Excellent, expected. The inspirational business advice podcast. Well, hello there and welcome to another episode of Excellence Expected with me, Mark Asquith. You know, every time I say that, I seem to get more English, which is really weird.
I find myself becoming more like an old school English actor, which is kind of weird. But anyway, I digress. Welcome to the show once again. And today we are going to go deep into creating and growing an online business because digital gives us the opportunity, gives everyone the fairest chance of creating a business that can succeed.
But how do we do that? How specifically do we grow that online business? And that is one of the biggest issues that I see my daily life. So I'm really looking forward to digging into that.
And joining me today to help with that is someone who has really, really mastered this. Someone who has created one of the biggest, brightest and best small business websites on the internet, the founder and CEO of Small Business Trends, and need to Campbell. How are you? I'm doing great, Mark.
Nice to be here. It's a pleasure to talk to you. And it's such an interesting topic because people do have so much opportunity these days, but they don't necessarily know how to harness it. So I'm looking forward to digging into that.
But before we do, Anita, what's your story? What do you do? Tell us about small business trends and a little bit about you in person as well. So people ask me, well, what is your occupation?
And I say, I'm a publisher. And I mean that in the truest sense. My business is like a magazine business, except that we don't put out a print magazine. We do everything in electronic digits and pixels, and everything is online.
But in reality, all we're doing is very similar to a magazine or another publication. And that is that we are publishing, in this case, business information, for a specific target audience. And we do that in the form of a news and advice website, small business trends. We actually started a digital magazine this summer.
We have three editions out so far. And that is content arranged like a magazine. It's set up as a distinct publication. But rather than it being printed out, it is actually delivered electronically.
And then the reader could print it out on their end if they want to keep a copy of that. We also run some other sites, including TweakYourBiz.com, which actually has a pretty strong presence in the British Isles, Western Europe. And it is also an advice site, a group site, where a lot of experts and people who know what they're talking about come on and talk. And then we run Biz Sugar, which is a social sharing site, just for small business content.
So those are the main sites. We have some smaller ones. And we do some other things. We do some awards, such as the small business book awards and the small business influencer awards.
But those are the main things. And again, our business model is like a magazine. We essentially make money from advertisers. And we provide the content to the readers, in this case, for free.
Wow. So I mean, you add deep in small business. And it's all online. That's why I love about that.
You've got so many different outlets. I'd just like to dig into that journey. Small business trends came first. How did you go about creating?
What was the initial catalyst for creating that website? And why did you choose the medium and the format that you chose? I'm really curious about that. It started by accident in a way.
I had been in the corporate world. By training, I'm actually a corporate attorney. And I was a corporate attorney. And then I got involved in the business side of things.
And I had a lot of different roles as an executive. I left that in the early 2000s. Wasn't sure what I was going to do. Friends who were entrepreneurs started asking me to help them with business plans.
And so I did. And I thought, one day, well, I'm really a consultant. So maybe I should put up a website as a consultant and do some consulting for a while, which I did. One day, I needed to publish some articles for an email newsletter that I was putting out for marketing purposes.
And I was having a tough time. Now, this was 2003. And back in 2003, we didn't have anywhere near the vehicles to publish online as we have today. It was much harder.
I was messing around using a program called Dreamweaver. And I was not very good at it. And it was taking me like two days to put a few articles up on the web and actually format them so that I could send out this email newsletter. And I thought, well, I'll never be able to make money in business that way, spending two days just fooling around with formatting some articles for the web.
That wasn't even counting writing the articles. I was just getting them online. Someone said, have you heard about these things called blogs? I said, well, you know, I've heard about them.
They said, you should check it out. So I went over to blogger.com, which at the time was the state of the art when it came to blogging and actually running your own kind of website. This actually preceded WordPress. I tried blogger.
I loved it. I fell in love instantly because to me, it was like creating a Word document. But instead of hitting the Print button or the Save button, I would hit the Publish button and voila. And there I was.
I published something online. To me, it was like magic. It was so wonderful. And I thought, oh, well, this was great.
Well, I started sending out this newsletter before I knew it. We had more people reading the articles on the website on the blog that I had, rather than in the email newsletter that I was sending out the links to the pages on the site. And from there, I realized the potential of publishing. And gradually, as I like to say, the blog ate the business.
And it became the business. And that's how I got into publishing. Wow. Dreamweaver takes me back as well there.
And that's like a blast from the past. They were dark days, weren't they? Yeah. And to think, you know, that was how you created web pages.
