when it comes to making changes. It’s probably best to leave everything almost identical immediately after the import, and save the changes and integration for later, after the audience has gotten used to the idea of the acquisition.

You want to redirect the entire blog, not send every visitor to a new homepage or subdomain on your site. Redirects can be finicky but here are some guides you should check out:

• Google’s walkthrough for Blogger.com redirects
• WordPress.com redirects
• Tumblr redirects
• About.com’s guide for site wide redirects

If a user sees a title in the Google search results and clicks on it, you want them to land on a copy of the original page. Redirects to the home page will just confuse and annoy users. Don’t  mess with what made the blog work in the first place.

Step 3: Streamline

After the blog is imported and the redirects are set up, the job is far from over. Some of the things you’ll need to plan for include:

• How to balance the needs of the blogger, the blogger’s audience, and your brand.
• How to leverage the blog to grow trust with your brand.
• How to straighten out any residual cultural differences (there will almost always be some).

A big part of this is going to come down to project management. Since you’ll most likely be working with a blogger who doesn’t live within driving distance of your office, it’s a good idea to work with online project management software like WorkZone, or something similar. Email is a cumbersome interface for projects of this magnitude, especially if you need to track time spent on projects.

Some of the sources of friction can include:

• The desire to write engaging content versus the desire to get conversions.
• The need to keep the feel of the old blog and the need to connect it with your brand.
• The allure of promising keywords versus the need for creative ideas.

Incentives can do a lot to alleviate these problems. If you reward the blogger based on the number of conversions their blog posts create, rather than simply order them to include conversion copy, you can expect to get better results.

But don’t just throw money at your blogger’s concerns to make them go away. Listen as well. There is a good chance that your blogger’s concerns are similar to the concerns of their audience. Carelessly incentivising those concerns away could actually alienate your blogger from their core audience, a situation that could backfire.

Even though your blogger doesn’t work in the office, it’s a good idea to pull them into the inner workings of the company to some degree. The more involved your blogger is with the rest of your team, the more they will understand your company culture and send the right message. This is another reason to use collaborative software, but you can’t rely on technology to handle everything. Ask your team members to work on collaborative projects with your blogger. This will help strengthen their relationship with the company, as well as provide material for the blog itself.

Conclusion

While buying blogs, along with their bloggers, is a surefire way to boost traffic in the short term, it’s not necessarily a surefire way to boost profit or long term results. It will start you off on the right foot, and continued acquisitions are a great way to continue scaling your business.

That said, it takes keen project management and sound strategy to keep the ball rolling effectively.

Surefire Growth Photo via Shutterstock

The post Blog Acquisition: A Surefire Strategy for Online Growth appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The reasons as to why businesses fail can be many. Here’s what I think. The reason most businesses fail is because entrepreneurship is a lifestyle shift, which most entrepreneurs do succeed in. It is, however, the mind shift that’s an integral part of entrepreneurship that remains incomplete. Most entrepreneurs do make mistakes during the startup phase.

Below are 9 entrepreneurship principles you shouldn’t forget, to help you be more successful.

9 Entrepreneurship Principles

It’s Never About the Economy; it’s Always About You

It’s easy to blame everything on the economy. The reality is that entrepreneurship has nothing to do with your idea, previous experience, education and training. Although all of these do help you later on.

Entrepreneurship is always about you. It’s about how you organize resources and manage them. It’s about how you market your business and it’s all about your commitment to see it through to the end.

You Aren’t Playing if You Aren’t Playing by the Numbers

If you are in business, you have to make those sales happen. The first hat you wear as an entrepreneur, apart from conceptualizing and designing your products and services, is that of a sales person. A sale manifests itself in various forms and doesn’t always lead to a financial transaction. Wooing investors, convincing customers to buy from you and roping in beta testers for your new startup are all successful sales closures.

As long as it’s about sales, there’s a cardinal rule that applies to it: It’s always a game of numbers while you focus on doing it right. The more customers you talk to, the more you’ll sell. Apply that rule to first hires, venture capitalists and everyone else involved in the startup phase.

