The Short List for Online Marketers at Small Businesses

My other blog is about entrepreneurship in the technology startup world (not to mention Cloud Technology, Mobile Computing, and Social Networks) and I’m a serial entrepreneur who has done 5 companies so far with a sixth (right here, baby!) underway. As such, I follow a lot of small business and entrepreneurship resources–I subscribe to nearly 200 blogs for that information. A number of our readers here at CNCCookbook run a manufacturing business of one kind or another. Some of them are running job shops while some are manufacturing their own products. As a result, I try to pass along a little small business wisdom every now and again, but not so much as to detract from the overall theme of CNCCookbook. Here is my first installment of business thinking for the New Year. All small businesses share a common problem: how to get more customers (and often, how to get more of the right kinds of customers). The web is a potent resource to all of these businesses, and one you want to make use of. Towards that end, if you like to read blogs, I wanted to give you my short list of must-read bloggers for small businesses. I subscribe to nearly 200 blogs, but for this list there are just three, so it should be easy to get started learning from some of the best minds how to successfully market your small business: Seth Godin Seth goes at the top. He makes a daily short post that always makes me stop and think. He is definitely trying to be unconventional, and thinking about what each day’s post might mean for your business is a great way to break loose from the cobwebs and generate some new ideas. If I have no time to read any other blog, I can always find the time for Seth and more often than not, it will be the best time I spend thinking about marketing. Duct Tape Marketing Combine John Jantsch’s folksier and more down-to-earth ideas with Seth Godin’s refreshingly unconventional idea generator and you wind up with a powerful one two marketing punch for your small business. John is one of the highest rated bloggers out there for small business, he hails from the heartland of our country which is a nice change from New York or Silicon Valley, and he really really gets small businesses of all kinds. Hubspot Blog Hubspot is a company selling software to help Internet marketers. That part is fine and I leave it to you to evaluate whether to even look at their software. However, they are pursuing a content marketing strategy (just like CNCCookbook). That means they give away tons of valuable information for free in exchange for getting some of your attention and to get the word out about who they are. As a consequence, their blog is a wonderful source of helpful information and ideas for how to really go about marketing on the Internet. If we put all three of these together, they’re a powerful team of advisors for your small business. Seth Godin is your ideas man and a source of inspiration. His posts get me pumped up. John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing will help you craft your strategy–what are you trying to accomplish with all those ideas and all how do you fit all the pieces together to get a worthwhile result? Hubspot will give you the tactics. What does the homepage of your web site need to do? If you are marketing a product online, what’s the best and most efficient way to get the word out or to get people to actually buy?

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