I mean, there were some other tools you could use, you know, that was one of the upper-tier tools. It was. It really was. And one of the things that you said there, the blog overtook the business.
And, you know, it became the business. That's a really interesting phrase, really. And the one thing that I just want to pull from that is that there's real opportunity for people, isn't there? It doesn't matter the walk of life.
There's real opportunity by creating something online. And I mean, you know, we live in this world of publishing. We've got this new video trend of Periscope, Meerkat, Blab. We've got all these new tools that you mentioned earlier, you know, things that have become significantly easier.
Would you say that it's the time is still right for people to create an online business? There's still as much opportunity there for people, even though things are so loud and so crazy online now. Yeah, there's definitely opportunity. I think the opportunities change as the nature of the tools change and as certain types of publishing become more mature and get a little more saturated.
So I still think there's plenty of opportunity for people to create a content-oriented site and have it grow into a large site. I think now though, when you do that, you just have to think in terms of a really, really narrow niche because a lot of the broader sites have already got out there. You know, the ones that cover a million topics. And what's left that isn't well served today with content websites are very narrow niches, very specific interests that people have.
But if you happen to have expertise in one of those areas and you spot an opportunity because you see that there are no sites that are serving that interest today, I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I completely agree with that. And it's to flip that around on it said, you know, people do worry that they perhaps have nothing to say that hasn't been said before. And the thing that I always think in that perspective is that people say things in their own voice, and that's the power of, well, this medium for a stat, but also the video, medium, even, you know, authoring written content in such a narrow niche.
As long as you do it with your own voice and with your own slant, your own angle, there really seems to be so many more people online ready to consume that content as well. You know, that can really work in your benefit, can't it? It absolutely can. And you know, you mention these new formats and other formats, you know, if you just consider YouTube, how many YouTube stars were spawned by just setting up a YouTube channel and creating videos, recording videos, and putting it out there?
Well, take podcasts, what you're doing, Mark. You know, that's another thing. You know, creating audio-related content. And as many podcasts as we have seen and looked at out there, what we find is that, you know, they're all unique.
Everybody has their own unique take on things. Everybody has their own flavor, their own format. And you get to know these different publications or podcasts or video casts or whatever they are by what they do best and what distinguishes them. And, you know, one person may like one format versus another.
There's something for everyone, or there could be something for everyone out there. And I think when it comes to an aspiring entrepreneur looking to publish and kind of make their way, whether it's to run a full-time publication or a full-time podcast or whatever it is, or whether you just want to use that on the side as a marketing tool for another business that you have, either way, I think there's plenty of opportunity to spot, something that's not being done today or not being done well and bring your own particular flavor to. Now, let's talk about persistence, because to take that a step further, you see, I mean, we see in podcasting, you know, that it's lovingly given the term pod feed where people start and then they just kind of give up after a while. And you see it with blogs, I mean, how many others have set up a blog and then completely bend it after two articles.
It's just the nature of it. Did you ever get to that point with any of your websites? Did you just ever think to yourself, that's it, this is too hard or I'm just not getting the traffic yet? So, you know, were there any of those kind of moments for you?
Absolutely. In fact, I've got a site sitting out there now called selling to small businesses. After a while, we just couldn't think of much to write on that site that was very different. I do have plans to use that site, so it's still sitting out there.
But we really found that one site, small business trends really took most of our energy and we put all of our creative energy into that. But even beyond that, you know, I used to run a podcast for six years. And, you know, after a while, we just found that it was great, but we had some other opportunities in the print, what I'm called Printer Text, Information World. And as a small business, you only have so much, it was a resources energy time.
So, you have to choose. You have to decide where you're going to put your time and energy. So, in that case, it wasn't so much that we thought, oh, we just weren't interested in it anymore. We just had to make a choice.
And so, we made a choice to go more in the direction of the text-related information. But, you know, I see that all the time. I would say this, though, if you're in business and you're committed as an entrepreneur, the one thing that I see people do so much is they give up very, very easily. And you might think, well, I haven't given up easily.
You know, I'm not there, I'm doing it. But in the overall, the game of things, you have to be prepared for the long term. And I think that sets apart a lot of the successful entrepreneurs from the others. Sometimes, you know, it's like being in a tunnel, you know, on train tracks.
And you do see that light at the end of the tunnel. It's very far away, very, very faint. But, you know, what if you turned your head a little bit, you might even have missed that little light at the end of the tunnel. You might not even see it.