Needless to say, rejections will come with 9 out of 10 interactions. It won’t matter since the 10th person is likely to buy. Rejection is the fuel that should keep entrepreneurship alive. Are you letting it fan that flame in your belly?

Use Technology

The new economy demands new approaches to business. The Internet has already turned the tables around. So when you are starting up, is your approach going to be contemporary or traditional? The contemporary route is going to pull you towards the rewards of using technology. You’d typically start a website; create a blog, set up social media accounts and one of the many tools available to run your business.

The traditional way still holds (depending on your business), but it still plugs itself into the contemporary way of doing business. That is, even brick-and-mortar business models will end up using technology.

Customers Are Humans; Not CRM Entries

Customers are not serial numbers. They aren’t entries in your CRM solution or on your accounting ledger. When entrepreneurs come up with ideas, they could fall in love with their own ideas, concepts and product prototypes that they forget that they are selling it to humans with the aim to solve a pressing problem with an effective solution. That process ought to reverse. Find the problem, come up with solutions for it, launch your product or service and then look to serve customers for life.

The story isn’t over after the sale. Serving customers to the best of your ability kicks in and stays over.

In a Sales Process, You Aren’t Important

Entrepreneurs are people too. They have needs as everyone does. That’s where the fault line is. Nowhere is it more visible than in the sales or deal making process itself.

If small business owners need a better conversion ratio in their sales process, they’d have to do the gargantuan task of “removing themselves” from the equation. Your idea might be unique, you’d have invested millions in product development and you’d have hired the best people your money could buy. Still, you aren’t important in the process; the customer is.

Just Shut Up

Entrepreneurship doesn’t earn you bragging rights. Nothing ever does. The more you tend to give away in a sales process or while making deals, the more you stand to lose.

How familiar are you with these elevator pitches?

“We are a edu-tech company with 8 different portals to facilitate online education in the emerging economies. We show up when learners demand better access to education.  $8.5 billion in funding, and having bagged 3 prestigious Startup of the Year awards. ”

That pitch does sound nice but it’s got “you” written all over it. It’s not personable, it’s not customer-centric and it doesn’t even say how it benefits your client or customer. All it does is brag about how quickly you grew.

Entrepreneurship Without Vision is Abortive

Entrepreneurship itself is a visionary endeavor. While your broad vision for the company can change as you grow and explore opportunity, it should have one to begin with.

What do you aspire to be? How do you purport to serve customers as you grow? What, exactly, do you want to achieve?

What’s Your Plan?

No, you don’t need a business plan. At least, you don’t need to create a 67-page business plan with financials forecast for the next decade. Your business plan puts your ideas onto paper. It gives you a document to go back and refer to when you need to refocus your entrepreneurial efforts. It’s not etched in stone. It’s printed on paper or it might even sit as a document on your computer hard drive.

Change plans if you must. Dump the original plan and go for a completely new one. Whatever you do, print it on paper and keep it with you because it guides you along your way.

Not Knowing Is No Excuse

Most successful entrepreneurs are well-read, knowledge-hungry, information addicts. Reports, magazines, books and countless hours on the Internet are all in a day’s work for the typical new age entrepreneur.

It’s actually a pretty simple trait that’s still so powerful. Entrepreneurs cannot rest on their laurels. Changes are the only constant that everyone has to deal with. The only way small business owners can keep track of changing trends is by keeping on top of what’s happening in the world, in their industry and elsewhere.

Entrepreneurship keeps the world’s economy spinning. It’s the reason why jobs are created and new products and services are launched. Entrepreneurship is the sum of all the work that goes behind the scenes to bring us everything we enjoy, use and experience. None of that would have been possible if any of those entrepreneurs behind everything we have today had not acceded to even one of these fundamental entrepreneurship tenets.

So what’s the plan, entrepreneur?

Principles Photo via Shutterstock

The post 9 Entrepreneurship Principles You Shouldn’t Forget appeared first on Small Business Trends.

