Marketing and social media consultant and author Mark Schaefer is a big believer in blogging. For one thing, as you'll learn shortly, it saved him from sitting through another cold chicken lunch at the chamber of commerce. Yesterday we posted part one of an interview with Schaefer explaining why blogging might be the best social media move your business could make. Here in part two he offers tips for blogging your way up the search engine ladder.

Yahoo! SBA: Does blogging help businesses show up in search engines?

Schaefer: Search engine optimization: that’s the number one benefit of blogging. It’s an evolving and complicated topic, but for many businesses today, customers are beginning their search for your business and your products on Google. It’s essential that you show up in the top three search terms.

How do you do that?

One way to begin to tip the Google search algorithms in your favor is to create very helpful, useful content that your customers will love. If your customers are

When I met the marketing guru Mark Schaefer at a crowdsourcing conference in New York last week, I asked him what’s the most important thing small business owners should be doing on social media. I was surprised by his answer. It wasn’t Facebook or Twitter or Google+. He said, “Blogging.”

Marketing and social media consultant and author Mark Schaefer

It seemed to be such a retro bit of advice. To find out why he gave it, I followed up by phone with him this week at the Schaefer Marketing Solutions headquarters, his home in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.

Schaefer says he makes the one-hour commute by plane from Knoxville to Newark a few times a month to teach marketing at Rutgers University. He also travels the globe giving lectures, teaching workshops, and consulting with clients large and small. He also offers $200 “instant consultations” by phone, and his work, including several social media marketing books (Born to Blog and The Tao of Twitter among them) got him onto Forbes' list of the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers.

Here’s part

Business Mistakes

Since small business owners wear so many hats, they can make mistakes. However, mistakes in managing and operating a business can threaten the organization’s long-term viability. Consequently, it’s important to identify the organizational priorities never to overlook or neglect. Here are 11 of the most common mistakes.

1. Unclear Purpose

Every organization must articulate why it exists and what it’s striving to achieve. Owners must focus time and attention on developing a mission and vision. It doesn’t matter if the business is a delivery service, neighborhood dry cleaner, or mom and pop restaurant. Every organization needs to understand its reason for existence, which is the anchor for all business decision making.

2. No Plan

There is an old saying, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Developing a strategy and having a plan to achieve objectives is critical to any organization’s success. Large or small, every business needs a plan. Devoting time, at least once a year, to

There is an accepted belief in politics and generally in the economy that small business is the engine of the American economy. But recently there has been a backlash with people trying to make a case that larger corporations are really the economic engine – creating more jobs and driving larger revenues. And sometimes it seems like government agrees – for all the rhetoric from both parties, very little is actually done to make things better for small businesses specifically. So who is right?

This infographic from OnDeck Capital has some of the answers. But it also highlights how much small businesses are in fact in danger from big business moving in and homogenizing local markets throughout the US. Here at Yahoo! Small Business Advisor we are obviously small business partisans – but every big business was a small business first. And the new legal and political rules categorically do favor larger businesses which can afford to support SuperPACs and lobbyists to drive regulation that

The sequester that went into effect on Friday will impose a nearly $60 million cut on the Small Business Administration, that, taken together with innovation-hindering cuts to education, science, and health budgets, will create an increasingly austere climate for small businesses, according to Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a New York representative and ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Small Business.

Velazquez and fellow Democrats on the committee issued a report today describing the “Impact of the Sequester on the SBA and Small Business.” SBA budget cuts will result in “reductions to small business services, loss of lending authority, reduced oversight of private-sector lending partners, and many other areas that help our nation’s small firms succeed,” according to their report.

Among specific cuts they report:

• $1.5 billion in SBA-guaranteed lending will be cut from the SBA’s $29.3 billion business lending program;
• More than $17 million of a $335 million business lending

Sequestered

As the deadline for averting major government spending cuts has arrived, several reports have noted that the so-called sequestration will mean a cut in U.S. Small Business Administration loan guarantees that could help small businesses access $902 million in capital.
One bright spot in the lending picture may be that private companies appear to be better positioned to borrow than they were a year ago, which could help improve their prospects if they seek non-government loans, according to data from Sageworks Inc., a financial information company.

Sageworks this week released a monthly report on the state of privately held U.S. companies, showing that the average company’s likelihood of credit default has declined over the last year. And private companies have continued to increase sales and improve their net margins in the period ending January 2013, the report said.

“While the sequester’s impact on businesses remains to be seen, the good news is that private companies are in pretty

Six weekends remain before Tax Day, and advice for business owners abounds.

Your first stop for getting clear about what exactly your tax obligations are and how to meet them, whether you’re a sole proprietor or independent contractor or a business with employees, should probably be the IRS Small Business and Self Employed Tax Center. There you can download the forms you will need and get help determining what taxes you need to pay.

Then you’ll want to move along to all the advice that will help you minimize your tax bill.

At the SCORE website, you can find out which common small business tax mistakes to avoid, such as tossing your receipts for purchases under $75. Or spend an hour in an online workshop to learn tax secrets to keep more of what you earn, presented by the president of the American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches, which also offers a plethora of tax advice articles and resources for business owners and free agents.

The National Association for the Self Employed has

Growing WisdomSome of the best stories from the past week on Advisor - in no particular order.

Baby Boomers' say they are more entreprenurial than their offspring. [There is evidence to support this and also evidence against it. Certainly more older people are starting more businesses and are they tend to be more successful at it than younger people - but more younger people are also starting more businesses.]

Shaking the Bode Tree: The Value of Knowledge. [Another great post from Chris Myers of Bode Tree discussing how much better it is to make decisions from a position of knowledge than pretending not to hear bad news.]

How funding mompreneurs is good for Kimberley-Clark. [Taking word-of-mouth to a whole new level and enabling some entrepreneurial activity at the same time.]

Three ways personal financial advisors mislead you. [Ramit Sethi has some counterintuitive financial advice that is also useful for helping you set priorities.]

Global Trading Tips: The Fivefold Path To Quality Control.