Blogging

Workers Compensation Secrets for Small Businesses Revealed

Nov 13, 2020 | Online Marketing

Are you a small business with employees? If you are, you need to have worker’s compensation coverage to protect yourself, your employees and your business at all times.

Are you hiring a steady stream of contractors? The same holds true here as well. You should start researching worker’s compensation coverage, so that you’re ready the day someone gets classified as an employee.

Here are some of the worker’s compensation secrets for small business that shouldn’t be so secret.

Worker’s Compensation Claims Aren’t Limited to Industrial Worksites

The classic worker’s compensation case involves a construction worker falling off a roof or an industrial worker maimed by equipment. However, worker’s compensation claims can arise in almost any workplace.

An employee injured in a car crash while driving your delivery van can file a worker’s comp claim. Office workers are more likely to file worker’s compensation claims for repetitive stress injuries, but they could get hurt carrying boxes down stairs or getting sick when exposed to chemical fumes.

Worker’s Compensation Claims Can Lead to Legal Battles

Worker’s compensation claims can lead to legal fights. An employee can fight for greater compensation, and they should fight allegations that the workplace injury didn’t occur in the workplace. After all, a finding that the injury occurred off-site or is unrelated to work means they don’t have a worker’s comp claim. If the boss ordered people to work in unsafe conditions or pushed them to violate rules in place for people’s safety, the company doesn’t just have a worker’s comp claim when someone is hurt. They’re also liable for safety violations.

Employees often get legal help, because getting a settlement can be difficult. They may be unable to fill out detailed paperwork because of a traumatic brain injury or when taking pain medication. Or they may have trouble getting all the paperwork together to get the full compensation they’re owed.

For example, they may have requested compensation for their emergency room visit but not yet addressed the mounting bills for ongoing care. Insurers who are slow to pay bills create an undue burden on the employee, and this can lead to interest and penalties as well as legal bills for everyone involved.

According to the NCS, the majority of worker’s compensation costs by cause through 2017-2018 were as a result of motor vehicles, burns, falls and slips, and more.

As you can imagine, in nearly all of these scenarios, the incident probably could have been avoided — which means there is no reason for employees to ever be injured while on the job.

Worker’s Compensation Is Similar to Every Other Insurance Policy You Pay For

Worker’s compensation is a form of insurance. You pay premiums based on several key risk factors. One is location. The premiums will be based in part on the state you work in, because different states have different rules. The type of work is a major factor.

Some industries are much more dangerous; construction and industrial workplaces are two such examples. Logging, fishing, and agriculture have greater than average risks, too. Premiums are also based on your payroll. You pay more when you have more people to cover. Then there is one’s claims history. If you have more accidents than average, you’re going to pay far higher worker’s compensation insurance premiums.

On the other hand, if you work with the insurer to mitigate obvious risks, your premiums may go down. If you make changes and no longer generate a steady stream of claims, your insurance company will eventually lower the premiums. Workers’ compensation typically considers the employer’s liability to be limited, but bad practices that cause people to be regularly injured or oversight that results in a major accident can leave you liable.

Worker’s Compensation Is Not Just For Big Business

Are you hiring contractors? You may want to prohibit someone from being hired for a job unless they carry their own workers’ compensation insurance. Sole proprietors can buy worker’s compensation to protect themselves, too.

7 Examples of How Commercial Businesses Create Engaging Blog Content

Oct 9, 2020 | Blogging

Content marketing is more important than ever before. Brands in every sector recognize that creating excellent content is the key to winning over customers. In 2019, their content marketing strategies still hinge on the quality of their blogs. One survey showed that 53% of marketers felt that blogging was the most important form of content marketing.

If you are planning on revamping your own blogging strategy, it is a good idea to learn from companies with a great track record. We decided to create a case study on some of the best blogs in various industries, so you can use them as inspiration for your own website. Here are seven great examples to follow.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola has dominated its industry for over 130 years. The company’s success isn’t attributed so much to its product innovation, as to its ingenious approach to marketing.

Coca-Cola has always evolved with technology to make the most of its marketing strategy. It started the Coca-Cola Conversations blog to engage with its customers in a unique way.

