Five Little Things for Your Monday: April 24, 2017

It’s the last Monday of April and this week’s Five Little Things covers everything from public speaking and SEO to authentic marketing. Take a look:

1. 5 Steps to ‘Connecting the Room’ via fPA

Do you have trouble speaking in front of groups? Is it difficult for you to engage your audience? Public speaking is a fear that plagues countless people, but the ability to present and connect the room is an incredibly important skill to have. This 5-step guide breaks down just how to gain everyone’s attention and get your point across.

2. BUILDING YOUR DREAM TEAM: A PICK-AND-CHOOSE ROSTER via kimberlite coaching

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: doing everything in your business is stressful and exhausting. There is no way you can be your best self, in your professional and personal life, if you go it alone. In fact, you likely won’t even have time for a personal life as your business starts to grow. It’s a struggle to keep up, and it’s easy to be tempted to “DIY” all the time to keep costs down. However, your personal sanity isn’t the only thing that stands to benefit from having a dream team to back you up.

3. 5 Ways Small Business Owners Can Leverage Social Media To Grow via Forbes

There are different use cases for social media. It can be used to communicate with friends and family, track news events in real time, further careers, or discover new music and movies. But for small businesses, the different networks serve as avenues to interact with consumers on a personal level and can convert casual consumers into brand loyalists.

Despite the plethora of social media offerings, only one in four business owners has a social media profile and less than half post consistently, according to the Clutch 2017 Small Business Social Media Survey. This largely remains an untapped and misunderstood market for small businesses, but there are five networks that small businesses should look to leverage first.

4. The complete guide to optimizing content for SEO (with checklist) via search engine land

Effective content marketing is a vehicle for modern SEO. Just as wheels without an engine leaves you pedaling, content without an SEO strategy can’t keep up in a digital marketplace. And just like an engine with no wheels, SEO without content is a shiny machine that goes nowhere. Content needs SEO to stand out in the din of mediocre blog posts clogging up the internet these days, and Google has said that one of the top three ranking factors for organic search is “content.”

But what does that mean? Not any content, surely. Unfortunately, search engines are not handing out checklists for “high-quality content,” and they probably never will. That means it’s up to those of us who geek out on this kind of thing to study search results, mine Google Analytics and create massive spreadsheets that we pretend to be bored by but secretly love — all to bring you (and ourselves, who are we kidding?) a comprehensive guide to creating “high-quality” SEO content.

5. 5 Ways to Create Content That Breaks Down Trust Barriers via entrepreneur

Content plays a powerful role in fueling relationships and building trust with your audience. Still, simply creating and publishing content isn’t automatically going to break down trust barriers. The content you create has to meet a few standards first.

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