For anyone not familiar with TweakYourBiz.com, it’s an international, business advice community and online publication which is owned by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Today it is read by over 100,000 business people each month (140,000 unique visitors, Google Analytics, December, 2013). However, it started out as a small Irish blog with little or no traffic. Let me tell you the story of how we grew this B2B blog into a business with 100,000+ unique visitors per month.

1. Tweak Your Biz: How We Grew A B2B Blog into
a Business with 100,000+ Unique Visitors per
Month
For anyone not familiar with TweakYourBiz.com, it’s an international, business advice community
and online publication which is owned by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends. Today it is
read by over 100,000 business people each month (140,000 unique visitors, Google Analytics,
December, 2013). However, it started out as a small Irish blog with little or no traffic.
Let me tell you the story of how we grew this B2B blog into a business with 100,000+
unique visitors per month.
The Tweak Your Biz backstory
“In just four years, the Tweak Your Biz crew has generated a valuable resource of stimulating
tips and ideas for a huge and growing audience. Great work and keep it up” – Bob Herbold, MD
of The Herbold Group, LLC and retired executive vice president and COO of Microsoft
Corporation.

2. Back in 2009 I was contributing to two community business blogs in the US, My Venture
Pad and Social Media Today. My homeland, Ireland was in the midst of economic recession and
I wanted to also contribute to a local community based business blog. I couldn’t find one, so I
decided to create one.
I reached out to my network on social media and was put in contact with Fred
Caballero and Facundo Villaveiran. Together, we created and launched Bloggertone.com in late
October. We managed to secure the contributions of a small group of dedicated Irish business
professionals – many who still contribute to Tweak Your Biz and I now consider friends.
That initial group of business bloggers generated early momentum that has carried ever since.
Another 1000+ or so contributors and business experts have since joined and written for the
website, and our website traffic has doubled year on year.
During 2011, the website came to the attention of Anita Campbell who owns and operates the
SmallBizTrends stable of websites. SmallBizTrends took a majority stake and Anita came on
board as our CEO. We changed the name to Tweak Your Biz, redesigned the website and
introduced the Tweak Your Biz title generator tool. Under Anita’s stewardship,Tweak Your Biz
became a proper online business – providing advertising solutions to brands interested in
reaching an international business audience.

3. Growing the Tweak Your Biz website
So, how did we grow Tweak Your Biz to where it is today?
#1. Community
Together we’re better. Community is at the heart of everything that we do at Tweak Your Biz.
We’re open to both the big names and the smaller ones from the international business
community. If you have something valuable to say, we’ll help you to get it out there. Even if you
haven’t blogged before, we can help to get you started.
We share, comment on, and promote our contributors and their content. We work hard on behalf
of contributors and we connect our community with each other.The bigger websites publish so
often that single articles can easily get lost in the overall content mix, resulting in less exposure
for individual writers. Our articles get thousands of views at least, many get tens of thousands
and some get hundreds of thousands.
#2. Content
Clearly, content is the driving force behind the blog. We now publish between 2-3 articles per day
and in collaboration with the writer, we edit, format and SEO every article. Whether you’d like to
write an article to reach a specific or a mass audience, the bank of content that’s available allows
us to analyse and advise our writers around what works. We’ve had notable success in helping
authors rank highly on Google for popular keywords.
#3. Social Media
Community, content and social media are a potent combination when it comes to marketing. In
terms of promoting the Tweak Your Biz site, our writers and their content – we’ve used social
media, and only social media from the very start. Tweak Your Biz now gets from 1500 to 2000
shares per month with the 10 best social media for traffic:
1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. BizSugar
5. Reddit,
6. Disqus,
7. Google+
8. Pinterest
9. StumbleUpon
10. Hootsuite

4. #4. International
More often than not, to grow a big audience online also means growing an international
audience. It’s worth noting that for every small or niche local audience is a big international
audience. This was particularly true for Tweak Your Biz. Ireland is a small country with a small
business population. However, because of our size, numbers and our history, we’ve become
accustomed to building and nurturing community and community spirit.
Being based here allowed us to create a tight community at the start. It was that community,
rather than our size or traffic that attracted others, and allowed us to grow at the start. Now,
because of our success, we can more easily attract contributors and readers from all over the
world. Last year, the top 10 countries to send us traffic were:
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. India
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Ireland
7. Philippines
8. Malaysia
9. Singapore
10. South Africa
#5. Consistency
Most of us are unlikely to come up with the next Facebook or WhatsApp or our content is never
going to be as popular or as sage as Seth Godin. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade,
chasing a big idea is great and dreams are what drive us forward but ambition should always
include hard work and consistency – rather than be at the expense of it.
The reality is that we live in a time when people want easy answers. They’re prepared to give up
without putting in the required effort. For the first two years at Tweak Your Biz, I commented on
every single post. Not because I always wanted to, or because I had something interesting to say
but because I was co-founder and community manager.
My job was to lead from the front, set the example and contribute to the type of community and
website that was contained within my ambition.
Tweak Your Biz wasn’t built in a day