The blog mostly focuses on talking about Coca-Cola collectibles. They make sure that every blog post is short and to the point. While longform content works in some industries that need to educate their target customers, Coca-Cola recognizes that its customers don’t want to read long walls of text when looking at old Coca-Cola products. They have made their blog more engaging by keeping the posts more concise. This strategy has paid off for them, because they have already earned well over a million visitors. The blog has been growing steadily since, which is especially impressive considering Coca-Cola had one of the largest brands in the world before this campaign started.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a company that publishes software products to help people improve the quality of the writing. They serve a number of different types of customers, including college students, law clerks and copywriters.

Grammarly manages a blog that provides basic writing tips. This helps the company into ways:

The blog helps Grammarly brand itself as an authority in its market (after all, who would want to buy a grammar checker from a company that didn’t understand the mechanics of the English language?)
They use the blog to generate more exposure for their brand
By helping customers develop basic writing skills, Grammarly is able to help them get the most out of the product

Grammarly covers a large number of topics on its blog. It helps customers with a variety of challenges that they face with writing.

WayKen Rapid Manufacturing

WayKen Rapid Manufacturing is a company that uses prototype manufacturing services from China. They have a great blog that talks about amazing innovation breakthroughs in their industry.

Sweet Leaf Tea

Sweet Leaf Tea is a lesser known company, but it has clearly mastered the art and science of blogging. Unlike most brands in various industries, Sweet Leaf Tea recognizes that the effectiveness of a blog is not limited to the quality of its articles alone. They have created a holistic blog design that clearly conveys the company’s core branding message.

Sweet Leaf Tea uses older fonts. It also has a color scheme and pictures that help convey an earthy message. They do a good job cultivating the warm, nurturing emotions that they want customers to experience.

Nuts About Southwest

The airline industry is not particularly well liked by many customers these days. Southwest seems to understand that, so they have created a blog that helps change customer perception.

The Nuts About Southwest blog discusses customer experiences with both Southwest and the airline industry as a whole. They have done a good job getting customers to engage with them through social media. The blog has a social feed that any customer can reply through. The Southwest blog is optimized to share content through social media, so customers can spread the word about new developments at Southwest and events affecting the airline industry.

Intercom

Intercom is a messaging software publisher that provides a variety of different types of products for various customers. Intercom recognizes that each classification of customer has unique needs. Therefore, it creates blog posts around different categories of customers.

What lessons can we learn from these successful blogs?

These examples show that brands in a variety of industries can get a lot of traction through blogging. Creating blog content is a great way to expand reach and position a company’s brand image in a positive way. Here are some lessons that we can pick up from these companies.

The length of your content should be based on customer expectations

If you read blogging guides, they often propose a lot of rigid rules of thumb when recommending the length of an article. Since the Google Panda update, they tend to recommend writing longer articles (ideally over 1000 words). These articles often are based off of those bloggers’ own experiences, which may not be universally applicable. The problem is that these bloggers often fail to consider that customers of different companies have their own expectations when reading blog content.

The blogs listed here all do a good job understanding the expectations of their customers. Coca-Cola writes much shorter blog posts, because they realize that people don’t want to read a couple of thousand words of content when they want to learn about a simple, fun topic like Coca-Cola collectibles. Meanwhile, other companies like Grammarly and Intercom write longer posts, because they have to educate their customers about complex topics.

Make the layout of your blog match your branding message

There is another commonality between the blogs we covered here. They all have optimized the user experience around their core branding messages. These companies realize that customer perception is determined by more than the content of their articles. The color schemes, font styles and header images are also very important.

Have a clear goal in mind

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make his writing content without a clear direction. You need to establish a list of objectives first. Every blog post needs to be written with these goals in mind and you need to make sure that it advances them in some way. Southwest has made sure that its blog posts improve the perception of the airline industry. Grammarly wants to educate customers about writing better and make sure that they have the necessary foundation to make the most of their product.

Make sure that your content warms readers up for future calls-to-action

You don’t want to take an ad hoc approach to writing content. Too many content marketing. They believe that as long as they get readers onto their website, they will be able to visibility for their brand. They believe that is all they need to do to get a future sale.

Unfortunately, it is rarely this easy. Your visitors are going to evaluate the entirety of your brand when deciding whether or not to make a future purchase. Inconsistent messages are not going to solidify your brand image in their mind. Low quality content is going to make your brand less appealing as well.

Whenever you are creating new content for your site, you need to think about brand positioning with the goal of future conversions in mind. This means that you need to think of future calls-to-action while generating any new content.

