***

I decided not to post this… but here we are. I told myself it wasn’t good enough. In actuality I was just scared. A reader saved it when she emailed about her own Impostor Syndrome. I sent her this post and she responded with this:

Well, here it goes…

[One more thing! If you're at all serious about writing a book, I'd love to have you join me for a presentation on how you can become on author before the end of the year. Here is the button to join: Become an Author Here (and to everyone who has already emailed me--I've saved a spot for you in the group but to join the presentation, use the button above. I'm excited to help you write your books before 2015!)]

***

I’m a fraud and everyone is about to find out. I feel that every time I am about to share something. I feel that right now writing this: I don’t even have impostor syndrome. That’s how bad my impostor syndrome is. I even think I’m faking that. If it’s part of my life, it’s fake. What is impostor syndrome? It’s feeling like an impostor when you’re not. Like you’re a fraud and the whole world is going to find you out. This makes total sense for undercover agents and people selling snake oil. It doesn’t make so much sense for people who are trying to make the world a little better or to sell something they believe in. The first step to feeling better about anything is to realize that famous people suffer the same thing. So here are some famous people with Impostor Syndrome:

“The beauty of the impostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a fraud! Oh God, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!’ So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud.” – Tina Fey “There are an awful lot of people out there who think I’m an expert.  How do these people believe all this about me?  I’m so much aware of all the things I don’t know.” Dr. Chan, Chief of the World Health Organization “I still think people will find out that I’m really not very talented.  I’m really not very good.  It’s all been a big sham.” – Michelle Pfeifer “Sometimes I wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and I think, I can’t do this.  I’m a fraud.” – Kate Winslett “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’ “ – Maya Angelou

Emma Watson, Sheryl Sandberg, and Sonia Sotomayor have also admitted to feeling like they’ll be found out for the frauds they are. But wait, these are all women… Apparently this is mostly a problem for women. I don’t buy that though. I think that guys just won’t talk about it. Or at least that’s the story I’m going with. (I don’t want to be girly.) In searching for famous people with impostor syndrome I did find a couple males. Tom Hanks and Neil Gaiman (artists of course, but they’ll do):

“The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It’s Impostor Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.” – Neil Gaiman

Seth Godin wrote in The Icarus Deception that after a dozen best sellers he still feels like a fraud all the time. (I have a sneaking suspicion that Tim Ferriss suffers it too, just saying.) This problem is only getting worse as more of us rely on our online presences. We’re in this weird culture where you’ve got to sell yourself aggressively while remaining “authentic”. You think you need to be perfect but you also need to feel free to fail. You need to be yourself and more! It’s all set up to make you feel like a fraud. At the end of this post I’m going to issue a challenge. If you don’t feel like reading anything else, skip down and do the thing with me! Here are the ways I keep going when I feel like a fraud:

21 Ways To Overcome Impostor Syndrome

1. Come off it. Usually I feel like a fraud when I think I’m more important than I am. When you feel like a fraud it’s in relation to some perfection that never actually existed. Letting go of some of your excess self-importance will go a long way in helping you feel less like a fake.

2. Accept that you have had some role in your successes. We feel like frauds because we are “unable to internalize our successes”. We were given an opportunity that others weren’t. And so nothing we achieve after that opportunity was actually deserved.

John D. Rockefellar’s oldest son suffered that bad. His entire life’s work was giving away money that his dad made. Can you imagine the intense impostor syndrome he must have felt? Holy moly.

There are plenty of people born with a silver spoon that still manage to f*#$ up. They were given every opportunity and never could take advantage of them. Opportunities come to those who expose themselves to them.

It’s not all “fair”, not at all. But you did do something to get where you are. You said yes when you could have said no (or, maybe more challenging, you said no when you could have said yes.)

3. Focus on providing value. I feel like a fraud when I’m concerned about myself. What will they think of me? If I fail they’ll shun me. I don’t know as much as that other guy, I have no right to say anything on the topic. Blah blah blah. The fastest way to get over feeling like a fraud is to genuinely try to help someone else. 

This is hard because what if they hate you for it? What if they make fun of you for trying to help? What if your sincerity is smashed under the laughter of others? Then OUCH! That hurts bad. Not nearly as bad as it hurts to feel like a shell of yourself though. I remember the first time I wrote vulnerably. I had gone through severe depression and had benefitted from reading about others being depressed. I felt obligated to share my story. I did. It’s a couple years later now and I still get emails telling me how helpful the letter was to them. Not one person made fun of me for that. At least to my face.   4. Keep a file of people saying nice things about you. I just started this earlier this year and it’s been amazing. Every time someone writes that I helped them online I take a screenshot and put it in my folder. When I feel like a fraud I can go look through the stories of people I have helped. There is a mom who’s 18 year old boy was shaken out of being stuck because of something I had written. There are a whole series of entrepreneurs who started businesses because of articles I’ve written. There are successful entrepreneurs that were reinvigorated by something I wrote. There are a whole slew of people at rock bottom who have found life worth living again because of something I wrote. Those things keep me putting stuff out there. Because, honestly, it’s easy to forget that writing can do any good. Collect your wins, testimonials, whatever and then visit them when you’re feeling like a fraud. 5. Stop comparing yourself to that person. There’s no good reason for you to be reading what I’m writing. There are world class biographies of Warren Buffett, John D. Rockefeller, and Einstein. James Altucher has had more successes than me. Peter Thiel just wrote a book. Tim Ferriss, Paul Graham, Kevin Kelly… these guys blog! But still, I’m writing this because I think I have something to offer. Actually, when I look at my praise file I have proof that I have something to offer.

