Small Business News

An online presence is an essential part of growing a business in 2021. Whether you’re opening a local shop or running a company entirely online, your content and website can make a huge impact. Here, members of the online small business community share tips for shaking up your online presence.

TikTok has quickly become a huge part of the viral video scene. But viral videos don’t necessarily help unless you use them to actually connect to customers. Michael Stelzner goes over how to accomplish that goal in this Social Media Examiner post.

Creating quality content for your online presence is only part of your job as a marketer. Once it’s created, you need to distribute it to relevant channels. This looks different for every business. But there are helpful tips in this Content Marketing Institute post by Jodi Harris. ??

Most social media posts fall into categories. Some tend to be better for engagement tahn others. If you really want to connect and converse with your audience, try the types listed in this Oktopost post by Na’ama Shoshani.

Blogging is all about consistency. But some bloggers have a tough time staying on a regular schedule, especially if they try to post daily. Instead, create a schedule you can actually handle. Lisa Sicard elaborates in this Growmap post.

Businesses need to be accessible to people of all backgrounds and abilities. This doesn’t just apply to physical locations — it is also relevant to online businesses. Read about the potential for web accessibility lawsuits in this Pixel Productions post. And join the discussion over on BizSugar.

Online forms can help you gather useful data from your audience. But they can also be time consuming. To automate this process, read the tips in this Biz Epic post by Ivan Widjaya.

There’s tons of competition to stand out online. So entrepreneurs need to get creative with their strategies. In this Aha!NOW post, Russell Emmental provides tips for getting creative in all aspects of your business.

Your online presence isn’t just about promoting your own services. You also need to listen to what others are saying about your brand and industry. Social listening tools can streamline this process. Adeyemi Adisa lists several options in this Platter of Gold post.

Social media is a powerful and generally free way to promote a small business. But people sometimes get caught up in negativity. And this can have far reaching effects for small businesses. Avoid the negative and benefit from the positive with the insights in this Mostly Blogging post by Janice Wald.

Podcasting is on the rise. You can build an entire business around a podcast or just use it to position yourself as a thought leader. Either way, promotion is key. Read the tips in this GMR Transcription post by Beth Worthy. Then check out the BizSugar community to see what members are saying.

If you’d like to suggest your favorite small business content to be considered for an upcoming community roundup, please send your news tips to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "10 Ways to Get Creative and Kickstart Your Business’s Online Presence" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmallBusinessTrends/~3/e7S0Tui5btM/kickstart-your-businesss-online-presence.html

WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built for WordPress or as an eCommerce option by web hosting providers. With it, users can create and manage an eCommerce storefront without the need to do any coding. In addition, the WooCommerce store comes with hundreds of free and paid extensions that let you extend and customize your online store including features such as inventory, tax management, secure payments, and shipping integration.

WooCommerce is a free customizable, eCommerce platform built on WordPress that helps you sell physical and digital products as well as affiliate products. You get everything you need to set up your store including homepage design, menus, site structure, and payment and shipping options. If you have a WordPress site, adding WooCommerce takes just a few minutes.

By simply adding the WooCommerce plugin to any WordPress site, you can set up a new web store. Established in 2010 WooComemrce has seen more than 150 million downloads in addition to millions of active installations, making it one the most popular platform for e-commerce sites. Similarly, the WooCommerce store boasts of more than 730 official extensions and themes that make selling products online a breeze.

This intuitive WordPress plugin helps configure your online store page with store contact information, product content, payment details, shipping information, automated taxes, and more. The WooCommerce store has hundreds of free and paid extensions that add features and functionality to your online business efforts. They include promotions, coupon codes, inventory management, buyer reviews, and product. With WooCommerce you have the option to install mobile-optimized templates or even develop your template. It comes with third-party integration with hundreds of solutions, including Facebook, Sage, Zapier, MailChimp, ShipStation, Square, Stripe, Fulfilment by Amazon, and more.

WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress that helps you launch a business or take your brick-and-mortar store online. It is a free plugin for businesses of all sizes and industries where users can add essential features to build their e-store with options to tweak the look and content of their store. These include how products are displayed on pages, shopping cart functionality, and handling payments gateways. This is why it is very useful to ask how to update WordPress plugins as well as how to add WordPress plugin to my website. WooCommerce offers both free and premium paid and free themes in addition to over 500 extensions and thousands of plugins that can help you add more features to your online store to sell both physical and digital products.

Besides being able to sell anything on WooCommerce, it comes bundled with several payment options. And scalability with this plugin comes easy, so you can sell one product or thousands.

WooCommerce is popular among users because it is entirely free to install on your site; comes with a vast library of free themes and add-ons; is designed with beginners in mind; makes your store mobile-friendly, and you can add many different features to your website to increase functionality and boost user experience. Other solutions on offer include:

As a business, you should be on top of your inventory as it saves you money and allows you to fulfill your customers’ requests. Through inventory management, you can control costs related to your operations as you know what you have, what is in your warehouse, and how to manage the supply chain. With WooCommerce’s inventory management plugin, you can manage your inventory by bulk editing stock items; manage and calculate changes in price and stock levels of your products; export product data for further analysis to analyze and other tasks. The ATUM inventory management is a free WooCommerce plugin that lets you have full control of your store’s stock from a single intuitive dashboard.

