The Small Business Social Media: A Guide to BizSugar
BizSugar is a niche resource and social networking platform for the small business
community. The social networking platform is owned and operated by Anita Campbell of Small Business
Trends LLC. Small Business Trends LLC is a stable of 7 websites including the flagship site Small Business
Trends, group business blog Tweak Your Biz and BizSugar. As their former community manager, I am well
placed to advise you on how to get the most from the platform.
What is BizSugar?
BizSugar is a place where you can submit and share your small business content. Once submitted, the
BizSugar community votes on this content with the most voted posts making it to the home page.
The business case for using BizSugar
BizSugar is a niche and successful social media for anyone interested in the International Small
Business community.
With over 1 million registered members based around the Globe, it is an effective way to target the
small business community, promote your content and drive qualified traffic back to your website.
It allows you make connections with small business owners, managers and entrepreneurs and to
stay informed.
“Top stories” on BizSugar make it into their Top 10 widget, weekly Top 10 newsletter and the Twitter
feed where they get even more visibility.
Setting Up
New users need to provide a username, email, and password, and confirm if they would like to subscribe
to the weekly Top 10 newsletter.
Then, once your account has been set up, you can further edit your profile to add more info including
your:
Avatar
Location
Occupation
Skype
YouTube
Websites
Interests
RSS
Note: You can also log in using your Facebook account.
Submitting content
To maintain the quality of the website and information, content that gets submitted to BizSugar goes
through a moderation process:
To submit your content to BizSugar, you need to include:
1. URL
2. Category
3. And description
Moderation team
This content then goes into a queue to await approval from the BizSugar moderation team.
Guidelines
Here are the full BizSugar submission guidelines but in short, content needs to be specifically relevant to
small business. Also, titles must not include site names, locations and other words unrelated to the
article and there should be no barriersi.e. extra windows, forms, or links out that readers have to click
through.
Voting
Voting on BizSugar is easy.
Users simply:
1. Log in
2. and vote (“sweet”) for their favourite articles.
Voting buttons
BizSugar also provides the option of voting buttons.
These you can install onto your website or blog and allow the community to vote for your content directly
from there.
Getting more “Sugars”
As with any other social media and online community, the more you put into BizSugar, the more you will
get out in the long run:
Content: The first step towards getting these votes is of course, creating and submitting great
content to BizSugar. However, it’s also a good idea to submit more than just your own content. If you
find information that the small business community would find useful, why not submit that too!
Community: Playing an active part in the BizSugar community, voting and commenting on other
members’ content will get you noticed and will in turn help your content to get votes, comments,
exposure and traffic.
BizSugar exposure
Getting your content onto the homepage is where you want to be seen on BizSugar: the more votes you
secure, the better your chances of getting on there:
Hot stories: Hot stories are published to the @BizSugar Twitter feed which has over 20K followers.
Weekly Top 10: The content with the most votes over a 7 day period also have the added bonus of
being included on the BizSugar newsletter that goes out on Fridays to over 200,000+ subscribers.
Video & Image Gallery: BizSugarlaunched a new “Video & Image Gallery” on October 30, 2012.
Videos include those submitted by members as well as some especially selected by the moderation
team.
What others say about BizSugar:
Steven Hughes, GeeklessTech:
“BizSugar is a recommended platform to market your website and blog…There are also
moderators that get involved and comment, keeping the pace fluid…Be consistent and you’ll
make connections. The BizSugar blog traffic back to your site will be sweet.”
TJ McCue, Forbes:
“If you are looking for high quality content you can trust, BizSugar offers it. There are real
people moderating, vetting, and culling out the spam. There is an opportunity to build a
reputation in this niche social network and then spread your content and ideas.”
John Jantsch, Wall Street Journal:
Try “networks that cater to business owners, such as Biznik and BizSugar.”
Understanding the Digital Economy
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