When I compare myself to these others it’s easy to fall into the trap of “my life sucks compared to that life”. You might as well not even do anything! Your life isn’t the best life! Emerson said, “Envy is ignorance…” and he was right on. You aren’t here to live the life of another person. You’re here to do whatever life you can. Turn Facebook off, get off Instagram, stop reading biographies of “successful” people and learn to respect your own experience. You’re not a fraud, you’re just you.

6. Expose yourself totally. Part of the twisted arrogance that causes impostor syndrome is the (usually unconscious) belief that you have extreme powers that the world couldn’t handle. Or maybe it’s just that you think you are a freak. You certainly have the ability to offer the world something that nobody else can… but really it’s not that wild! You are not nearly as much of a freak as you think you are. Again, come off it, you’re just not that special.

Do this: write for 30 minutes the most insane things about yourself. You will never show anybody this. Write your most ridiculous beliefs, your most terrible thoughts, your biggest fraud! Just write gibberish if you think that is crazy. Push into the deepest taboos you hold. Seeing this things on paper doesn’t get rid of them, but externalizing things puts them in a more sane perspective.

I have a gay friend. Everyone knew he was gay. He spent years not telling anyone. He spent a huge chunk of his life without expressing himself. If the world knew he was gay everything would be over. “So, I’m gay,” he told me. Big surprise. “Okay,” I told him. The next month I saw him he was living a totally different life. There was some kind of rusty wheel in him that was now spinning freely. His eyes shone with life. He was energetic and positive. All just from letting down his guard for a minute. 7. Treat the thing as a business/experiment. Today there is a whole slew of artist-entrepreneurs. We call part of what we do “content creation”. There has never been a time in history where so many people have a “voice”. No wonder we’re all suffering from impostor syndrome.

Start treating even your art as a business. Not to the point that you start making crap because it’s what people like, but to the point that you are honestly serving the market. In a business, if a product doesn’t sell, you stop making it.

If nobody shares this post or leaves comments then I’ll assume that nobody wants to hear me talk about impostor syndrome—so I’ll stop. I won’t wallow in my failure and think the world hates me.

I’m running a test. Looking at it this way makes it easier to create the thing freely.

8.  Say “It’s Impostor Syndrome” and it immediately becomes a little less terrible.

9. Remember: being wrong doesn’t make you a fake. The best basketball players miss most of the shots they take. The best traders lose money on most trades. Presidents are wrong about stuff all the time. The best football teams inevitably lose.

Losing is just part of the game. Don’t glorify failure, but don’t let it make you feel like you’re not a real contender either.

10.  “Nobody Belongs Here More Than You” <<That’s the title of a book I haven’t read, but I agree with it. Why do we feel we don’t deserve to be in the game? Because we haven’t won it yet? We haven’t even tried! Break people down into what they are: expiring meat sacks.

We are all going to die, we just take different routes to get there. One of the most attractive qualities in a person is acceptance.

Acceptance of themselves and acceptance of you.

Not in the surrendering kind of way, in the “seeing clearly” kind of way. If you can admit that nobody belongs here more than you (while maintaining the belief that you don’t belong here any more than anyone else) you will find yourself making connections with people in powerful ways. 11. Realize that when you hold back you’re robbing the world. If you walk around feeling that you should be someone else or that you don’t deserve to be here then all your crappy vibes rub off on other people. Your stunted expression means that you can’t be there for people who need you.

Everyone has doubts, the best gift you can give the world is to move forward regardless of the doubts—because it gives us the permission to move forward as well.

12. You’re going to die. Do you want to be on your deathbed regretting that you spent your entire life stopping yourself because you felt like a fraud? Maybe you can’t shake the feeling that you’re a fraud. You can force yourself to move forward despite the feeling.

13.  Stream-of-conscious writing. I suggested something similar in #1. This is aimless though. Do this: write for 30+ minutes nonstop. You can’t put your pen down. If there is no thought in your head then write “I can’t think of anything” until you do. This will constantly put you in touch with what’s going on inside yourself.

It will show you how silly the impostor syndrome is. It’s awesome.

14. Say what you can. We are often put in the position of “expert”. When this happens people look at you like you should know everything about a topic. We can’t know everything about anything though. If I’m in a situation where there is potential to actually be a fraud—ie bullshit about things I don’t know—I just say what I can instead. People respect this much more. Admit that you don’t yet have the answer but you’ll find it.

