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If you're a creative person looking for small business ideas to help get started on your next venture – this post should definitely help. As a professional SEO and content marketer – who started out in journalism and copywriting – I've got over 20 years' experience working in the creative industries as my own boss. And one thing's for sure, if you're willing to work hard and be entrepreneurial – the creative small business lifestyle can have many rewards (not least financially). So let's have a look at the types of ventures that are ideal for creative people who want to live life on their own terms… Listen To My Show On Business Ideas For Creatives [toc] 1. Photography If photography is your passion, then perhaps it's time to take this passion to the next level. Professional photographers are always in demand, especially if you niche down. Whether it's weddings, corporate events, family portraits or local festivals, talented photographers capture the essence of these events forever. You can build this business from home with few costs as well. 2. Event Planning Is planning and organisation your forte? Then you can try your hand at event planning. As an event planner, you’ll manage the logistics of coordinating major events. Perhaps you can begin by planning your friends’ birthday party or your dad’s retirement party before scaling up? Pull off one great party and soon word-of-mouth recommendations will do the rest.  3. Renting Storage Space If you live in a city or built up area and you've got a secure space not being used, you could always rent it out for storage. We live in a world where people just have too much ‘stuff' – so letting storage space is big business. Perhaps it's time to give that garage or workshop a tidy up and get it listed locally? 4. Interior Design If you love designing interiors, why not turn it into a source of income? Start with a friend or someone from your personal network and use that work to find better business opportunities as an interior designer. You can even partner up with your local furniture stores and manufacturers for a commission. It means they can bring you new projects to work on too.  5. Furniture Making Take your love of working with woodwork to the next level by opening a business crafting custom-made furniture. You could also offer a repair service for existing pieces of wooden furniture that require renovation. Get a website going to market yourself in your local area and this one could be a winner. 6. Graphic Design This is a good business opportunity for those who love art and design – and who also know their way round an Apple iMac or similar. With a little training, you can start a graphic design business with minimum expenses – and build up a portfolio of designs for friends and family first. Your main investment would be the https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud.html, which can now be purchased with a simple monthly payment.  7. Bed & Breakfast If you live in or near an interesting tourist destination or major city – and your home has a guesthouse or a spare bedroom, you could start running a B&B. If you love cooking and entertaining guests, you can use the extra space in your home to earn some money. You can list your room or guesthouse on sites such as Airbnb, HomeToGo, and Bookings.com to reach potential customers.   8. Catering Starting a catering service is a good idea if you are a qualified chef or a talented amateur cook. After you've got some experience working for a local restaurant or pub, you can then consider branching out to be your own boss. There are loads of high quality cookery courses that can help you along your career path too. 9.

Entrepreneurship is hard. Mastering online marketing is perhaps even harder. But as a time-strapped small business owner you knew that already right? Yet here's the thing… If you can't translate the success of your bricks and mortar business to a wider audience of the right people online – then at some stage your competitors will steal your market share. Who knows, it may even be another local business that does it. That's why every successful entrepreneur needs to learn some pretty specific and very important skills during their career – in order to make their company a success on the Internet. These top skills will not only help to set you apart on the Web, by enhancing your online traffic, leads and sales – but will help you build a brand that stands the test of time in your industry. So what are these essential skills entrepreneurs need? Let's dive into a list of the key traits that will place you among the most successful online entrepreneurs in the world. Listen To My Show On The Entrepreneurial Skills [toc] 1. Positioning ​Smart small business owners know that ​niching down will help them stand out online, rather than going too broad with their ​positioning. However counter intuitive it may sound, there’s more money to be made by catering to a smaller market than…well, everyone. Identifying ​a niche market ​requires an entrepreneur to adopt a marketer’s mindset, so you can focus on ​your potential audience's pain points – their needs, wants and frustrations. ​Positioning your ​business to solve these problems will give you a great foundation to build upon. Niche targeting has much to do with ​empowering your online ​authority and sales. ​By getting your positioning right from the outset, ​you'll ​convert more of your web visitors into customers as you grow your traffic. ​Recommended Reader Resources http://cultbranding.com/ceo/create-strong-brand-positioning-strategy/ https://liquidcreativity.com.au/marketing-positioning-guide/ 2. ​Knowing Your Audience Right from the start you should always be thinking of how to effectively market your ​products and services. It all begins with getting a good grasp of what the people in your target audience want, and knowing how a desired product or service can address their needs. ​​Naturally, you should make sure ​there’s sufficient demand for ​what you're offering – and ​devise a lead generation ​process to convert this demand into ​sales. ​ ​Understanding who your target audience are, where they are and what keeps them awake at night will then help you create ​accurate customer avatars – and in turn assist you in mapping your customer sales journey online. ​Recommended Reader Resources https://www.contentchampion.com/customer-avatar/ https://liquidcreativity.com.au/marketing-positioning-guide/ https://www.contentchampion.com/customer-journey-mapping/ 3. Understanding How To Scale Having identified a desirable product/service and started building a business brand around it, you can soon (hopefully) expect to deal with an influx of demand. Before this happens though, you should already have the systems in place to ensure that your business can efficiently handle the anticipated growth in customers. This is what building a scalable business entails.

