How to Support Your Family, Friends and Community’s Businesses

As a small business owner, supporting other small businesses has become a priority for me.  Trust me, I’m the first to admit that I love Amazon with all my heart and soul but when I can – I love to support small, local or ethical businesses. So many of us who are NOT small business owners or entrepreneurs have no idea HOW exactly to do that – even if we aspire to. And that’s perfectly ok. Because you don’t know, what you don’t know, if you don’t know it.

I know that sentence sounds crazy but if you take a second to let it resonate – it makes total sense. How can you really know what you don’t know?

Did you know, that taxes and credit card companies SUCK for small businesses. There’s really no nice wait to put that and tis’ the season for all of us little folks to shell out the bucks. Small business owners pay about 30% of what we earn in sales and federal taxes ALONE. Crazy right?

Did you know that credit card companies charge us processing fees around 3%. That doesn’t sound too bad…until you add it all up. That could easily be $150 directly to a credit card company when you pay for a wedding vendor.

Those two things alone don’t include all of the other fixed and variable expenses that it takes to actually run a business. In hopes to bring awareness, here’s another couple of ways that you can help support small businesses:

1. Make your praise public. As much as we appreciate the emails, texts and calls, they don’t positively impact our business. If you’ve had personal experience with our services, please write a review. 84% of users trust online reviews as much as a personal reference. The more places you can copy and paste it to, the better! If you haven’t used our services but like what you see, please comment and let us know! More about this in #2.

2. Interact in any way you can. Each facebook/instagram ‘like’ and comment helps the exposure of a post. Social media sites have set algorithms (aka a fancy computer term for a set of processes/calculations designed to rank the importance of what you see). The less interaction a post receives, the less the post will be ultimately be seen and vise versa. Interaction in the first 30 minutes is most helpful so please don’t scroll by!

3. Tag + share. If you are featured in a post and have security settings to avoid being tagged, please tag yourselves! If the post is a form marketing/advertisement, anyone can share and help bring exposures to others that may not be familiar in the business but may like what they offer. To try and put it as simply as possible, social media sites use the data they collect on your interests to show things you interact with to people of similar interests. You could actually help bring exposure to a business they’ve never seen before.

4. Blog posts (and maybe the most important). Please, please click on blog post links. Anytime a post has a link to somewhere else, Facebook automatically tries to hide it from viewers to avoid people leaving their site. Every time you visit a website, you are helping to boost that site’s google rankings and view-ability. Leaving a comment is even better as those words are a portion of what google picks up during searches.

5.  Personal referrals. This is THE best way to send us business and are always much appreciated! You are the biggest and most effective form of advertisement!

6. Skip the credit cards. It’s not easy to make a small business profitable. The amount I spent on expenses and taxes alone last year makes me nauseated. Help keep more money in the those you support’s pockets by saving the 3-4% of credit card processing fees paid directly to the big guys.

As always, we are passionate about we do and appreciate all of those who make it possible. Thank you for your continued support and please feel free to share!

Small business owners : have a tip I may have missed? Feel free to comment below so we can continue to add, educate and grow together as a community.

Photo credit : Laura Ryan Photography