Admit that you haven’t found the perfect solution but you’ve come close enough.

the second time for good measure!

15. Realize that nobody knows what they’re doing. Most startups fail. Even the ones that you hear about raising millions of dollars fail all the time. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. There are a ton of people who will tell you they know the answers. These people are liars.

The world we live in is the result of a lot of brave people tinkering, failing, and succeeding once in a while. Nobody knows what’s next: some are willing to play ball in the face of uncertainty and some aren’t. You’re not an impostor for trying something that might not work. You’re a hero.

16. Take action. Impostor Syndrome lives in abstraction. It is impossible for it to survive when you’re taking action. Taking action proves that you’re not a fraud. It tests your mettle in the real world.

Impostor Syndrome cannot do damage to the person who consistently takes action. (You still might feel it every once in a while but you won’t let it stop you.)

17. Realize that you are never you. You’re constantly changing. You’re constantly becoming a new person. Your opinions change with new information (I hope). You spend 6 months eating donuts and then you spend 6 months at the gym. Last year you were obsessed with Call of Duty, now you don’t understand video games. Maybe you were in a terrible mood this morning. Maybe you’re a bit brighter now.

“There is as much difference between us an ourselves as there is between us and others.” – Michel de Montaigne

You are growing into something different. You are getting better. How? By trying to do something better than you actually can. That’s not a lie, that’s valor. 18. Authenticity is a hoax. What is being authentic? I’m not going to write to my grandma using the same words as I use to write to my sister. I’m not even going to emphasize the same interests I have.

If I’m selling security systems, I’m not going to pitch a Mormon the way I pitch a rock tar. It just wouldn’t make sense. There is no person you can be other than you. Ever. The impostor syndrome will have you believe that you are being inauthentic. That you are a liar. If that’s true then where is your true self!?

The impostor syndrome doesn’t give an answer because it doesn’t have one. Tell it to eff off.

19. See credentials for what they are. They don’t mean much. “Expert” means someone decided to call them that. “PhD” doesn’t mean someone knows more than you, it means they spent more time in school about you. (And actually do know way more than you about some uselessly specific topic.)

“As seen in The Wall Street Journal” means they knew how to use HARO. Don’t measure yourself by credentials. It takes the focus away from actually doing good things. And it won’t shut up the impostor syndrome for long either.

20. Find one person you can say, “I feel like a fraud” to. Being able to say that out loud to another person can be a huge help. Especially when they laugh at you for it.

21. Faking things actually does work. Sometimes faking it doesn’t make you a fraud. If you smile your body will be more generous with happy chemicals and actually make you happier. Neuroplasticity means that you can shape your brain by pretending.

When you were a baby you tried to walk and failed down every time. Were you a walking impostor? Who are you to walk!? You can’t even do it! It’s absurd!

Silicon Valley has been built by people trying to do things that probably weren’t going to work. We need them to keep trying. We need you to keep trying. We need you. Whether you feel like an impostor or not.

Impostor Syndrome: The Challenge

You have the opportunity right this very instant to overcome your impostor syndrome. This is what we’re going to do. A Blog Confessional of sorts.

Write in the comments one thing you’ve avoided because you feel like a fraud. (If this is too much, you can email me… commenting will be more powerful though.) You can even stay anonymous if you want. Maybe you haven’t started that blog because you feel that you couldn’t do it as well as the people already blogging about a topic. Maybe you haven’t started your business because you don’t think you’re an “entrepreneur”. Maybe you haven’t talked to that pretty girl/guy. I don’t know. There are all sorts of thing. I’ll give you mine in a second.

**BONUS ROUND** Do something about it! If you don’t know what to do, I’ll give you a suggestion. The comment itself will be a huge step for sure. It’ll be even more huge to take the thing head on.

[Last Call]

Overcoming the Impostor Syndrome is one of the many challenges participants in our book writing group will overcome. If you want more information on it just click the botton: Become an Author Here]

The post 21 Proven Ways To Overcome Impostor Syndrome appeared first on StartupBros.

Ever been so worried about your cash that you didn’t even check your bank statement for weeks?

Simply hoping for the best when trying to pay for your groceries?

And then almost gotten a heart attack after you found out it’s even worse than you thought because of that 1 big credit card bill you’d forgotten?

How does this translate to your business?

Do you apply the same ‘stick your head in the sand’ strategy towards your cash?

I’m sure you don’t…

I’m sure you know what your burn rate looks like and that you’re already sitting on secondhand chairs to save on money. And of course you’re doing everything you can to reel in the customers. And your vision for the future is even more awesome.

Fact is though that poor cash flow management is one of the biggest reasons why start-ups fail.

They didn’t fail because their products were awful or that they were spending way too much. They didn’t even fail because they didn’t have enough customers.

It’s because they couldn’t pay their bills the moment they needed to be paid.

