It’s an amazing time to start a small business.
Technology has reached a point where the world is very small and that brings incredible opportunity.
I don’t overlook the fact that even a few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to run Ghost Blog Writers with clients all over the world including the other side of the world in Australia.
There are many reasons that now is a wonderful time to be in business. And another is that there is access to funds for growing a business.
That’s where Fundera comes in.
Fundera is a site where small business owners and those with ideas can go and find funding. It’s very free market in nature in the fact that lenders look for the best opportunities and when they find the best opportunities they compete.
It seems kind of like The Voice blind auditions. At first the contestants are looking for any backers. But if they get more than one then the contestant grabs hold of the power to choose.
Anyway, Fundera is a very interesting and exciting new company. Today I want to look at what they’re doing with their business blogging strategy.
1. Lead Magnets
The first thing that happens when you load the Fundera Blog is you see a pop-up for their lead magnet, which is the A-Z Guide To Business Funding.
This is something more companies are using on their business blogs and it’s a good strategy depending on what you’re trying to get visitors to do.
The idea is that you capture an email address of a new visitor and from there you can work them through some content and nurture them until they’re ready to use your service or buy your product.
Fundera also has a call to action for this lead magnet at the top of the blog with a small banner above the header.
It’s a good thing. You’re offering something valuable. You can even create these lead magnets with content from your blog archives. You can put together some of your best posts around a common theme and package them as a PDF.
But you have to examine how visitors use your site. You don’t want to turn them away with a pop-up the first time they visit your site. And sometimes getting an email address isn’t the right approach. It often is, but not always.
For example, with GBW I’ve often found that our potential clients aren’t interested in signing up for the newsletter. They’d rather go to the homepage and about page and learn more about how we can help them. Then they contact us without ever signing up for our newsletter.
That’s a good result for us.
But in many cases you do want email addresses. You just have to think about your sales process and find the right place to offer your lead magnets.
2. Search Bars
At the top right of the blog you’ll see a small search bar. I just happen to see it while looking at the blog for the first time. It’s very common, but I had a quick thought on search bars for business blogs.
I think a search bar is a great thing especially if you have a lot of posts. People are very interested in search bars when looking for more content. We’ve done it for 20 years and we’re comfortable with it.
However, there are other ways to direct people through your content like categories and even tags. Fundera does this too in their top navigation. I like it. Those can often be better vehicles especially if you don’t have a large number of posts; maybe more than 50.
But I think a search bar that is easily found, but not obnoxiously in the way is good for most business blogs.
3. General Industry Posts
Fundera gets it. They have posts that touch on lending, but they also branch off into similar topics affecting their target audience that don’t really have to do with lending.
That’s critical for the success of a blog. There are people that are looking for your specific service, but usually there are many more people that don’t know about your service. They don’t even know that they’re interested. They’re searching for other information and to get their attention you can write about those topics.
You want to keep it pretty close to your wheelhouse though and a good example of that is this post on hiring that Funder posted recently.
It’s about hiring, not funding. But this is obviously a topic that Fundera’s target audience would want to read about. It’s important for small business owners to know how to hire especially if they’re growing. And it would make sense that if a small business owner was looking to hire that they’re probably growing and maybe they need funding to grow.
Look for those connections to expand your range of topics.
4. Addressing The Main Questions
Building on the previous post is the idea that the best way to blog is to touch on the main questions your target audience is asking in relation to your industry and what they do every day.
You’ll often read about thought leadership in relation to an industry and the way to become an authority is to become a source for answers.
You don’t need to know all the answers. You can research these things. Either way, people seek out really good information and you have that opportunity with a business blog.
I think these are two posts that display this approach very well. The first is on FICO and how it’s calculated. The second is how applying for many business loans can affect a credit score. Thinking as a small business owners, these are two topics I would be very interested in.
And that’s why touching on big questions is a great strategy for a blog. You know that if even one person has a question that many others out there are likely looking for the answer especially online.
5. Current Hits
A little note that we’ve kind of already touched on, but that’s worth its own point. On the sidebar of the Fundera Blog you’ll see a little section called Current Hits. I really like the design of this section. It shows the popular posts with little gauges for each to show just how popular they are.
This really stood out and it’s a great way to get people to read more articles. When people see popular posts they often want to click on them for social proof reasons. We see others doing it and we want to do it also.
Pretty neat little business blog design that I haven’t seen before in that way.
Another thing is changing out the current hits. There is one side that would make sense to change it out maybe every month or whatever. Kind of reset the stats. But if you think about your blog, many of the visitors will be coming for the first time so popular posts could be just left running because visitors that see the popular post list will be seeing it for the first time.
Final Thought
Fundera is really doing a great job with their business blog. They post usually multiple times each week. They keep up that consistency. They are focusing on questions and they’re broadening their topics while still attracting the right people to their blog.
And this all shows. They have a large number of shares on social media and I’m sure they’re doing well in organic search. It’s a great example of a business blog you can emulate if you’re looking to launch your own.