When I think about the things that have made me successful in the field of SEO over the past 5-6 years, I don’t list my technical knowledge or the proprietary ranking techniques I’ve developed as being the most important contributing factors to Single Grain’s achievements.  Sure, both of these things have played a huge role in my ability to help website owners optimize their online performance – but there’s one element that’s been even more critical to the results I’ve been able to achieve.

Can you guess what this often overlooked skill might be…?  It’s good communication!

More than anything else, learning to communicate well has enabled me to turn my business dreams into a reality.  If that sounds too cheesy to be realistic, consider all of the following different ways in which my communication skills have contributed to my success:
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Sure – I understand that running a business is difficult.  If you’re a company owner, you likely have hundreds of different items already on your “to do” list – from developing and testing your product to reaching out to consumers using various online and offline marketing strategies and more.

However, if you spend all of your time focused on your own internal affairs and put no energy into consuming the content that others have created, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to learn and develop as an entrepreneur.  To get in the habit of making ongoing education a priority in your business, check out the following blogs, find a few that you like and set a goal to check in with their posts at least once a week for best results.
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Being a business owner is challenging.  Not only do you carry the enormous weight of transforming a vision into reality on your shoulders, you do so while also attempting to balance these business pursuits with your personal life, managing a workforce and handling the financial ramifications of business ownership.

Unfortunately, given all of these competing demands, it can be easy to let bad business habits sneak into your daily life, undetected.  To prevent this from happening, you must be vigilant in guarding against the following business mistakes – all of which can threaten your growing company if left unchecked.
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If you think about it objectively, entrepreneurship doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Sure, there are cases of well-off people launching successful products or services with no risk to their own financial well-being.  But many of today’s entrepreneurs are those who have put their careers, family lives and personal stability on the line to pursue a business idea that – realistically – has only about a 50% chance of succeeding over five years.

But despite the logical argument to be made that we should all stay home, work our steady jobs and never deviate from the traditional “college-to-career” path, plenty of would-be business people still make the leap from corporate life to their own ventures.

In fact, according to research on entrepreneurship in the US compiled by the Gallup Business Journal, “nearly half of all jobs are in the small-business sector, and small businesses accounted for 65% of the net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009.”  Given the uncertainty that this particular path entails, that’s a pretty large number of people willing to take on the risks of entrepreneurship!
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