When it comes to getting more traffic, leads and sales – content marketing is the low cost and highly effective way to build your small business online. Research your target audience, build your customer avatars then create and execute a documented content strategy. That's it in a nutshell. The benefits of content marketing for your business are many and varied – but all of them will positively impact your bottom line. Let's have a look at them… Listen To My Show On The Benefits of Content Marketing Want your episodes to look this good? https://www.contentchampion.com/spp [toc] 1. Better Brand Recognition Content marketing is hands down one of the https://neilpatel.com/blog/brand-building-blogging-strategy/ to make your brand stand out online. A lot of markets are maturing and becoming saturated, so buyers are naturally more cautious about what they purchase. By consistently delivering quality content that builds trust and authority with your target audience, you'll ensure your brand is always at the forefront of their mind. 2. Increased Search Engine Traffic If you regularly create and promote high quality content based on longtail keyword research using a tool such as https://www.contentchampion.com/kwfinder-review-and-tutorial/ or Ahrefs, over time you'll benefit from higher rankings in the major search engines – and in turn be rewarded with higher organic traffic. Sounds simple right? It kind of is – but you need to be persistent and consistent. 3. Enhanced Social Media Reach If your content satisfies a need or solves a problem, your target audience will definitely share it on the major social media platforms. This means other people you want to reach will also like, share and link to your content over time. If you always focus on creating and sharing high quality content – either yours or someone else's – then your social media reach should grow quite quickly. 4. More Credibility Want to look like the expert you actually are? Then let your customers know it, with content that shows how on the ball your business is. A series of blogs showing your knowledge of your product or sector will set you above any competitors who aren’t demonstrating their authority. You’re educating, entertaining and establishing expertise all at once. 5. Increased Conversions Your website content – and particularly your blog – reaches your customers in the research stage of their buying journey. The chances are, potential customers will find you because they’re searching for a specific answer. If you know your market, you’ll know why your customers come to you and what they’re looking for – so simply create content that addresses this. If you can satisfactorily answer their questions in your content, they are more likely to convert from researcher into purchaser. 6. Teaches You To Listen The very act of researching your target audience, customer avatars and conducting competitor and keyword research – helps you connect with your core prospects more deeply so you can answer all their questions. The feedback you get through this process will help you become better at listening to what your customers really want from you – which is why inbound marketing is such a high value strategy. 7. Unmatched Cost-Effectiveness We don’t want to sell content writing cheaply here; however, let’s be honest. Compared with a printed ad, physical event or even a shop window display, you won’t have to pay much for a good blog post. As well as publishing it on your website, you can also share it socially, send it out in an e-newsletter or promote it an...