You need to make sure that your content sets the stage for future landing pages, so readers know what to expect. Here are some things that you will want to keep in mind:

The general layout of your content should not be too different from your other landing pages. You might need to trim the length of the content a bit, but you are going to want to otherwise make the presentation as similar as possible.
You need to think about the types of CTAs that you will have on your sales pages. Are you going to use buttons with a specific color? Then you might want to use similar colors in other images on your blog posts. That is going to help readers get used to those colors. When they make the transition to your landing page, they will be more comfortable interacting with them.
Your other content should reinforce the key points on your landing pages. If you are emphasizing the importance of affordability and accessibility on your sales pages, then you want to discuss them in detail on other pages as well.

There are a lot of other factors that you might need to consider, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of what you need to keep in mind. Before you start creating any new content, you should ask yourself how it will support the rest of your strategy.

Don’t be afraid to change course if your content isn’t resonating with your readers

Consistency is one of the most important aspects of any content marketing strategy. However, it doesn’t make sense to be consistent about following a template that isn’t working.

There is a lot of testing involved in any online marketing strategy. You will probably start off with some preconceptions about the types of messages and content that will appeal to your readers. However, your data is probably going to show that a lot of your assumptions missed the mark.

Your content marketing strategy is going to be a work in progress at the beginning. You will need to pay close attention to your analytics to see what content your readers are most interested in. Don’t be afraid to stop writing content that they aren’t engaging with. Otherwise, you will just be wasting your time and money.

Go after a broad range of keywords

You can learn a lot from major blogs like these by looking at their general layout, but you can see even more when you look under the hood. Take a look at the keywords that these blogs are ranking for.

You will see that Grammarly, Sweet Leaf and Coca-Cola are all getting traffic from a lot of different keywords. They have taken a very broad content marketing strategy, rather than focusing a few select keywords.

There are several benefits to this approach:

You can attract a lot of traffic from less competitive keywords. This is especially important for new blogs, because they don’t have a high domain authority yet. However, it is also beneficial for large blogs as well. They can receive a lot of traffic from random, long-tail keywords that they might not otherwise have thought to focus on.
You may find that some of the less obvious keywords actually convert better. By targeting a wide range of keywords, you can find a number of hidden gems.
Targeting a wider range of keywords can help you expand the demographics that you want to target.

You may be surprised by how much traction your blog will get by focusing on a large number of keywords.

Use a strong internal linking strategy

All of the blogs that we reviewed here have done a great job with their internal linking strategy. They often have at least a couple of links on each page. This is a good way to improve SEO. However, it also improves navigation and helps readers find the content they are looking for.

Don’t underestimate the importance of a great logo

Creating great content is important, but it is not enough by itself. Every blog needs a great logo. Some companies have spent millions of dollars on their logos, so you don’t want to overlook it.

The blogs we reviewed all have excellent logos and they are prominently featured. You want to keep this in mind. You can always reuse the logo elsewhere, such as with branded water bottles.

Use These Blogs as Your Guide!

It is a lot easier to create a successful blog if you follow templates from others that have been successful. The blogs on this list have become very successful, because they have an excellent layout and a well-thought out content marketing strategy. You should keep this in mind while developing your own blog.

17 Digital Marketing Tips for Big and Small Businesses Online

Oct 7, 2020 | Blogging, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing

If you own a small business, you should have many digital marketing tips for small business and ideas for your brand. There is a lot to the process of digital marketing. But, if you are going to have a successful digital marketing campaign, you need to have some tricks up your sleeve.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing involves a wide variety of tools, and it comes in many forms. Blogging, podcasting, video marketing, and even eBook writing are all forms of digital marketing that you can use for your branding.

Digital Marketing is an essential part of your marketing strategy if you have online marketing strategies for small business. It includes a wide variety of tools and methods that can be used to promote your business in various ways. We have scoured the web from different sources to reveal to you some of the most efficient ways to market yourself as a small business owner. Read the following tips and see which ones you may want to use

17 small business digital marketing strategy

Below is a list of some of the best 17 digital marketing tips and tricks that small business owners can use to promote their brand and some of the techniques you can utilize to promote your brand. Some of them involve PPC advertising and how to maintain your ad budget. Others are about how to use digital formats in different ways to promote your brand.

1. Use PPC advertising with strong keywords in titles and descriptions.

Pay-per-click advertising gives you a way to get your message out in front of your target audience faster than organic SEO alone. You can control your own budget when it comes to PPC advertising and decide how much you want to spend on each campaign. This is a great way to create intermittent campaigns that you can start and stop whenever you want to stay on the radar of your primary audience.