It seems almost unfair, and to be honest, it sort of is… But it’s also easily fixable if you just know what to do.

So, here’s the inside scoop on consciously managing cash flow (even when you don’t have any accounting skills).

Why Cash Flow Is More Important Than Revenue

You LOVE revenue!

It means that you’ve sold something and that money is guaranteed to come in.

It’s fantastic!

But…exactly WHEN will this money be coming in?

In my experience customers aren’t always happy to pay as soon as you send them the invoice. As a matter of fact, many customers aren’t even happy to pay on the due date stated on your invoice. And sending reminders and calling them does not always help either (more about that later).

That means that all you’ve got is ‘fictional’ money in the bank. You know it’s coming but it’s not there yet. Meaning that it can’t be used to pay your own fees, your employees, your own suppliers, your taxes, etc.

But as you DO want to pay all your bills in time, to avoid trouble AND because you’re a nice person, you’ll need to start scrambling for solutions. Like going into credit card debt. Or borrowing from your parents. Or, even worse, from the bank.

You’ll make your life a whole lot easier if you prevent them from happening.

And doing so is what managing cash flow is all about.

It is making sure that you know exactly how much cash is in the bank at any given point in time to avoid a crisis of liquidity. In other words, to avoid not being able to pay your own bills and going under because of it.

Other Surprising Benefits From Consciously Managing Cash Flow

First and foremost you’ll want to manage your cash to avoid going out of business but there are some other benefits that come with it:

• You’ll get really creative with the resources you do have.
  It’s really cool to see how far you can go with next to nothing and the more aware you are of your cash situation, the easier this becomes.
• You’ll be a more desirable investment.
  If an investor (or bank) sees that you’re capable of getting as far as you did on your own, she will definitely trust her money with you a whole lot more than with any other startup. It makes you independent, creative, trustworthy and flexible; all magic words to an investor.
• You’ll have a better chance of bootstrapping your way to growth.
  You’ll be able to steer away from the time sucking investor talks for a lot longer and you might just even make it all the way on your own.

Who The Cash Manager Should Be In Your Business

Managing cash flow is not for everyone. It’s not necessarily fun and glamorous and it does involve saying NO a lot.

That means that the person managing the cash flow – yes, it should be ONE person – should have certain characteristics that make that person better able to do it.

It makes sense that your CFO manages the cash flow but if you don’t have one (yet), look out for the following in the person to do it:

• Have a strong sense of responsibility.
  As cash is the fuel your business runs on, this person needs to feel responsible enough to know and check at ALL time if there’s enough to get you through to the next month (at least).
• Get a special kick out of numbers that add up.
  Cash management is still a numbers game and especially for those start-ups that have a some sort of flow of cash coming in and going out (like when you’re in retail for example) it can get a bit tricky to keep track of everything, though it becomes all the more important to do so.
• Be willing (and able) to dive deep into the spreadsheets and invoices when the numbers DON’T add up.
  It’s very likely that the numbers won’t all add up for some reason. Sometimes it’s because of a typo, other times you’ll find money has mysteriously appeared or disappeared on your account without a corresponding invoice or you forgot a one-off payment agreement with a customer that is now messing with your calculations. Either way, the cash manager (so to speak) needs to figure it all out.
• Be able and willing to stand up to the rest of the team when an idea is financially impossible.
  This is where things get really tricky because you want to be open and flexible and you know how excited you get when new ideas come pouring in and you know how important it is to keep innovating and growing and networking and doing all those things that cost you money. But you can’t do it all…in the first few years every cent counts and needs to be weighed carefully.
• Be flexible and creative enough to think of alternative solutions to that initial idea.
  But…not having cash does not necessarily mean not following up on that important idea; it means that you’ll have to get creative with what you do have. In other words: you’ll need to bootstrap and hustle your way through it.
• Not be afraid to stalk call customers or ask suppliers for embarrassing payment extensions.
  In other words, this person should not be afraid to have potentially tricky conversations with customers who aren’t paying and even going to the extremes of getting a bailiff in to fix it. On the other hand, you might get into some payment troubles of your own and need to negotiate your payment terms with your own suppliers.

All in all, this cash manager should be someone who is responsible and flexible, structured and creative and strict and humane all at the same time.

As said; managing cash flow is not for everyone!

So we now know WHY we should manage cash flow and we know WHO should do it. Let’s look at HOW to actually do it.

The 4 Elements of Effectively Managing your Cash Flow

Element 1. Start Keeping Score Of Every Cent Coming In And Going Out

Literally, every last cent!

And you do so by using a Cash Flow Forecast.

Something you’ll work with regularly and in it you’ll keep track of ALL cash flow including taxes. The cash flow forecast tells you literally when cash will come into the bank and when it goes out based on REAL transactions.

That means that you know EXACTLY when you’re going to run out of it (so you can make sure you take all the appropriate actions to prevent this from happening).

But here’s the thing…there ISN’T an app for that!

