MyCorp’s Top 10 Blog Posts of 2013

2013 was a great year for MyCorp, and easily the best year our blog has had yet. Did you know that, so far this year, we published 308 posts? 308! We’ve always been very proud of our little business blog, and are extremely grateful to everyone out there who has taken the time to click over and read our posts and become regular readers at our site. Since we had such a productive blogging year, we thought it would be fun to look back and pick out a few of our favorite posts from 2013 – here are our top ten:

10. Starting a Business in 2013: An Infographic
Back in June we thought it would be a good idea to take some of the more frequently asked questions we get and spin them into an infographic. Starting a business can be a very confusing process, and we wanted to make our guide as easy to understand as possible. We pared the process down to six steps, and put out a very well-received infographic to help out our readers.

9. Tax Tips for America’s Entrepreneurs
This post was actually written by our friend David Nilssen, the CEO & Co-founder of Guidant Financial. We’ve done a few cross-posts with David, but this one stands out because of how useful it is. Tax season is stressful, but by following David’s advice, it can actually be a straightforward, productive time. You just have to know how to prepare!

8. How to Attract and Keep Talented Employees
Our CEO Deborah Sweeney has always said that one of her biggest points of pride at MyCorp is her team. So when Arlene Chandler pitched this idea to us, we thought it would make a great post. And it did! Business owners do have trouble tracking down, and holding onto, talented employees. But, with Arlene’s advice, finding driven, motivated staff is a lot easier.

7. Knowing How to Use Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights
Intellectual property law is not an easy subject to explain, but Alden Brooks easily broke down IP protection right to the basics. He did an amazing job explaining a very complicated subject to a lay-reader, and we have often referred people with questions on copyright and trademark protection back to that post.

6. How to Give Good Feedback
This post was actually actually very timely as we were going through employee reviews when Maki Nishiyama of ProjectManager.com sent it in. You’d think that providing someone else feedback would come naturally, but there are so many people out there that have no idea how to give out constructive criticism. Backed with quotes from prominent business analysts and executives, Maki laid out how you should approach the feedback process, and wrote a great piece.

5. M is for MyCorp
At the end of last year we decided to do a 27-part series wherein we would use each letter of the alphabet to inspire a post that would give advice on, or explain, business concepts starting with that letter. The whole series is great, but we were especially fond of our ‘M is for MyCorp’ post because it allowed us to toot our own horn. We try not to get overly promotional in our posts, but we are really proud of what we do here at MyCorp, and the letter ‘M’ was a great opportunity to bask in that pride.

4. How Small Businesses can Optimize their Website for the Visually Impaired
This was our social media manager Heather Taylor’s favorite guest post of 2013, and it is easy to understand why. The idea behind the post is really creative, and it is a subject that few think about. When you are designing your site, you are trying to get everything to look perfect for the average user, and you never think about how it might look to the visually impaired. You could be losing a significant portion of your target market simply because your site wasn’t built with them in mind. Calvin Troise of DBurns Design did an amazing job reminding us all to keep the web accessible to as many people as possible.

3. 5 Questions with B-Corp Innovator Tim Frick
Benefit Corporations are a really neat new business entity meant to protect executives that want to continue to use their business to help pursue a philanthropic mission, while still being able to take advantage of the protections that the corporate structure offers. Tim Frick runs a certified benefit corporation called MightyBytes, and gave some great insight into what it is like running a B-Corp.

2. Throwback Thursday: MyCorp’s Earlier Web Designs
This was definitely one of our favorite posts, and almost edged its way to number one. Essentially, we used the internet way way back machine to look at cached versions of the MyCorp site dating all the way back to when we first opened in 1998. The results were glorious and embarrassing, and our early sites had everything you’d expect from a company website in the late nineties – MyCorp was not immune to the allure of animated .gifs. We even referred to e-mail as ‘electronic mail,’ and gave our e-mail contact information a place of honor right next to our fax number.

1. The Seven Fastest Growing Industries of 2013
We have lovingly dubbed this post the gift that keeps on giving, which is why it takes the number one spot. Back in July we designed and uploaded an infographic on the fastest growing industries in 2013. It’s a great graphic and absolutely chock-full of good information, but we still weren’t expecting the response it got. It’s five months on and that little graphic continues to pop up on all sorts of big-name sites and outlets. It is also the most read post on our blog, and is ahead of our second most read post by over a thousand readers.

And there you have it, our top ten posts of 2013. Of course there are many, many others we could’ve chosen – we just didn’t have room for them all – so if we missed one of your favorites, be sure to mention it in the comments!