Sprouter Signals #1 Save Time by Focusing Only on the Best Content

There are a lot of tips, resources and guides for small business owners and entrepreneurs. However, all of us are lack of time and most of it should be spent on building our business rather than looking for the best resources.

Sprout Geek aims to become the ultimate learning and education platform for both small business owners and startup entrepreneurs. With that mission, we are introducing Sprouter Signals, a weekly mashup of insights, tips and resources that are important for you.

Let us do the hard work in curating the best articles and videos as well as filtering out all the noise. We want your business to be successful and in order to do that, you should spend all your time building it.

Let’s see what we have for you in the first edition of Sprouter Signals.

Marketing

A couple of weeks ago, Foursquare introduced Foursquare Local Updates, a feature that allows business owners to share updates with nearby users who have either liked or checked in at their place. This is a great opportunity for businesses to connect with former customers nearby and it will definitely generate more repeat business for them too. Have you claimed your business on Foursquare to take advantage of this feature?

If you have a commercial website, it should target a set of keywords in order to obtain laser targeted traffic from search engines. How many keywords do you need? How do you know which keyword to target? Over at Search Engine Watch, Ray “Catfish” Comstock wrote A 6 Step Process for Keyword Research, an article that will specifically answer your questions about keyword research.

With the explosive growth of social networks in recent years, one may think that forums are on their way out. Not so soon. In fact, most of your prospects might still be hanging out in forums. If you are unsure about how to participate in forum discussions without getting cold shoulders from members or getting banned for being too promotional, do check out How to Engage in Online Forums for Your Brand by Patrick O’Keefe.

For many small business owners, marketing looks easy. Go out, tell people about what you have and that’s about it. Well, if it’s that easy, why are there so many failed marketing campaigns? It’s either because what you have to offer is a complete disaster or you are missing something with your marketing strategies. 20 Bonehead Marketing Mistakes You Must Avoid by Neil Patel contains basic mistakes that small business owners and even experienced marketers still make today.

If you have an e-commerce store, you should have realized that the conversion rate for organic search engine traffic is usually the highest. You’re in luck today if you are about to give up on searching all over the Internet for link building ideas as well as ideas on how to optimize your store for search engines. We stumbled upon Jason Acidre‘s article, 40 SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites and we think that it is a must read for every search engine optimizer and business owner with an e-commerce store.

I am a die-hard proponent of email marketing and lead generation. Most of the time, I try to find ways to improve the conversion rate of my lead gen forms and this week, I found 11 Clever CTA Tricks Real Brands Are Using to Grow Their Email List written by Magdalena Georgieva. If you have run out of ideas on how to further boost conversion rates of opt-in forms, these case studies might be able to inspire you.

When you are writing the copy for your website, are you blindly referring to what others are doing? Stop doing so because this is not a good habit to have if you want to become good with copywriting. What are the habits that you should have instead? Well, read 8 Habits of Conversion-Focused Copywriters by Craig Anderson.

Rather than spending time and money continuously on one marketing campaigns after another, do you know that you can actually implement some hacks to your products, web pages or services, which they will then start generating more customers and users for your business? Head over to The 6 Best Growth Hacks to Get Customers Without Having to Pay for Them written by Lars Lofgren.

Business Strategy

If you have spent time using some of the web applications that are out there today like Mailchimp or Evernote, you should know how freemium works. Basically, this business model is adopted by giving away the product or service to users for free but a premium has to be paid in order to access advanced features.

A couple of weeks ago, Rags Srinivasan put forward an interesting food for thought, Freemium Has Run Its Course. I think the article has some reasonable points so do give it a read and decide for yourself whether the statement is true or not.

Self Improvement

As an entrepreneur, you cannot escape from talking to people. You’ll never know whether the next guy or gal could be your co-founder, investor or even an evangelist of what you have to offer. As an entrepreneur, you need to invest your time properly when it comes to networking and HackFwd has some good insights to share with their blog post, 10 Rules of Networking for Startups.

Are You Looking Forward to Next Week?

This week has been super exciting for Sprout Geek as we ramped up our content creation (with the latest post on how part time entrepreneurs can be successful) and marketing efforts.

We can’t wait for next week to come and we are crushing it through the weekend to bring you this compilation of great resources. We hope that you like it.

Do give us your feedback and comment on the compilation. Let us know what would you like to see more or less of. Have fun!

Image courtesy of Hamed Saber, Nick J Webb and mikebaird