The thing is though that no cash management tool can automatically predict when a customer will pay you or when you will pay your bills. That’s (still) something that needs to be done manually.

In the crucial beginning phases every cent counts and 1 paid invoice can make all the difference.

That’s why I use an Excel sheet. And in this article I use the template I found right here.

And it looks like this:

If elaborate spreadsheets scare you not to worry; we’ll go through it step by step.

If you’re a rebel, no need to worry either; this spreadsheet is just an example. You can change up the rows as much as you want without losing any of its value.

And if you really want to use an app, Pulse is pretty good. It has the same characteristics and some extra features but will cost $14 a month and it’s of course still not linked to cash forecasts.

1.1 Cash on hand

The Cash on hand (end of month) is THE MOST IMPORTANT row on the entire sheet. It is calculated from everything that is put in the rest of the sheet and it shows you exactly how much cash you’ll have on a monthly basis.

In this example you can see that you’ll be expected to be $18 in debt by the first of August.

The trick is to know exactly what is going to come by as many months ahead as is possible in your business. That way you know when you’ll get in trouble and can take all the preventative measures necessary.

1.2 Cash coming in

In these rows you put in EVERYTHING that comes into your business (including VAT!).

When your business only has a handful of customers you might want to list them all and simply fill in the payments that have come in in that month as soon as you see them come in.

If your business has lots of customers – like when you are in retail – it is easier to go over your bank statements once or twice a week and make sure all the numbers are added in the ‘cash sales’ row. You might want to differentiate to customer- or product type, but that is a matter of what is important to your business.

Now WHEN you’re ‘allowed’ to put anything in these rows is important. For this sheet to work you can only put in the things that are a 100% certain.

So not when you’re working on a lead that is probably going to fall but only after a signed contract. And not that investment that you’re probably going to get but only when the deal is closed.

Another important thing is to take into account the exact WHEN money will be in the bank. If you for example have a payment term of 30 days than open this sheet on the day of the sale and place it in the month of the 30^th day.

Same goes for investments and subsidies; it’s always great to get this money in but it often has to go through some loops before it’s actually on your account.

In short, the only numbers that are allowed on these rows are the ones you are a 100% sure of. That means no predictions and no forecasts whatsoever or you’ll be counting yourself richer than you actually are!

1.3 Cash paid out

This part is ALL the cash you spent in a certain month and includes both your internal costs as well as external. Mind you: the numbers you put in here are including VAT!

Again, the structure is entirely up to you as long as you put every last cent you’ve spent in here.

Personally, I use the following clusters:

• Personnel: wages, management fees, insurances, travel costs etc
• Costs Of Goods Sold (COGS): supplies, consultants, materials, etc.
• Office expenses: rent, insurances, subscriptions, coffee, fruit, toner, etc.;
• Marketing: advertisement, flyers, etc.
• Taxes: all of them.
• Capital: interest, reserves, etc.
• Other expenses: for all the rest.

For each of these clusters you can make a ‘subtotal’ row so you can immediately tell how much you’ve spend on something in a particular month without having to dig into your accounting software.

Unlike on the income side you are allowed to put in the foreseeable expenses for things that you know you are going to have to pay. Things like salaries, management fees, insurances, subscriptions and housing costs. In other words, all those expenses that are certain, you put in. This is important, as this is the burn rate with which you’ll go through your cash.

Expenses that are more variable in nature, like materials and supplies follow the same route as the incomes; only when you’re a 100% sure about it.

Be careful: do calculate the taxes that you have to pay monthly and/or yearly upfront! If they’re not in the forecast you might be up for a big shock!

Element 2: Do A Monthly Check-Up

If you’re doing the above steps you’ll already have a pretty great idea how healthy your cash flow is (or isn’t) but as supplier and customer payments are usually rather fickle of nature, you need to be absolutely sure that you start and finish with the right numbers.

Here’s what you do:

• Download the .csv file that has all your bank transactions on there for that past month and plug it into another Excel sheet;
• Delete the columns that you don’t need and make sure that you’re left with at least the following: transaction date, debit (d) or credit (c), the actual value, name, description;
• Make sure the value column is formatted as ‘currency’;
• Filter the rows so all the debits and all the credits are next to each other and ‘autosum’ both amounts in an empty column. You’ll now have all the totals coming in and coming out and these should be the same as in your cash forecast;
• If they’re not, and they’re usually not…start filtering out the most likely causes and comparing them with your forecast. For example: perhaps you’ve paid rent on the 1^st of the month and the 28^th for some reason. Or you accidentally put in a payment twice or forgot something else entirely. Sift your way through everything until it adds up;
• Make sure all is ready to do the same thing next month; all your projected payments and incomes are in the right month and the beginning balance is exactly as it is on your bank statement.

Element 3: Make Sure Your Customers Are Paying You

Important as it is to know exactly what is going on in your cash situation, there’s things you need to do to make sure it stays as healthy as possible.

