Back in 2009 I was contributing to two community business blogs in the US, My Venture Pad and Social Media Today. My homeland, Ireland was in the midst of economic recession and I wanted to also contribute to a local community based business blog. I couldn’t find one, so I decided to create one.
I reached out to my network on social media and was put in contact with Fred Caballero and Facundo Villaveiran. Together, we created and launched Bloggertone.com in late October. We managed to secure the contributions of a small group of dedicated Irish business professionals – many who still contribute to Tweak Your Biz and I now consider friends.
That initial group of business bloggers generated early momentum that has carried ever since. Another 1000+ or so contributors and business experts have since joined and written for the website, and our website traffic has doubled year on year.
During 2011, the website came to the attention of Anita Campbell who owns and operates the SmallBizTrends stable of websites. SmallBizTrends took a majority stake and Anita came on board as our CEO. We changed the name to Tweak Your Biz, redesigned the website and introduced the Tweak Your Biz title generator tool. Under Anita’s stewardship,Tweak Your Biz became a proper online business – providing advertising solutions to brands interested in reaching an international business audience.
Growing the Tweak Your Biz website
So, how did we grow Tweak Your Biz to where it is today?
#1. Community
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a_JThy8B38[/youtube]
Together we’re better. Community is at the heart of everything that we do at Tweak Your Biz. We’re open to both the big names and the smaller ones from the international business community. If you have something valuable to say, we’ll help you to get it out there. Even if you haven’t blogged before, we can help to get you started.
We share, comment on, and promote our contributors and their content. We work hard on behalf of contributors and we connect our community with each other.The bigger websites publish so often that single articles can easily get lost in the overall content mix, resulting in less exposure for individual writers. Our articles get thousands of views at least, many get tens of thousands and some get hundreds of thousands.
#2. Content
Clearly, content is the driving force behind the blog. We now publish between 2-3 articles per day and in collaboration with the writer, we edit, format and
#3. Social Media
Community, content and social media are a potent combination when it comes to marketing. In terms of promoting the Tweak Your Biz site, our writers and their content – we’ve used social media, and only social media from the very start. Tweak Your Biz now gets from 1500 to 2000 shares per month with the 10 best social media for traffic:
- BizSugar
- Reddit,
- Disqus,
- Google+
- StumbleUpon
- Hootsuite
#4. International
More often than not, to grow a big audience online also means growing an international audience. It’s worth noting that for every small or niche local audience is a big international audience. This was particularly true for Tweak Your Biz. Ireland is a small country with a small business population. However, because of our size, numbers and our history, we’ve become accustomed to building and nurturing community and community spirit.
Being based here allowed us to create a tight community at the start. It was that community, rather than our size or traffic that attracted others, and allowed us to grow at the start. Now, because of our success, we can more easily attract contributors and readers from all over the world. Last year, the top 10 countries to send us traffic were:
- United States
- United Kingdom
- India
- Canada
- Australia
- Ireland
- Philippines
- Malaysia
- Singapore
- South Africa
#5. Consistency
Most of us are unlikely to come up with the next Facebook or WhatsApp or our content is never going to be as popular or as sage as Seth Godin. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, chasing a big idea is great and dreams are what drive us forward but ambition should always include hard work and consistency – rather than be at the expense of it.
The reality is that we live in a time when people want easy answers. They’re prepared to give up without putting in the required effort. For the first two years at Tweak Your Biz, I commented on every single post. Not because I always wanted to, or because I had something interesting to say but because I was co-founder and community manager.
My job was to lead from the front, set the example and contribute to the type of community and website that was contained within my ambition.
Tweak Your Biz wasn’t built in a day 🙂
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Tweak Your Biz is an international, business advice community and online publication. Today it is read by over 140,000 business people each month (unique visitors, Google Analytics, December, 2013). See our review of 2013 for more information.
An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
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