With Woocommerce you can sell anything from physical products, appointments to even digital products such as ebooks. With this platform, you can sell virtually any services or product under several options that include retail, wholesale, and even subscription-based options.

When it comes to payments WooCommerce comes bundled with the ability to accept major credit cards, bank transfers, checks, and cash on delivery. It also seamlessly integrates with Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay. Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

WooCommerce.com uses WordPress.com accounts allowing you to merge your existing Woo account with WordPress. What this means is that with integration with WordPress the leading content management platform in the market you not only get built-in eCommerce solutions but also a dashboard that is easy to use.

Through the WordPress dashboard, you can activate WooCommerce to open up some powerful features that include setting up product pages, calculating the shipping, making tax calculations, configuring your store’s preferred payment, and more. The dashboard combines multiple reports on one display screen, giving you quick insights into the performance of your store, managing charges, refunds, disputes, and deposits right from your WordPress dashboard.

When it comes to shipping options WooCommerce Shipping is built right into your WooCommerce dashboard, with everything you need for your shipping delivery and fulfillment needs. In addition, WooCommerce comes with a selection of some 57 WooCommerce extensions for shipping, delivery, and fulfillment that offer options to print USPS and DHL labels, calculators for shipping cots, offer free shipping, guest check-outs, handle bank transfers, and more flexible checkout process.

Content marketing is a key feature in your marketing efforts as it is driven towards getting you lead, sales, and reaching wider audiences. WooCommerce helps boost your content marketing through blogs; product reviews; post your store location; social media integration; and integration with third-party marketplaces that include Facebook ads, Google listings, and ads; eBay, and more.

You can also boost sales by listing products on Google Shopping, promoting your store on Facebook, or emailing customers with Mailchimp. With it, you can also track and report on your marketing efforts with Google Analytics. It also offers email marketing tools that can help you create personalized engagements with customers backing these with rewards and incentive capabilities to let you offer coupons; discounts; points and rewards; and even gifts.

With more and more people using their smartphones to search for products and make purchases your e-commerce store needs to be mobile-friendly. Having a mobile responsive design means that your site adjusts to the size of the user’s device be it a cellphone or tablet. WooCommerce can help you tap into customers who rely on their phones by offering you mobile-friendly themes. WooCommerce has also a mobile app available both in iOS and Android that lets you take control of your e-commerce store from the palm of your hand.

WooCommerce is SEO friendly as it offers numerous built-in features that users can use to optimize their online store for search engines including the ability to preview products in search results; product descriptions; image optimization; use product categories and tags and more. WooCommerce’s SEO WordPress plugin comes with a product-centric SEO and readability analysis that can help you write product descriptions, offer short description suggestions that are both SEO-friendly and buyer-friendly.

With WooCommerce calculating taxes comes easy. It comes with inbuilt features that let you handle taxes on sales, apply custom tax rates, conduct major tax rate calculations, factor in geo-location tax rates; billing address; define tax rates, and even manage tax rates assigned to your shipping costs.

Since WooCommerce is compatible with WordPress, it easily integrates with most free and premium WordPress themes. Most of these themes are also mobile-friendly where you can choose your storefront’s theme and even add wooCommerce many extensions to get more powerful e-commerce solutions. Some popular WooCommerce WordPress themes include Astra, Shoppe, OceanWP, Neve, and Hugo.

WooCommerce offers support with product installations, configuration, and use. It also has a help desk that operates through a ticket-based support system for technical-related queries and issues. For help and troubleshooting, WooCommerce.com account holders can chat with its dedicated Support team. For customization, one can hire a developer for everything from design tweaks to full builds. Additional support can be accessed through emails, WooCommerce Help Forums, and WooExperts.

WooCommerce is a free customizable, eCommerce platform to help you build your online stores. It is not only 100 percent open source but you stand to benefit from a global community of more than 350 contributors for a steady stream of innovations and releases.  Because the WooCommerce core features come free it competes with leading e-commerce applications by offering users free features with great capabilities without having to commit to expensive subscriptions or proprietary software licenses.

It offers both free and paid add ons that offer different capabilities and complete control over your online store.WooCommerce can cost nothing to use, apart from WordPress hosting. However, there are other costs involved besides the web hosting solution such as getting a domain email and other options that come with additional expenses.

WooCommerce plugin can be installed with just a few clicks the same as any other WordPress plugin. It is important to first review the server requirements before installation to prevent issues from arising when you use WooCommerce. You also need a website hosting service provider WooCommerce recommends the following web hosting services Bluehost, SiteGround, GoDaddy, WordPress, and others. To install Woocomemrce through WordPress’ administrator take the following steps:

Then click ‘Activate Now’ to prompt the WooCommerce Wizard.