• Make sure you send out your invoices as soon as possible.
  A common mistake many start-ups make is that they’re not strict enough with their billing. Often they only bill after the product or service had been delivered and this is not always necessary.Oftentimes it is no problem at all to send the invoice straightaway. Just make sure it is clearly stated in the contract and that you’re flexible when people do object. Being strict on this will make sure you get your cash faster but be careful not to mess up the relationship with your customer.

• Follow up on non-paying customers IMMEDIATELY.
  Though you’ve spent time on building a relationship of trust with your customer, this doesn’t mean that they’ll actually pay you in time. But as your business’ survival depends on this cash, it is vital that you make sure this does not get stalled.It’s very likely that the customer either simply forgot the invoice or that it wasn’t communicated properly. Just give your customer a call and let them know their payment is late and that you were curious if it was on the way. 9 Out of 10 customers will tell you how sorry they are and make sure it gets paid immediately.

• Don’t be afraid to really go after your money .
  Unfortunately there’s always a few customers who are just really really bad payers.The “I’M NOT HAPPY AND I’M NOT PAYING UNTIL YOU’VE FIXED IT” type is at least clear and gives you the chance to do something about it, which you should of course immediately do. Once the problem is solved, the bill will also be paid; no problem.The silent, brooding customer is a bit more difficult; you’ll often only find out they’re not happy after you’ve called them that the bill is still open. You can imagine that that’s a bad situation on both a customer satisfaction side but also on a cash flow management side. You’ll have to make sure you fix it right away and do an extra good job in making them happy as they won’t let you know themselves. Still fixable though.The dodgy customer is the really bad egg. They’re usually impossible to get on the phone, don’t reply to their emails and if you do get them they’ll usually have an excuse that seems sort of plausible. The trick for you is to not be too polite and get a lawyer or bailiff in asap! Usually a stern and formal letter from a lawyer will get the quickest results.

Element 4: Get ‘Creative’ With your Payments To Suppliers

• Pay your suppliers just 1 day before the end of the payment term.
  You want to be a nice and good customer but the longer you stretch your money the easier it is to catch little glitches like when your customers don’t pay YOU in time.
• Strike a deal with your top suppliers to extend the payment term.
  If you’ve indeed always been a good customer and you’re bringing them some good money (or a huge potential to), they might very well be open to extend your term of payment. This could be hugely beneficial for you so definitely pursue this option though be careful of not becoming too cocky; you’re still a startup so your relationship is mainly based on trust.
• Remember the order in which to pay: Taxes, Suppliers, Employees, Yourself.
  This is really about leveling out the amount of trouble you’ll get yourself in when you don’t pay; if you don’t pay yourself you might have to rent out your house and eat ramen noodles for a while. If you don’t pay your taxes you’ll go to jail….

Managing cash flow is about moving that dreaded month in which you’ll hit that feared negative number forward as much as possible.

And it is about preventing yourself from nasty surprises that could just mean the end to all your hard work.

It’s about giving you all the possible time you need to take all the appropriate actions. Like asking your suppliers upfront if it’s okay if you’d pay them 2 weeks later this time. Or not paying yourself and you co-founders for a few months. Or putting in more effort to get those subsidies and that accelerator money in. Or even handing out bonuses to customers who pay early.

As an entrepreneur you’re already pulling and pushing on a 1000 levers to move your business forward and there’s already sooo incredibly much to worry about.

So why not put in a little effort on managing your cash flow and make sure you can sleep a little more sound at night?

Bio: Linda Coussement helps entrepreneurs lead, grow and improve remarkable businesses. Download her 10 page interactive Vision Guide and build the practical blueprint to take YOUR business the next level. Connect with Linda on Twitter.

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If you’ve been online recently, you’ve heard about Nir Eyal’s new book, Hooked.

You’ve heard about it because it’s freaking awesome. It’s one the best business books to come out in 2014–and possibly the single most useful.

I’m not going to summarize his ideas here, instead, I’ve connected a few of the ideas in his book and used them in a slightly different way. Hooked is a quick read and there’s no fluff. You’ll read it in a day and be applying ideas to your business by the second chapter.

Getting Business Ideas

Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, offers up this straight-forward formula for creating a new product or business:

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

This alone will take you a long way towards seeing opportunities all around you. Every complaint or annoyance is a sign that something could be done better. You could be the person that helps ease that pain.

Paul Graham has a simple formula that we can use to discover business ideas as well:

“Instead of asking ‘what problems should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’”

Nir also reports on another fascinating way that we can go about discovering business opportunities.

As Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research writes, “When the research focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities.” Looking for discrepancies exposes opportunities. Why do people really send text messages? Why do they take photos? Ask yourself what pain these habits solve and what the user might be feeling right before one of these actions.

What would your users want to achieve by using your solution? Where and when will they use it? What emotions influence their use and will trigger them to action?

Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and Square, shared how his companies answer these important questions: “[If] you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives.”