Or, you know, you might not have gone in far enough to really start to notice that light at the end of the tunnel. But, had you walked, you know, a couple hundred meters further in, you might have seen it. And so, that's how you have to think of it. You have to think of business as a journey that you can't stop or gets eye-tracked too early on.
You have to stick with it until you start seeing that goal at the end. I think that's really important. I just want to talk about expectations for a second. Because for a lot of people, you do see this kind of, let's call it, if you like, a silver bullet.
You know, I'll go online, I'll create a business, and suddenly I'm making millions over now. And the reality is it's just not like that. And one of the things that I'd like to just dig into is those expectations. So if you do create an online business, and you know, it's not, it's not instantly going to be profitable.
It's not necessarily going to be successful from day one. What are the expectations like from someone that's done it in a detail? What's that journey like in the early days? How does that feel?
What does it look like? And what can people expect from those first maybe three, six, nine, 12, maybe 24 months? So expect that you're not going to make much money unless you can come up with a service that's in demand that you can sell quickly, or you have some kind of a product that doesn't take that long to put together. And so you have to have something that you're able to get out there and earn money with.
And if you're looking to earn it based on any kind of publishing or podcasting, especially anything that's advertising supported, it's going to take a while. It's going to take a couple of years before you can really make any, you know, true money off of that. So your job at first as an entrepreneur is to find the money elsewhere, to buy you the time to get to that point. So you can be building your business and take all the steps and everything that you need to do to get to the point that you can actually earn money from advertisers or sponsors, or however it is that you're going to earn from it.
So what does that mean in the real world? Well, that may mean that you have to have a side job for a couple of years. And one thing that I've seen a lot of people do is there'll be a consultant for a few years. And they'll do consulting or some kind of freelancing based on a skill they have on the side for a few years.
And that gives them the money that they earn that helps them pay their living expenses. And they can also take some of that money and plow it into building the business and investing in the business and new technology or marketing for the business or potentially helping subsidize a new hire for a seeking, get some help, whatever it might be. But that's really how you have to think of it. And side businesses, I don't know about the UK, but certainly here in the US, they're very popular.
A lot of people have side businesses or some of them, some people, you know, the more cool people call them the side hustle. I got a side hustle. OK, but whatever it is, you've got something on the side that is, you know, either your business that you're building is a side business or you're doing some consulting or freelancing or some kind of service work on the side. I've even seen people make money from publishing on Kindle, for example, publishing fiction books on Kindle and making money from that and turning that into money that they use to fund a software business, for example, or building an agency or something like that.
That's really interesting. The idea that the focus can be split. A lot of people worry too much about that in the early days, because you do have to, at the end of the day, you have to live, you have to fund the new business that you're in. And one of the big bits of advice that I got from a client and a friend of mine, John Cunningham, was focus on what's important, not just on what's interesting.
And that's been a real mantra of mine, because you do have to earn the money. You've got to focus on the important. You know, when you start a business or you start something online, you can get so into that. You get so passionate about it.
Sometimes you don't bring your head up out of the sand. You've got to earn the money. And in your experience, is there a way to balance that? Because we all know what it's like if we do split our focus.
If you've got any advice or people out there that have doing the side hustle, if you like, I've never heard that, but I'm going to use it. It's only advice for those guys that are trying to spin these plates and feel like they're perhaps treading water in both sides of things. Well, you know, I think it's, you know, the question of measuring your performance, you know, a little trick that I did and I still do today is I would send myself reports. Some of the big believer in analytics and reports.
And what I use them for is I use them to look back over a period of time and compare where I am today with where it was. And one of the reasons that I do that is, you know, the obvious thing is it shows progress over time shows you're making progress. You can see, well, how am I doing today compared to how we were doing three months ago and are we improving whatever metrics it is that you're measuring over three months? But you know, the real reason that I would send those reports to myself in the days before I had any staff to send me reports, since I was the only one there, I had to send them to myself.
I did that because it motivated me. It gave me tremendous motivation to see a little bit of progress. And I would find the slightest little bit of progress to hang my hat out. Oh, we had, you know, 100 more visitors this week compared to last week.
Well, you know, aren't we doing great? Hey, you measure whatever it is that you can, you know, but I would measure whatever I could to, you know, give myself the motivation that little, you know, pump me up of, wow, we're doing a little bit better because I need to see positive improvement. And when you see positive improvement, that keeps you going. And that's how you know that, you know, there's something here.