Welcome to the show. In this episode I’m going to be making some recommendations on the marketing blogs you should read in 2020 – based on my experience of either reading their stuff for years, being on their email lists or interviewing them for my podcast (or all three). Listen To My Show On Marketing Blogs Want your episodes to look this good? https://www.contentchampion.com/spp Featured Blogs There are so many online marketing guru’s out there – but in my opinion many of them don’t know what they’re talking about. So by all means make your own choices too, but be aware there are a lot of smoke and mirrors being used on most of the marketing blogs you’ll find online. That’s not the case with this selection though. These are the good guys who actually practice what they preach and can genuinely help you grow your business on the Internet. So let’s dive into the list in no particular order…. https://backlinko.com/ https://www.gotchseo.com/ https://www.authorityhacker.com/ https://fatstacksblog.com/ https://yaro.blog/ https://www.thecontentmarketingacademy.co.uk/ https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ https://createandgo.com/ https://ahrefs.com/ https://incomeschool.com/ https://www.contentchampion.com/ In Conclusion: 11 Marketing Blogs You Must Read In 2020 So there are my choices. I like other marketing blogs too but these are my absolute favourites that would fit into a short, snackable podcast. If you pushed me on what my absolute best blog is at the time of writing – then I’d have to say Fat Stacks Blog. I love Jon’s business model, blog writing style and emails – and in an ideal world I would do what he does for a living. Easier said than done 🙂 While I’ve had some success with affiliate sites in the past, I’ve always found transitioning from client work to a publishing model to be very hard in terms of replacing the lost income. It seems like a big gap to leap between the two business models, but I’m not giving up yet. Watch this space in 2020 and thanks for listening. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Watch The Video Podcast Subscribe, Rate & Review The Content Champion Podcast Thanks for listening to ​the Content Champion podcast throughout 2019, we look forward to serving you with some great shows in 2020. If you enjoyed this episode, https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-content-champion-podcast/id626722163?mt=2 to leave me a rating and review. You can also subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode – and please share your fave shows on social media. Thank you!

Welcome to the show. In this episode I’m going to discuss my top five marketing tools of 2019. I’ve not really talked about my marketing stack before – but that’s long overdue because I quite simply couldn’t run the content marketing and SEO campaigns that I do for clients and my own projects if I didn’t use marketing automation. So in no particular order, here are my best tools of the year – that I absolutely cannot do without on a daily basis… Listen To My Show On Marketing Tools Want your episodes to look this good? https://www.contentchampion.com/spp 1. Active Campaign For email marketing and automations based on tagging people’s interests, I absolutely love Active Campaign. I’m slightly obsessed with creating automation workflows in this software, and I’ve got so used to its interface and layout that I couldn’t even entertain using anything else. It does have its drawbacks – for instance I find editing emails within automations to be clunky – but when used in combination with lead capture software such as ConvertBox, then this is the only email marketing stack you’ll ever need. I’m on a $50 bucks a month plan at the moment, and that’s sufficient for my needs in terms of automations and campaigns, so give it a go yourself if you need an email marketing provider or are thinking of changing from another solution. 2. ConvertBox This brings us neatly onto my next choice – ConvertBox. Describing itself as the new, more intelligent way to convert your visitors – it really is the new, more intelligent way to convert your visitors. ConvertBox helps you create email signup slide-ins, popups and exit intent forms that use advanced segmenting and targeting to convert more of your site traffic into email subscribers. That sounds fancy but what I really like about this software is its easy-to-use and intuitive interface, the personalised nature of the messaging – and also the fact that the design of the various conversion boxes and elements is refined and doesn’t scream, ‘I’m doing some marketing’ at your prospects. I went for their lifetime access pricing which is a few hundred bucks at the time of writing, so I’d get in on this fast as I think this offer is running out very soon. 3. Ahrefs Next up is my SEO tool of choice, Ahrefs. I use this literally everyday and find it to be the Swiss army knife of SEO software. From website audits to keyword research and link analysis – and everything else in between – I choose to stay with this tool because I trust the quality of their data and the size of their backlink database. Over the last few years I’ve alternated between their lite and standard plans – and although it can get a bit pricey as you go up the service levels – don’t forget you are paying for the integrity of their data, which is really everything in SEO terms. One feature of Ahrefs that has really impressed me this year is the site audit. I used to use SEO Optimer (which is fine) and a mish-mash of other tools – but I’m finding the data this produces to be really insightful. The best thing I can say about Ahrefs is that it’s a bit of an SEO oracle – in that if I find a great keyword or some link data in another tool (such as KW Finder which is also great), then I always double check it in Ahrefs just to be sure. 4. Gmail I started using Gmail in anger at the start of this year – not I would add in anger at Gmail itself, but at the host of other useless email platforms I’d failed with previously (Mac Mail you’re guilty as charged). I think I pay about $5 bucks a month for the G Suite version of Gmail, which means I can use my own Content Champion domain as part of my email address – and I can honestly say since I did this I’ve never looked back.