These five SEO software tools help you gather SEO information without breaking the bank:

1. SheerSEO

This all-purpose tool helps you manage, monitor, and conduct SEO campaigns. While it has broad capabilities, it is most useful for watching your rankings and how your link building efforts are impacting them.  SheerSEO is available at several different levels priced between $7 and $40 per month. (They recommend the $15 option.)

Features include:

Rank tracking – This lets you know where your pages are ranking for your chosen keywords. The most useful part of this is the historical tracking, so you can follow trends in your rankings over time without needing to export to a spreadsheet.

Main referrers – This lets you know how many links you have and lets you view the top 50, sorted by most referrals or by “PageRank Boost.” This is not merely the PageRank of the link. Instead, PageRank Boost is a specially created metric designed by SheerSEO which estimates how strongly the link impacts your rankings.

Social metrics – Track how your site is shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc. The tool is good at finding sharing activity you wouldn’t normally see from the social networks themselves.

Link building – A “blog reviews” tool helps you partially automate the process of getting product reviews from blogs. A directory submission tool is also included, although this is a somewhat dated tactic.

Reporting – Use this to easily put together easy to understand reports for clients.

2. W3Optimizer

This product is available for $9.95 a month or $99.95 a year, putting it well within the reach of small businesses. Use the tool to analyze competition for keywords in Google, and to discover keywords used by your top ten competitors in the search engine.

The tool also offers on page analysis, and more detailed analysis of your top ten competitors, as well as detailed off-page analysis of your links and the various factors revolving around them. A content optimizer offers advice, and extras include a members forum, and a search engine snippet simulator.

3. SearchEnabler

At $15/month, this product is one of the most complete & best values for money small businesses can get. SearchEnabler is useful in complete site audit, analysis as well as optimization and tracking. It also has multi-user option so in case if you have more than one website to manage, you can go for $49 version which lets you manage 5 sites.

Tools include:

Domain Analysis – Get advice on how to fix errors and optimize your domain for the search engines.

Website Crawl Analysis – Get information about how well your site is getting crawled and indexed by Google.

Content Analysis – Discover issues with your content such as duplicate titles and text, long or short titles, and more.

WebPage Analysis – Test how well optimized your pages are for specific keywords.

Keyword Rankings – Track your keyword rankings and record how they change over time without needing to export to a spreadsheet.

Link Analysis – Track the number of links you and your competitors have gathered. Detect broken links on or off your site to recover them for search engine benefit.

Tracking – Integrate your Google Analytics as well as social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to track your traffic and social media performance.

4. SERPs.com

This one’s a bit more pricey than some of the other options, but SERPs.com does offer a monthly $48 version which is within the reach of many small businesses. One of the best features is the fact that the tool offers link metrics from SEOmoz without needing to pay the SEOmoz price.

In addition, the $48 version offers daily rank tracking for 300 keywords, more than enough for most businesses. You can manage three clients, ten websites, and export stylish PDF reports. Smart ranking alerts let you know about sudden changes in the search results, and a Google weather report lets you know if changes in your rankings were caused by changes to the algorithm.

One of the more useful features is the ability to add events, such as changing a keyword position, and track how it influences rankings for that keyword.

5. DIYSEO

At $33.25 a month this one’s fairly low on the price scale. The tool offers a simple step by step plan to boost search engine traffic. Keyword consultation comes with the package to help you choose which phrases to chase after, as well as tools to track your rankings and backlinks.

This is a good option for beginning SEOs or businesses that would like to handle most of the SEO themselves. For advanced SEOs, however, this tool will seem more like a refresher course in things they have already learned.

Conclusion

As they say:

“What gets measured gets managed.”

SEO software helps you stay in touch with your efforts and outcomes so it’s clearer what is helping and what’s a waste of time. It’s important to track your results so that you can continue making process.

At the same time, it’s important to avoid spending too much money early on in the SEO process. These tools are a good place to get started.

Do you recommend any other tools? What is the best way to leverage tools for success?

The post 5 Low Cost SEO Software Tools for Small Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.