If you're not getting any improvement at all and you know, you know, you're not making excuses to yourself that you in fact have done your best. You've put forth your all and you're seeing no progress. In fact, maybe you're seeing negative progress. Well, then maybe at that point, you really have to say, you know, maybe I'm not working on something that's important.
Maybe I like this. It's my passion, but customers aren't interested in it. Readers aren't interested in it, whatever. So I, you know, I guess my bottom line advice there would be measure things, really look at reports.
And you can do that easily today. If you just take a, let's talk about traffic reports for a website. If you just take Google Analytics, you can set it up to email reports to yourself once a week. And you can say, you know, tell it, I want, I need a report, email it to this address with these items in it.
And in your inbox that morning, you're going to get a beautiful Google Analytics report with pretty, you know, blue graphs on it and you'll be able to see whether or not you actually have made any progress. But again, I think it's really important to motivate yourself, but also not, not kid yourself, not fool yourself. You really have to see if you are indeed making progress. I think the measurement is so important.
I completely get that. And I always find the metrics very, very difficult for people who haven't yet got something. So I always find there's some solace in creating your own metrics, what matters to your business. You don't necessarily need something that's industry standards.
Just if you can measure your own progress, I think that's vital. So I think that's really important to each other. I think that's a fantastic piece of advice. And speaking of advice, we're now just going to shift a gear into the actionable takeaway section.
So I need to know you've prepared three fantastic actionable tips for people that are perhaps looking to start and grow an online business. So let's dig in to actionable tip number one, please. So number one is to stick with it. You know, you mentioned 24 months earlier, I would have that as a, you know, a very good timeframe, certainly one year, but in between a year and two years to really grow traffic because there are so many websites today, it does take time to build up traffic and you're going to have to work at it.
And, you know, it's one of these things where you have to keep working at it too. You can't stop. So you're going to have to measure and see if you're growing your traffic at all, but not give up because most people do give up too soon and they really underestimate how much time it takes to build an audience. But if you do stick with it and you do the right things, like you were saying earlier on, Mark, it's within the power of anyone.
It doesn't matter what your background is, how much money you start out with, whatever. It's more a matter of your determination, your persistence, the amount of effort you put into something, you know, the amount of effort you put in is probably in direct proportion to, you know, the, what you get out of it. So stick with it. I love that stick with it.
Don't give up. And it's so easy. I run in a podcast. I just digress for one set, running a podcast.
The first week you're logging in, you've got 30 listeners and the second week you're logging, you've got 32, you just suddenly think to yourself, man, this is difficult. You really have to switch around. So well, last week it was 30, this week it's 32. You'd really, you know, even when the numbers are tiny, you've got to celebrate every little one.
So I completely completely get that and each other. That's fantastic. And let's move on to actual tip. Number two, please.
Publish, publish, publish. What I mean by that is that when you're trying to build any kind of an online publishing business, even if it's YouTube videos or a podcasting business, I think this applies to that as well, you have to build up a body of work and you have to be out there consistently. And one of the biggest mistakes I see budding publishers or podcasters or others do is either inconsistent content created or not enough content, not doing it frequently enough. And the more you publish and get out there, the more traffic you will get, the more your business will grow.
The more people will be aware of you, the more there is for your happy users, listeners, readers to share on social media, which of course has a network effect when that happens when they share. So all of these things, the foundation of that is having a pretty good and consistent level of publishing and the more you can publish, the more content you can get out there, the better. That said, there is one caveat and that is some people see that and they just think, well, I'll just start scraping things and I'll just do these things that are like two sentences that, you know, then have a quote from, you know, some other content somewhere or whatever, you have to keep your quality up too. And you have to have something unique about your approach, something that is just you and the way you do it.
But provided you do those things, provided you maintain quality and provided you establish a personality or unique approach that's, that's your competitive advantage. Then at that point, you really want to go for volume. Volume is very, very important and it builds cumulatively and just stop and think one moment. Just want to add this one point to that.
And that is just stop and think for a moment about the search engine benefits of having a lot of content out there. If you have two videos on your YouTube channel versus 200, you can see how many fewer possibilities there are for people to find your video in the search engine or in the YouTube search and get to you versus 200 of those. You know, just obviously there are many more chances and the same go with the number of articles that you might publish in text. You know, if you've got 200 articles versus 2000, you can see what a huge difference that is.