2. Create regular, shareable content on a weekly basis.

More content means higher results in Google and more coverage for your brand through informational content. Remember that your content need not be too sales-oriented. You should focus on creating valuable content that is helpful to the reader that will increase your credibility and motivate them to learn more.

3. Use social media often but wisely to put your brand in the best light.

Social media is still one of the most effective means of creating hype for your brand. But you should consider each post carefully before posting so that you will create interest without including unnecessary information. One mistake some business owners make is to include too much information that can lose the reader. Creating shorter but valuable posts can help increase your response rate and will appeal more to the growing number of mobile users.

4. Join a LinkedIn group to put your business in front of similar influencers.

LinkedIn has some professional groups that you can join. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social media platform that connects business people with like interests. You can use this power to connect with others in your industry or share and exchange links to promote each other’s brand.

5. Attend a real-world or online marketing conference for new trends and ideas.

Pubcon is one example of a company that offers regular content for digital marketers. Get new ideas that are trending and gain valuable insight on what works with digital marketing campaigns.

6. Take a digital marketing course.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, you may want to take a course on blogging and digital marketing to learn about various techniques that you may want to consider using for your small business. Digital marketing courses may include information about the types of digital marketing (video marketing, blogs, social media, podcasting, and others), as well as how to implement these techniques for your brand.

7. Refresh your content.

Blue Fountain Media suggests keeping your content fresh is important when you are creating digital content. One way to do this is to keep your “creatives” fresh. Redo or improve images by retouching them or using PhotoShop to enhance the images to make them crisper. Anything you can do to make the creatives appear new will help draw the attention of your target audience and reduce the chance of boredom with your message.

8. Spend your advertising budget wisely.

Planning your ad budget carefully will help you to make sure you are getting the most out of your spending budget. It’s important to see that you are making a profit from your digital marketing efforts. Be aware of your actual ROI (return on investment) when creating digital media campaigns. Plan your digital marketing budget around what you can afford and focus it on the methods that pay off the most by the use of tracking software and metric analysis.

9. Understand the buyer’s journey.

Having an understanding of the buyer’s journey will help you understand the experience your customer goes through on your site. This can be done by simply going through the process of your sales funnel yourself or having others do it. You need insight as to how your customers are viewing your sales funnel and purchasing process to see what needs fixing.

10. Aim for repeat visitors.

If you want to make an impact on your target audience, you need to aim for getting repeat visitors. Increasing targeted traffic is the main goal. But, once you get these targeted people, you need to keep them by offering fresh content weekly.

11. Spend more money on lead generation than one-time purchases.

Leads generation is essential to growing your brand. You should aim for focusing your ad dollars on creating leads that will pay off over the long term.

12. Know your target audience.

It is important to know who your target audience is and what motivates them to make a purchase. This requires research and study regarding how to pull in your key customers by appealing to their target interests. You may need to conduct surveys, polls, or other online activities to acquire this information. But common sense also plays a role. Think about what type of people would be interested in your products or services and make your content resonate with these people.

13. Offer discounts and coupons with off-site locations.

You can create lots of hype around your brand by putting coupons and loyalty rewards on other sites. Use your social media, various forums, blogs, and even YouTube to generate interest and get new leads.

14. Be omnipotent.

Creating discount or loyalty rewards puts your links on various locations online and brings in more traffic to your site. When you create coupons, make sure that you put the link to your site in an obvious place and make it your call-to-action so that people go straight to your landing or sales page to cash in.

15. Sell yourself.

When you create a brand, you are a part of that brand. Learn how to sell yourself, as well as your products. Putting your picture or a video up of yourself near your logo on some of your digital assets is one way to do this. Connect with your audience on a personal level. This will increase your credibility and rapport with your audience.

16. Use podcasts and videos.

People love media. In fact, they search for videos and podcasts more than they search for other types of content on a daily basis. Be present with audio and video to accentuate your other content.

17. Use infographics.

Another digital asset you should consider is infographics. Infographics are visual elements that include data and compelling images to attract your target audience.

Remember that not all digital marketing is about ads. Creating good content that is relevant to your audience is about information, education, and motivation. Inspire your customers to take action and show them how your brand can help make their lives better. Inform them of a solution for a problem that they have. Be a friend.