"I don't want to give away my secrets."

Small business owners seem to fear that if they tell too much about what they do - be it selling luxury items to up-and-comers or offering consulting services to the tech industry - customers won't be intrigued enough to contact them. They'll see what you have and keep looking because they assume you've told them everything and then they decide that's not what they want.

Small business owners want the chance to customize the consumer experience offline. So it's a tightrope-walk to decide how much to tell and how much to leave to the imagination.

But there's another aspect to all this. It's called search engine optimization (SEO). Before you can turn your website visitors into customers, you have to get search engines to send you visitors in the first place. And to do that, you have to have plenty of quality content.

That means giving away some of your secrets. When you write about who you are and what makes you the best, you're taking a risk that someone will see who you are and go elsewhere. But you're also increasing the likelihood that more people will find you. And some of those people will want what you're offering.