Are your customers truly happy with the product or service you are providing them? Are you doing it better than your competition? Do you even know where you stand when it comes to delighting your customers? Regardless, here’s a secret; you can always be better.

If you in fact want to be the best and have customers return over and over again, you will need to continue to learn, train and evaluate your small business. Many small business owners have the mentality of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While that may have some truth to it, it can also leave you behind the competition and ultimately impact your success in a negative way.

Sometimes your best just isn’t good enough when you’re trying to get new customers. That’s when you need some momentum to push you forward into the realm of closing customers before they lose interest and turn to your competitors. But how do you do this?

Maybe you think you're doing a really great job at this inbound marketing thing. You’re attracting people to your company website by blogging 3 times a week, actively posting on social media platforms, and you think your keyword strategy is accurate. You’ve even started converting some of your website visitors with your stellar calls-to-action that entice them to click and fill out the form to download the helpful content your staff has created. But then these leads seem to vanish into thin air and you’re left wondering how you can hold onto them and close them as customers. Keep reading to learn three key things that you should be doing.

So many marketers set goals of increasing website traffic, getting more visitors to your website and so on…

These are important goals when using internet marketing for your small business, especially when you implement inbound marketing strategies. This is all fine and dandy and a really great place to start if you are just getting on the web or if your website isn’t attracting visitors at all. But increasing lead conversion rates is where you will start to see a real impact on your ROI and allows you to grow your business full of passion and provision.

So, what if you have 2000 people visiting your website each month? The real question becomes, “where are the customers?” As internet marketers we work really hard to make our client’s websites as “findable” as possible as people use search engines to research products and services. Here at Half a Bubble Out, we do this for our clients through the attracting stage of inbound marketing.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a type of marketing that would give you the competitive edge that you need to take your successful small business full of passion and provision to the next level? Normally competitive edge requires having more money budgeted towards marketing. What if I told you that this type of marketing will allow you to compete with the big guys in your industry? Before we get ahead of ourselves let’s start with the basics of this special type of marketing.

While I’m not prone to prognostication I do love to look ahead and consider where we are going as a company and what we need to pay attention to. This holiday season I was reminded of some really great skills that I will need in business in the year ahead. The funny part of this inspiration is where it came from. They say good things sometimes come from the strangest places and this holiday season that’s no joke.

My college daughter, home for the holidays, decided to go all OCD on us and start watching multiple seasons of American Ninja Warrior. The show involves athletes competing on crazy difficult obstacle courses. My hands actually sweat as I’m watching the show. The ultimate goal is to make it to the mother of all obstacle courses, Mount Midoriyama. The competition started in Japan and came to America 6 years ago. To date no American has ever been able to complete the Mount Midoriyama course.

The holidays are a great time for business, big and small, to give it their all when it comes to creative advertising in the form of TV commercials. Advertisers work hard all year long to create ads that will raise brand awareness and promote new products, but there is something about the holidays that bring out the best in advertising for business. The holidays bring out the importance of passion and provision, even in business. 

If being an inbound marketer and content creator has taught me anything, it’s that the only constant is change. As technology gets smarter and people get braver, new strategies are tried. They might fail and that’s okay because that’s how we learn. But they also might succeed, and then you must adapt. In order to survive and thrive in the inbound marketing world you have to know how to write. If you really want to have a successful small business, then you also need to learn how to blog effectively.

I’m no fortune teller, so what I’m sharing with you is purely based on research I’ve done and my own predictions. But whether I’m right or wrong doesn’t really matter, because the points below will help your blog either way.

Now that is it 2015, let’s take a look at your New Year’s resolutions.The Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2014 is culture, which is no surprise being that it is becoming more popular in the business world. When you look at your successful business, do you see a business that has an environment that engages employees and nurtures relationships while focusing on passion and provision? These aspects of business can easily be thrown on the back burner and neglected.

Selling a product or a service to someone can often be a tough feat as a small business. People have so many options when it comes to purchasing something in our marketplace anymore. What if I told you that certain words you use in your content and sales pitch can help you sell more products and/or services?

With 2014 coming to an end, it’s time to evaluate how different marketing strategies worked throughout the year and how we should change them in 2015 to work better, as well as what predictions we have for the future of marketing, specifically social media. It should be no surprise for you to hear that social media marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So, why is social media important in 2015?