Why Small Business Owners Blog

Anita Campbell posted Five Reasons For Small Business Owners To Blog.

• A faster and better way to create newsletter articles.
• A strategy for getting published.
• A low-cost way for a small business owner to market online.
• A method to communicate and connect — especially important for business owners.
• Satisfaction of some inner need to share.

I'd agree that these are some pretty good reasons. But I'd like to hear your thoughts. If you blog, or if you'd like to, what are your reasons for joining the blogosphere? And if you don't blog, or aren't at all interested in blogging, why not?

Profits Straight to the Bottom Line

Pricing can be one of the most difficult challenges businesses face. Assuming that cost is the deciding factor in whether someone does business with them, many people simply choose to undercut the competition and price their products and services lower. This is a big mistake, as outlined in Wilson Ng's post Profits Straight to the Bottom Line.

Perceived Value: If price was always the deciding factor, we'd all drive a Kia.

If you look at the world’s most successful companies, whether it be BMW, Coke, Microsoft, Toyota, Apple, IBM, HP, Nestle, Starbucks, and others, you will find with utmost consistency that they are not the cheapest - and the definition of success is indeed that people pay a premium to do business with them.

Success is when you can charge higher than competitor, and customers still want to do business with you. If you work for a company, would you define yourself as successful if you feel that you only got the job because you were willing to accept a lower salary than everybody else?

Maximize Profits: If price was always the deciding factor, we'd all eat at Taco Bell and shop at Walmart.

The success of Walmart is not about lowering prices. It is about their ability to lower their cost thus increasing their ability to lower prices. In short, don’t offer lower prices, unless through volume or efficiency, you are able to have a roadmap in which you are able to lower your cost.

Ultimately, when determining your long-term pricing strategy, Wilson Ng encourages you to focus on 2 strategies: a.) increase the price that your customer is willing to pay you. b.) Look for ways to see how you can lower your expenses as a factor of per unit production, and if you can do that, then yes, it is a viable strategy to offer a lower price.

Cool Site: World Travel Guide

Just happened upon this cool web site for anyone who plans on traveling -- anywhere, for almost any reason. You can search for information by country, city, airport, and much more. What I found particularly interesting was the information on business travel and etiquette in various cities from Delhi to Edinburg.

http://www.worldtravelguide.net/

Brand Wimps?

Any blog post with a title Brands are for Cattle that starts out with "Marketers are a bunch of flaky wimps," is bound to get my attention -- and fast!

I have to agree that putting the brand above the needs of the customer/buyer/visitor is a mistake.

Marketers who obsess about brand usually focus on aesthetics over buyers. They are more interested in the color scheme of the Web site than in meeting their buyers' needs with a content marketing strategy. They care about logos not buyers. They research color schemes instead of the market. Countless marketers got their knickers in a twist about the outward manifestation of an organization's brand--including logos, image ads, and tchotchkes—all at the expense of buyers and what they need to understand the company—especially the content found on the company’s site. Well, they are flaky wimps if that's what they do.

What's really at stake—in fact what branding's really about—is a focus on the buyer. As each buyer builds an emotional response to a company, that emotion becomes the brand-image for that person. Fortunately, some great marketers understand that the provision of quality Web content does more to build brand than pretty logos, cool Web design, and hip color choice.

But I can't put the blame entirely on the marketers; sometimes it has to rest with the client -- the site owner.

I can't count the number of times clients have been more worried about what their web site looks like than what it says. That's great if you're a web designer, but not so good for the site visitor. And ultimately, not great for the web site owner.

Effective web sites focus on what the visitor wants and needs, their experience of the web site, and their emotional connection to the company through the web site. If their online experience is frustration, they will connect that emotion with the company.

Marketers aren't the only flakey wimps; some clients are too.

Read the entire post at Web Ink Now.