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The Curator: Client Retention, Patent Trolls, Social Media Fails, Ecommerce SEO, Twitter IPO

Here’s our weekly link roundup of small business buzz, musings and muchness. A curation of the best small business talk around the web.


Here’s our weekly link roundup of small business buzz, musings and muchness. A curation of the best small business talk around the web.

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Post-Deal Management and Client Retention

Loyalty pays big dividends in business, which is why fostering customer fidelity makes good business sense. These tips will help you increase repeat business. Customer loyalty alone can account for 40 percent of your business revenue, according to marketing analytics company SumAll.

 

Patent Trolls Are Killing Startups — Except When They’re Saving Them

Kate Endress was living the startup dream. Two years out of Stanford’s business school, she was running a website, Ditto, that offered a way of trying on glasses without actually trying them on, and the operation was on the verge of raising its first round of venture capital. Then came the lawsuit. Wellpoint, the owner of 1-800-Contacts and Glasses.com, sued Ditto for patent infringement. “Just like that, we were faced with an ‘injunction’ threat from a $25 billion competitor,” Endress remembers. “I was terrified our years of hard work were for naught.”

 

5 Small Business Social Media Mistakes

Small businesses can use social media to boost sales and gain attention from potential customers. Unfortunately, a lot of small businesses make mistakes when trying to harness the power of social media. Some of those are rookie mistakes that are easy to avoid, if you just are conscious of them and work to handle them differently.

 

3 Ways Ecommerce Websites Can Grow or Maintain Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic has long been one of the most valuable sources of traffic for any e-commerce site. Not only is the sheer volume of visitors huge, but those eyeballs were often net-new customers coming in from head, torso, and long-tail queries. As any good online marketer knows, organic traffic isn’t “free,” but the ROI for organic search is excellent – giving it a prominent place in the marketing mix.

 

5 Habits Of Relentless Entrepreneurs

Anyone can start a business, but it’s hard to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are achievers but their achievements don’t come without pitfalls. What makes entrepreneurs tick? What is it about them that makes them so ambitious, confident, and, well…different from others? Let’s find out.

 

16 Surprising Statistics About Small Businesses

In the last 6 years, we’ve amassed a wealth of knowledge about the state of small business from our 38 million members and we never cease to be surprised. Here are 16 vital (and surprising) statistics we’ve uncovered about the small business landscape…

 

#TwitterIPO Could Yield $16 Billion Valuation

Since I first interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in February 2009, the company has found a business model and tapped into new twists in the capital markets. Now it’s poised to sell shares to the public at a value that could be around $16 billion — a whopping 97% annual rise in its valuation since 2010. That’s not bad for a company that has an estimated $600 million in sales.

 

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