Dorsey goes on to describe how he tries to truly understand his user: “He is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store… This is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play. It’s really, really beautiful. If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally because you can edit the story from all levels of the organization, engineers to operations to support to designers to the business side of the house.”

Dorsey believes a clear description of users—their desires, emotions, the context with which they use the product—is paramount to building the right solution. In addition to Dorsey’s user narratives, tools like customer development, usability studies, and empathy maps are examples of methods for learning about potential users.

One method is to try asking the question “Why?”as many times as it takes to get to an emotion. Usually, this will happen by the fifth why. This is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System, described by Taiichi Ohno as the “5 Whys Method.” Ohno wrote that it was “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach…by repeating “why?” five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. 

Motivate Yourself & Others (To Use Your Product)

Ironically, reading about human behavior through the lens of product design gave me a clearer picture of my own behavior than other books designed to do specifically that. This is thanks partly due to the fact that some goals are best achieved by not aiming at them. Happiness, fulfillment, and self-knowledge tend to fall in the category. It’s also thanks to Nir just being a master at weaving together disparate knowledge and reframing it in useful ways.

He spends time throughout the book looking at the work of famed behavior scientist B.J. Fogg. What follows is a powerful set of laws of human behavior.

“Three Ingredients Required to Initiate Any and All Behaviors”

[B.J.] Fogg posits that there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.

Let’s frame this for the wantrepreneur. Why have you not yet started your business? Let’s take a look at how Fogg’s model can help you understand. (Notice that I have changed “the user” to “You”–we all operate similarly.)

1. You must have significant motivation. This on it’s own can almost make the other ingredients automatic. Nietzsche was more poetic about it: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Indeed. Tony Robbins makes sure people have a “why” for their goals because he has seen so many smart people fail because they didn’t care enough and plenty of dumb people succeed because they cared with all their hearts. If you don’t feel that you “must” start your business then you won’t. If you haven’t given yourself a significant enough reason why you need to become an entrepreneur, then you won’t. If you truly believe that this is something you have to do, then you will.
2. You must have the ability to complete the desired action. If you can’t become and entrepreneur, then obviously you won’t. Now, with the barrier to entry at nearly zero, this isn’t the case for you. The corollary to this rule is more interesting: if you don’t believe you can complete the behavior, you won’t. If you don’t think you can, why not? That’s a trick question. You don’t know until you take action. Try the thing to discover your actual limitations and find out what you need to learn. It also helps to shift the narrative in your head. Find a story of a person who started where you’re at and became successful.
3. A trigger must be present to activate the behavior. There are two types of triggers: internal and external. Nir dedicates many pages dealing with them but all we need understand here is that internal triggers are your emotions (usually negative) and external triggers are things outside of you (like a notification on an app). A wantrepreneur should set triggers for himself that will force him to actually start building a business. This could be something like a note over his computer that says, “Are you building or dreaming?” or it could be having his significant other call him out for doing infinite “research” that never ends in any progress.

Let’s Take a Look at Motivation

Fogg states that all humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain; to seek hope and avoid fear; and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.

Let’s take a look at each in turn. Again, from the viewpoint of the wantrepreneur.

1. Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Wantrepreneurs have associated pain to actually starting a business and pleasure to thinking about starting businesses. If he starts a business he might fail, then he’ll have to admit that he’s not as good as he thinks. Before you start a business you can stay delusional, you can believe you are capable of anything. (This is a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect that states “unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority … while highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate.”) It’s painful to admit our own limitations. It’s much more fun to think about all the success you’ll have. Of course, this only lasts so long. At some point you’ll look up and realize you haven’t done anything and then you might switch your pain/pleasure associations.
2. Seek hope and avoid fear. It’s easy to have hope in planning because that’s basically all you’re doing. Thinking about stuff and hoping it happens. We avoid doing the scary stuff… like actually risking failure, rejection, and loss. The wantrepreneur needs to associate action to hope and learn to fear inaction. To do this you’ve got to take the perspective of the future you. The one who’ll be pissed off and more than a little sad that you didn’t do the thing you wanted to.
3. Seek social acceptance and avoid rejection. The wantrepreneur is usually surrounded by other wantrepreneurs. People comfortable where they are. Maybe they think that if they try and fail they won’t have any friends to go back to. Maybe they think that their friends will stop talking to them if they start their business. Maybe they think that people will look at them and believe they have no right to start a business. Maybe. Probably. It’s pretty obvious what needs to be done about that one.

6 Elements of Simplicity

Sometimes we’re sufficiently motivated to do something and feel like we are able to do it… but then we don’t. Fogg describes the barriers that may be standing in our way.

Fogg describes six “elements of simplicity”—the factors that influence a task’s difficulty. These are:

The post How to Find Profitable Business Ideas and Motivate Yourself to Execute Them: A Different Look at “Hooked” appeared first on StartupBros.

So here it is: Everything we have ever learned about importing.

Our step-by-step hacks on how to make $1,000 a month importing from China.