You've got 2000 potential chances to be found in search for various things. Actually, a lot more, but let's just keep the numbers simple compared to 200. I love that published, published, published. And that, excuse me, is one of the things that you just, you sometimes can't get your head around, you know, getting as much content out there as possible is difficult and getting to that routine can be quite challenging.
But once you do do that, it really becomes, it kind of becomes habit, doesn't it? Do you find yourself even now sort of relying on that instinct to just keep publishing to take you through those tough times? Does that just get you through? Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, it just becomes a way of life and you realize that you just have to do it. You know, once you start seeing how your traffic rose and so on, you see the benefit that comes from having a lot more content out there. When you start seeing the number of social shares growing from happy readers or happy visitors to your site who found some value and wanted to share something, that will pump you up. And you'll start to see the real benefits of that.
And remember, it's kind of a network exponential effect that comes into play because it's not just even the cumulative aspect. It's that, you know, if you have 5,000 followers on various social networks, at some point sharing things, then each of them is potentially touching, you know, how many thousands or millions, I'm sure someone could figure out that number of their own followers with your content. So the more of them that you are reaching with your content, exponentially more have the potential to see it. And that's why those numbers are so very important.
I love that. Fantastic. And let's dig into the third and final actual tip. And that third tip is figure out something to sell early on.
And what I mean by that is you really do have to have some kind of revenue source coming in while you build advertising revenues, because just think of it, your traffic is going to take a period of time to grow. So while that traffic is growing enough to be of interest to an advertiser, you're not going to get an advertiser and really interested or make enough from even a source like Google AdSense unless and until you've got substantial traffic numbers. With that said, you're going to have to have something else in the interim. And that's a mistake that a lot of people make.
They don't have anything to sell. They're just relying on this advertising. So even if you feel like you don't have any skills at all, there's something that you know something about. You could write an ebook and go out and put it on Amazon and sell it as a Kindle.
You could create some kind of a software program and sell it. You could hire out your services. That's a very easy thing to do. You know, we all have some kind of services, something that we could do, you know, whether it's freelance writing, whether it's consulting, whatever it might be, if you're a mechanic, you're going to be able to provide those services.
And think of that. Think of your labor that you can hire out as something that you're selling. But do think of that as I've got to find something that I can sell quickly. And, you know, if you are a consultant or, you know, any kind of a service provider, that also means selling small things because it takes a lot longer to get a prospective client to buy something that's going to cost thousands of dollars or pounds or euros or whatever versus buying something that's going to cost a few hundred.
That's a big risk for a lot of clients to take to spend thousands out of the gate. So if you give them something smaller, they can spend their money on, they get to know you, they can trust you, you get some money in more easily. It's not as long as sales cycle. And then you can build on that with repeat sales to that customer.
Love that. Find something to sell early on. It's sometimes nerve-wracking putting that first product out there, but I like the idea of selling your skills and your consultancy and, you know, kind of moving into that freelance zone. If you like, I know a few people that have done that with great success.
And the beauty of that is you can really focus where you want to focus. I think that's a cracking idea. It really, really is. And that's been such a good chat.
Thank you so much for that. I think it's packed full of high quality value and good quality tips. That's what we like people that can actually take action from that. So thanks so much for doing that.
And just before we wrap up, where is the best place for people to find you online? Have you any preference? Well, I do. And Marco, before I get to that, I do want to thank you again very, very much for having me.
And wonderful format you have for this podcast, by the way. And thank you for the insightful questions and commentary as well. People can reach me at smallbiztrends.com. I'm on Twitter.
That's probably my social network of choice. You can find me at our main account, which is at smallbiztrends. And I do, in fact, try to respond to people sometimes not as quickly as I'd like to. But if people do speak to me directly or send me a direct message, I will try to get to it, even if sometimes it takes me a few days.
Fantastic. Check it out, guys. We'll make sure to put everything in the show notes so you're not going to miss any of these links. And I need to thank you once again.
That has been my pleasure. Thank you so much, Mark. Super stuff. Guys, thanks so much for listening.
It's half an hour out of your day. So I hope you've enjoyed that and found some action buried within the last 30 odd minutes. So again, thanks so much for that. As I did mention, everything will be available at excellence-expector.com and a small favor to ask if you liked the show, if you enjoyed our chat, everything that myself and I need to have gone through today, just please tell a friend and ask them to tell a friend.
That would be massive. Thanks so much for that. And don't forget, the more you expect from yourself, the more you will accept. Bye bye.