Blogging, notwithstanding what Matt Cutts had to say about it, still remains an important internet marketing activity. It’s a great way of earning natural links, but it’s even a better way of building relationships with authoritative online entities and your personal/business credibility. The problem is that there are many internet marketers that choose to use guest blogging or blogging purely as a link building activity (that’s why Google’s comes out all guns blazing against blogging in general) than a relationship building activity. 

But you need to start clearing your blogging misconceptions quickly and start to think beyond link building as its core objective. You need to start thinking of your blog as a tool for building credibility, authority and influence. In this article, we will focus on building credibility through your blog and how you can go about doing it.  So, let’s take a look at a few things you need to keep in mind to improve credibility through your blog:

Growth hacking is a term that’s all the rage right now. In all honesty, I can’t stand it… I feel like we’re on a merry go-round with terminology sometimes when it comes to marketing.

When people are thirsty, sell them a tall refreshing glass of lemonade served with a smile.

LinkedIn has long been a solid source for business to business marketers and sales departments to find and connect with their prospects and customers. It’s also a great platform to include in your content strategies.

Learn the basics of building your brand's content calendar to maximize marketing efforts.

Here are the content marketing tips for #startups and #smbs shared in this post:

1. Create content before, during and after events.

2. Support great posts about you by writing about them.

3. Don't SELL, CURATE instead.

4. Create content with an eye toward what you want.

5. Tools matter.

http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2013/11/5-quick-easy-content-marketing-tips.html ;

Excerpt from the last article published by Heidi Cohen on her blog:
"Content marketing in 2014 requires a content curation component and related strategy.

According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), buyers check an average of 10.4 sources when they research a purchase. This translates to providing lots of information targeted at answering their specific purchase related questions.
The way to meet this need effectively is to add content curation into the content marketing mix.

Content curation in the content marketing mix
To create an effective content offering, marketers use a mix of content strategies according to 2014 research by Curata.

Curated content distributed
When it comes to distributing curated content, marketers focus on 3 key strategies according to Curata’s data.

Actionable Content Marketing Tip: Share content created by your customers such as photographs of your product and reviews.

Actionable Content Marketing Tip: Develop blog posts based on curated articles and opinions such as round up posts.

Actionable Content Marketing Tip: Make sure you highlight content you created that’s appeared on other platforms such as guest blog posts.

Curation timing
If content curation is an integral part of your social media strategy, it’s important to be present and share regularly across social media platforms. This is particularly important for social signals that influence search results.
Actionable Content Marketing Tip: Determine what level of presence you need on various social media platforms and how much content you need to distribute to be competitive..."

Each point is analyzed with more information. Read full original article here:
http://heidicohen.com/content-curation-in-the-content-marketing-mix/

There is an unspoken rule: to launch a startup, you need to build a product, and to do that you need someone that can write code.

Whether that means chasing down a technical co-founder, learning to code, or even building that “Lean MVP” – the conventional wisdom is that without tech abilities you’re nothing more than a dude (or dudette) with a Powerpoint.

A growing number of startups, however, are quietly disproving this assumption.

They’re getting their first customers with minimal technology, and often no code at all. Instead of building fancy technology from the outset, they’re hacking together inexpensive online tools such as online forms, drag-and-drop site builders, advanced WordPress plugins, and eCommerce providers.

They’re jumping right in to serve customers in any way possible – heading right for their first paying customers.

Most importantly, unlike the majority of their peers, by the time they start building a product, they already have a humming business.

How are they doing it?

To read the full article, click on the title.

Get your Free Business Plan Template here:

http://bit.ly/1aKy7km

"Startups face tremendous pressure while competing with their bigger counterparts. They neither have large manpower nor big infrastructure. Social media can become an effective solution in helping them grow. This infographic shows how startups should utilize the power of social media."

Startups are businesses that make money. Otherwise they're hobbies. Expensive ones.

"Startups face tremendous pressure while competing with their bigger counterparts. They neither have large manpower nor big infrastructure. Social media can become an effective solution in helping them grow. This infographic shows how startups should utilize the power of social media."

The Lean Startup
Every entrepreneur and wannabe entrepreneur should read Eric Ries' The Lean Startup. Here are 6 Tips from the book:

* Build an "Innovation Factory" Using Lean Startup techniques.

* Validated Learning most important "product" in any startup.
* Find what assumptions are BRILLIANT & which ones are CRAZY.
* Create a testing & experimentation culture & experiment based on vision, core values and feedback.

* You don't know what "quality" is yet, so go early, ugly and fast and refine from feedback.

* Get Out of the Building meaning get your ideas in front of real customers as soon as possible. 

Highly recommend The Lean Startup and not JUST for startups. Great book for intrepreneurs, people trying to innovate within Fortune 1,000 companies, too.