The vibrancy, vitality, and importance of small business can’t be overlooked when it comes to our economy. It’s estimated as of December 2012, there are nearly 1.2 million small businesses in Canada (businesses with at least one employee on payroll). For many people being small is OK, it’s works for them, it pays the bills, feeds the family, and maybe fits their lifestyle.
Occasionally there’s a startup story that doesn’t involve a founder with a vision of scaling a business to epic proportions, building a huge team, or talking about being the next billion dollar player. For Vancouver’s Jerry Tian, founder of ContentDJ, he’s one of those people who’s good with being small. However, just because being a small business works for Tian doesn’t mean he’s satisfied with working on small problems.
Many small businesses can be characterized as idea rich and resource challenged. Small teams can only accomplish so much in the work week. While the web offers advantages in terms of potentially being discovered by customers, it doesn’t give us any more time in the day. That time crunch of operating a business often runs smack up against learning and implementing a consistent content and social media marketing strategy. Simply having a website doesn’t translate into more sales.
Borrowing from personal experience Tian sees real value in curating and sharing quality content as a lead generation process for startups and small business. ContentDJ can grow an online presence, and has automated the process of identifying and sharing trending content to be more engaging with a potential audience of customers. Using a proprietary algorithm Tian’s platform helps sort content based on it’s timeliness, relevance and quality to easily identify the most shareable stories and information.
Bootstrapping and coding on his own, Tian has worked with his early customers to create a tool set including a social media editorial calendar, which optimizes the best time to publish. It’s also possible to schedule WordPress blog posts. There’s the ability to track engagement and get insights from each post by tracking metrics like reaches, retweets, favorites, and click throughs.
Tian doesn’t necessarily dream big for himself, but he does dream about the big things he can do for other startups and small business owners. By subscribing to a mantra of driving traffic, gaining followers, generating more leads, more sales, and saving time doing it, he’ll soon be past the “ramen profitable” phase, and running ContentDJ from whatever continent his travels are soon to take him.
