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Starting a Blog for Your Business

Starting a Blog for Your Business

According to HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company, nearly 40 percent of U.S. businesses have a blog for marketing purposes. If you’re not among them, it’s time to think about joining the ranks of business bloggers. Not only will it provide a vehicle for sharing engaging stories about your business, products and services, a well-maintained blog can also improve your search engine ranking and ultimately lead to more customers in the form of inbound leads. Consider the following steps to get started:

1. Identify your business blog goal and purpose.

While your ultimate goal will be to promote your business, you need to do so subtly. The best blogs are not overtly promotional but instead provide readers (customers and potential customers) with articles and tips they will find helpful. The purpose of your blog should be to present your company as the best source of information in your industry. This purpose will drive your content creation strategy.

2. Choose your blogging platform

There are many platform options available for building and publishing your business blog—from free programs to fee for service platforms. WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Svbtle and HubSpot frequently appear on lists of the best. To maximize your results, experts recommend choosing one that you can install on your domain and integrate with your website.

3. Commit to blogging regularly.

You should fill your blog with relevant content, updating it with new posts regularly. Once you’ve brainstormed a list of suitable topics, create an editorial calendar that includes who on your team will write each blog post, the date the content is due, and the date you intend to publish it.

In their 2013 Marketing Benchmarks study, HubSpot found that companies that blog 15 or more times each month got five times more traffic to their website than those that don’t blog at all. Companies that increased their blog frequency from three to five times a month to six to eight times a month almost doubled their leads.

4. Create a plan for generating blog traffic.

Your blog will be of little use if your customers and potential customers don’t know about it or cannot find it. Great ways to generate blog traffic include:

  • Search engine optimized blog posts.
  • Promotion on your company’s social media pages (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+).
  • Weekly email blasts to your database with excerpts from recent posts.
  • Eye-catching links to the blog from your company’s home page.
  • Including links to your blog in your staffs’ email signatures.

According to Social Media Today, an independent online community for professionals in public relations, marketing and advertising, small businesses with blogs generate 126 percent more leads than those without. Why is this so? The answer may lie in the popularity of blogs with U.S. consumers. In fact, surveys have found that 81 percent of them trust the advice and information they find on blogs. Sixty-one percent have purchased a product or service based on a blog post. Starting your business blog will require a time investment; however, the new customers you gain will be well worth the effort.

Three Ways to Clean up Your Email Subscriber List

Three Ways to Clean up Your Email Subscriber List

Despite the rise of social media, email is still the marketing mainstay of many businesses—and the numbers show us why. According to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, worldwide email accounts will increase 27 percent between 2014 and 2018, from 4.1 billion to more than 5.2 billion. Additionally, the number of worldwide email users—both business and consumer—will increase 12 percent during the same period. Whatever your industry, chances are excellent that most of your customers are on email and willing to subscribe to communications from your company.

Of course, any email subscriber list you use—whether prospects you’ve purchased from a vendor or generated from your current customers—is only as good as the data it contains. If it’s outdated—leading to repeated emails sent to bad or non-existent email addresses—it’s more than a waste of time; it can potentially damage your reputation with email service providers. Fortunately, a few simple steps can help you keep your email subscriber list in great condition. Consider these three ways to clean it up today.

1. Eliminate any distribution email addresses. These are generic addresses that distribute received emails to multiple parties within an organization. They often begin with “sales,” “support” or “questions” and are rarely beneficial from a marketing standpoint because they distribute your message to individuals who did not ask for it and who may report it as SPAM.

2. Review your bounce reports. Emails may “bounce” for numerous reasons. A “non-existent” bounce may be due to an email address that no longer exists or has a typo within it. Go through the emails with this designation in the report and see if there are any you can correct. If not, discard them.

An “undeliverable” bounce means that the server that houses the email address is either temporarily down or not found. A “blocked” bounce means that the server that houses the email address is not allowing the email to enter. Review your bounce report for emails with undeliverable and blocked designations. If the report repeatedly labels them as such, discard them.

3. Look at your email “opens” and “clicks.” If you’re sending communications through an email marketing service, you should be able to review a list of the prospects or customers who opened your latest missive as well as those who clicked on links within it. If you notice individuals in your list who consistently fail to open or click links within your marketing emails, consider reaching out to them with a special offer to encourage re-engagement.

You might extend a special discount, a free eBook or anything else that’s of value to the reader of this “We Miss You” message. Make sure your unsubscribe link is prominently displayed so those who are truly no longer interested in your product or service are prompted to opt out.

Before you abandon your email marketing efforts in favor of social media, try cleaning up your subscriber list. The minimal time spent is likely to be well worth the results—according to McKinsey & Company, a global management-consulting firm, email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act Expiring

The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act Expiring

Will Your Workers Compensation Insurance Premiums Skyrocket if the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act Expires?

Created by Congress after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that resulted in $40 billion in insured losses, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) is set to expire in December 2014. According to RAND researchers, the results could be devastating to businesses, significantly affecting the cost and availability of workers compensation coverage.

What is the Purpose of the TRIA?

After September 11, 2001, deemed by many the most expensive manmade catastrophe in insurance history, the reinsurers that absorbed most of the losses began to exclude acts of terrorism from their policies. This resulted in an extreme scarcity of terrorism reinsurance and led to issues with availability and affordability in a number of commercial property and casualty (P&C) insurance lines.

Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 to guarantee the availability of commercial P&C insurance that covered acts of terrorism. The act requires that these insurers offer policyholders coverage that includes losses due to terrorism—and that they do so on the same terms as their non-terrorism coverage. The act also established the Terrorism Insurance Program, which they designed to protect the insurers from catastrophic losses due to another major terrorism event.

Since its enaction, terrorism insurance has been widely available. According to RAND, 62 percent of U.S. businesses in 2013 had property insurance that covered losses due to terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, with the potential expiration of the TRIA at the end of this year, the private insurance industry is once again concerned about its ability to cover terrorism risk.

Why Will This Affect Workers Compensation?

Employers are required to provide no-fault compensation for medical expenses and lost wages to employees who are victims of work-related injuries or illnesses. Workers compensation insurance assists them in meeting this obligation.

While an act of terrorism is unlikely to relate directly to an employee’s job, one injured at work during such an act may file a workers compensation claim under the “positional risk” doctrine. Covering cases where the employee was in harm’s way though the cause was not related to employment, this doctrine encompasses most terrorism scenarios (including everyone in the World Trade Center on 9/11).

In the event of a large conventional terrorism attack, RAND estimates workers compensation losses could be more than $10 billion. Losses increase to more than $300 billion in the event of a nuclear attack. Under the TRIA, much of the risk of these catastrophic losses has been transferred to the federal government. If congress allows the act to expire, workers compensation insurers will have to reabsorb these risks on their own. According to RAND, they are likely to raise premiums for high-risk accounts, decline policies for high-risk accounts, or withdraw from the market altogether as a result.

If considered a high-risk employer, a business might find its premiums so high that it has to reduce its labor force to compensate. This could reduce incomes nationwide and inhibit economic growth. And should another terrorism attack occur after TRIA expires, businesses and taxpayers within the attack area would likely find themselves on the hook for financing workers compensation losses.

What Should You Do?

At present, the future of the TRIA is uncertain. You may want to plan ahead for any eventuality by discussing your workers compensation insurance coverage with your business insurance professional.