Your small business has been running smoothly enough this year, but there’s always room for improvement.

If you want to do better in 2019 – get more people talking about your business on social media, attract and built trust with prospects using great content, and increase your revenue – here are 15 excellent resources from 2018 that can help you to achieve you goals in the year to come.

Content marketing

From useful bog posts to well-researched ebooks and customer success stories, purposeful content can change the relationship between your brand and your target audience. It not only helps to build trust, generate leads and cultivate customer loyalty, but it’s also become the new normal from the consumer side.

Use the following resources to create quality content that drives traffic and sales.

Sticking to a blog content plan – You know what separates popular, authoritative blogs that people devour, share and keep coming back to from regular blogs that readers visit every now and then? A plan! Learn how to create an editorial calendar for your blog and the tools to make the process easier and less time-consuming.

Developing a guest blogging strategy that works – Guest blogging is still a powerful way to raise awareness, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and drive measurable results for your business. That is if you do it right and have a clear strategy in place. This article walks you through the steps to follow to develop a guest blogging strategy that works.

Using ebooks to turn more leads into customers – Ebooks are “the new business cards”. They say more about who you are and how you can help than a business card and even a sales page. So if you want to stand out, attract more prospects to your site and make more money, get to work creating and promoting an ebook. This article will teach you how to do it right, even if you’re on a tight budget.

Prove your worth with a customer success story – You know what’s more effective than bragging about how great your business is or how cool your products are? Your customers doing the bragging for you. Social proof in the form of customer success stories, also referred to as case studies, is a fantastic way to win new business. Learn how to write a customer success story and how to make it an effective weapon in your digital arsenal.

Social media

You know those brands that say that social media doesn’t work? Of course it doesn’t work if they’re the only ones doing the talking and none of the listening.

Social media is a two-way conversation. No matter what platform you’re active on, use it to connect with your fans and followers, to educate, inspire and delight them but also take the time to listen and to respond to what they’re saying about your brand. Here’s how.

Building your personal brand on social media – If you want people to pay attention to you on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you need to provide valuable content that they can’t get from elsewhere. In other words, you need to become a recognised subject expert that people seek out for help, advice and solutions. This article will teach you how to do that and how to build a successful personal brand on social media, no matter what platform you’re active on.

Getting started with social listening – If people don’t tag your brand name in their posts or photos, that doesn’t mean they’re not talking about you on social media. They most likely are but you didn’t know how to track those comments and brand mentions. Until now. Use these six tools to monitor your brand’s reputation on social media and immediately know when someone says something positive or negative about your brand.

Reaching more people on Instagram with ad campaigns – With 800 million active monthly users, it’s difficult for a small business to cut through the noise and reach more people on Instagram. Have you tried advertising to target the people you need to see your content at the right time? If you’re new to ad campaigns, this guide will teach you how to set up your first Instagram advertising campaign and start driving your target audience back to your business.

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is critical to your visibility in the search engine results, which can impact your bottom line. Find out what’s changed in terms of ranking factors and how to fix issues on your website that can prevent your small business from getting discovered in the search results.

Top SEO ranking factors – Learn more about the most important search engine ranking signals and get practical expert advice on how to use them to increase your site’s visibility in the search engines.

Fixing those broken links that drive prospects away – You work hard to bring prospects to your site. The last thing you want to do is to drive them away because your site isn’t working properly. Broken links not only frustrate and get people to hit the back button and go elsewhere but they can also damage your reputation and your SEO efforts. Learn how to find and fix broken links to ensure a pleasant experience for anyone visiting your site.

Email marketing

If you’re looking for creative ways to build your mailing list, and if you want to get better engagement and results from the emails you send out to subscribers, we’ve got you covered with a few resources that’ll help you do just that.

Using video to grow your email list – Video is an effective tool to tell a story, explain a complex idea and delight your audience. It’s powerful and you know it. So why not make the most of it and use it to get more people to sign up to your mailing list? Here’s how you can use video to engage viewers and turn them into email subscribers.

Essential elements your emails can’t be without – Contrary to popular belief, people do want to receive promotional emails. What’s more, subscribers who buy products marketed through email spend up to 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers. What does this mean for you? It means that email marketing is still crazy effective, that is if you get your emails right. Consider this your checklist – the eight essential elements of every email you send.

Getting more subscribers to open your emails – No matter how useful or interesting your emails are, if your subscribers don’t click to open them, it means that your campaign’s a goner. Check out these eight types of subject lines that’ll get people to open your emails.

Ecommerce

How well is your ecommerce business doing? If your sales have fallen and you don’t know why, or if you’re getting a decent amount of orders but you know you could do much better, the following resources are filled with tips and advice on how to boost sales.

Getting back on track when your sales begin to sink – Have you experienced an inexplicable drop in sales on your website? Are you having trouble figuring out what happened and how to fix it?  This article walks you through a few scenarios that can help you to quickly diagnose what crippled your site’s cash flow and what to do to get back on track.

Improving your pricing page to drive more sales – Did you know that there are psychological triggers you can use on your page to motivate, influence and persuade prospects to click that “buy now” button? In this article you’ll find a few tweaks you can make to your pricing page to get more people to buy from you.

Using reviews in your content to boost sales – Social proof drives sales. It’s why we buy more from sites that have lots of great reviews and testimonials. We feel more confident to buy a product or a service when others before us have used it and raved about it. Want to boost sales? Use customer reviews everywhere you can, on your site and outside of it. Here are a few ways to use reviews in your content and entice more people to buy from you.

There you have it – 15 useful links from 2018 with plenty of actionable information and advice that you can use to improve your small business in 2019.