The WooCommerce Wizard will then take you through all the necessary steps to set up your store.

WooCommerce is built on WordPress and is regularly audited by Sucuri, an industry leader in security. However, as a site owner, you will still need to be constantly on the alert against threats from hackers.

Image: woocommerce

This article, "What is WooCommerce?" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmallBusinessTrends/~3/qvdSYkGqIZY/woocommerce.html

Twitter has debuted a raft of new ad features and a revamped algorithm as part of a drive to grow its performance and advertising business.

The social networking giant’s restored algorithm decides which ads users see. The ad feature overhaul enables users to initiate the download of ads that promote the downloading of mobile games and other apps, without having to leave the Twitter app.

The San-Francisco based company is also working on new tools to enable businesses to run ads to find customers which are likelier to make in-app purchases.

For small businesses that use Twitter for marketing and promotional purposes, or that are thinking about utilizing the social media platform, it is important they are familiar with the new ad features and revamped algorithm so they can work the updates to their advantage.

Kamara Benjamin, group manager at Twitter, commented on the opportunities performance ads provides: “Performance ads are a very large opportunity… that’s relatively untapped for us. Ultimately, this is going to lead to people installing apps, visiting websites and finding products that meet their needs,” Benjamin told Reuters.

Slide-Show Ads

Twitter’s new features include users now being able to create slide-show ads which feature multiple products and that can be sent to different websites when a user clicks on the ad. Previously, businesses could only choose one destination to send users to when they clicked on an ad.

According to Twitter, this increased the number of clicks by 25% on ad campaigns which set a goal of driving people to websites.

Ads Shown to Wider Audiences

Through its improved advertising algorithm, ads are shown to a larger pool of people at the start of a campaign. Subsequently, it can better gauge user interest. Twitter says that the improvements to the algorithm has resulted in a 36% increase in ad campaigns which achieved at least five downloads during the period of time that the ad ran on Twitter.

Small businesses would be wise to tap into these new opportunities offered by the Twitter’s ad and algorithm updates, so they can fine-tune marketing campaigns reach out to and engage with the optimum number of customers and prospectives.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "Twitter Rolls Out New Ad Features for Business" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmallBusinessTrends/~3/-shn4Zt89bA/new-twitter-ad-features-small-business.html

Fake reviews can have a devastating effect on a small business. And the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is ready to hold the people or businesses responsible for this practice accountable. The FTC Says It’s Cracking Down on Fake Reviews Online by committing to protect consumers and competition.

It aims to do this by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices and using its Penalty Offense Authority to make advertisers aware of the law and prevent them from breaking said laws.

This practice is being driven by the proliferation of social media and the way it has obscured the distinction between authentic content and advertising. And this has resulted in deceptive and dishonest endorsements becoming commonplace online, thus resulting in the growth of fake online reviews. Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says, “Advertisers will pay a price if they engage in these deceptive practices.”

Yelp, a leading provider of user reviews of products and services, is introducing a series of new features designed to support small service businesses. From the research phase to discovery stage, to writing an online review, the features support users through each stage of a project.

Small business loan approval rates at big banks increased from 13.9% in August 2021 to 14% in September. Approvals from small banks also rose from 19.3% in August to 19.5% in September. The data comes from the latest Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index.

A lot of small biz owners think that you can only get a review after the customer has purchased their product or service.

A niche market can be defined as a subgroup of a larger market that has its own unique identity, needs, and, preferences making it stand out from the overall market. Niche marketing entails channeling marketing efforts towards first identifying a particular type of clientele and their particular needs. And then attempt to deliver a better solution not being offered by other companies.

According to an economic profile by the U.S. Small Business Administration, American small businesses employed 60 million people in 2019. That figure pre-dates the pandemic, and it’s fair to say small businesses have been particularly challenged over the past 18 months keeping and expanding their workforce, however small.

No matter where you live in the US, The Small Business Expo is coming to a city near you. As a small business owner, you’d be wise to attend.  The Small Business Expo is the largest business-to-business trade show, conference and networking event for small businesses in the country. The Small Business Expo is tailored to small business owners, entrepreneurs and start-ups.

Amazon Renewed is one of the best marketplaces if you’re looking to sell refurbished products in good condition. There is a large audience of buyers, so the chances of selling items are quicker than others. Plus, there is more trust among users so that you can ensure a fast sale without risking losing products or money.

Zoho One is adding 5 new apps, 3 new services, 3 updated services, and 7 major platform enhancements. “We’re very excited about what’s included in the updates,” said Taylor Backman, Zoho One senior evangelist/customer advocate. “It’s a unified offering using different technology, for a personalized experience.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "In the News: Online Fake Reviews Coming Under FTC Scrutiny" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmallBusinessTrends/~3/zIKWC9p7Cyc/small-business-news-roundup-october-22-2021.html