Yes it can be scary, difficult, frustrating, down right painful, but if you follow our guide and stick to it, you will reap all the rewards and then some that the far east has to offer…

Search for Products

The first thing we need to define a “good product”. This is probably the most important question.

In the beginning almost everyone is drawn towards electronics because they are fun and interesting. But let me ask you this:

When was the last time you bought something electronic that was not made by Sony, Apple, Samsung, etc?

Probably never, me either. But like an idiot, these were the first products I tried to import. Don’t be like me. You do not want to compete with these companies for market share.

This is what we are looking for….

Requirements for a Profitable Product

Light weight: This is important because it saves on shipping charges and if you do have to deal with a return for some reason it will not kill you to ship stuff back, the last thing you want is to be shipping something heavy all over the country.

Simple: You want a product with a large margin for error. If there is a defect in the product ideally you should still be able to sell it. That is why we do not do electronics, a small defect with electronics and the whole product is worthless.

Between $10 – $200: This is where the majority of the world purchases products the ‘middle class’ of products and the middle class is what we are after. That is where all people are and thus all the money is.

How to Get Product Ideas

The first thing you need to do is identify products, there are a lot ways you can do this, and the hardest part is usually coming up with ideas to research. I usually do the following.

1. Ask people what problems they are having Facebook and reddit are both great places for this, usually I just ask people questions about what things they use in their everyday lives that they have trouble with or could use improvement. Check out this reddit post here, this is how I do it.
2. Keep a notebook where I jot down things that I see everyday that I think are cool or interesting. I made a short video about this and some shipping info.
3. Look through Amazon Best Sellers and Ebay Popular to see if you can piggyback (we’ll define this later) or improve a product.
4. Try to solve problems that I have. The most obvious problems are hard to solve because you have been dealing with them forever, so next time something seems a bit annoying or dumb  take a second and think if there is a way to improve it.

Research for Money Makers

Terapeak is an awesome tool for identifying products on eBay and Amazon. It’s also simple to use, all you need to do is input the product you want to research and TeraPeak will give you some sweet analytics. Like sell through ratio, sales volume, and the trend over 30, 60 and 90 days.

Another awesome tool is  Camel Camel Camel. CCC is a free tool that allows you to track pricing trends from Amazon over time so that you can easily see whether a product is trending up or down. Another great thing about CCC is you can get an idea of where to price your product in order to be competitive.

Here is a screenshot of MorphSuits, I use to sell a ton of these:

As you can see the price is trending down, so I would not do this product now. When you see a chart like this it usually means there are too many sellers now and the market has been oversaturated.

Searching for Suppliers

Alibaba is without a doubt the holy grail of Chinese factories. Anyone who is anyone is a member AND its not CHEAP, so people that are listed on there are either (A) Serious Factories or (B) Serious Scammers. Below I am going to show you, step by step, how to vet suppliers and make sure you are not dealing with a scammer.

There are basically two ways you can search Alibaba.

1. Search Engine

You can search through their search engine to do this. Simply type in the product that you are looking for.

Once you have done this, look just above the first product and you will see five boxes. Check the following:

• Gold Supplier
• On Site Check
• Assessed supplier
• Escrow

The last box is E-credit line–we are not quite there yet little grasshopper.

The reason we check these boxes is to begin weeding out the good from the bad. Typically if they accept all four they are pretty legit!

2. Ali Source Pro

Ali Source Pro is a great way to do the buckshot method (i.e. shoot the shot gun and hope you hit something). When you fill out the quotation form it will be sent out to every supplier that fits your criteria, so you will get a TON of messages. The negative about this is they will message you forever, the positive is that you will have a bunch of suppliers that are serious and really looking to make deals happen. [Pro tip: make a new email address just for this! The flood of email you receive may render your account useless.]

First Contact

The first contact with a supplier is VERY important, Your objectives are:

1. Sound serious
2. Don’t sound like an amateur
3. Make a good first impression

So how do we do this?

Here is a template I use when contacting suppliers for the first time:

***

Hello,

My name is ______. I am a purchasing agent for XYZ corp. We are very interested in learning more about your company and it’s production capabilities. If you could send us more info as well as your product catalogs and MOQ requirements we would greatly appreciate it.

We look forward to speaking with you.

Sincerly,

_________

 ***

Of course you can tweak this to fit your needs, but this is a good start.

Build Slowly!

DO NOT buy in bulk immediately, that is the quickest way to get screwed. What we want to do is buy a few samples, sell them, get feed back, and then move to the next step. Building your business gradually and methodically will ensure that you stay in business and are able to grow quickly later on. Here is the process from start to finish:

How to Hack MOQs

The first thing that your supplier is going to ask is how many pieces you want to order. This is where the ‘fake it till you make it’ phrase is VERY important. I know it might be hard and uncomfortable for some, but if you do not play this correctly no one will want to work with you. Normally their response will be to ask how much you are selling per month or how many pieces you would like to buy. Below is a great example of an email one of our students (Daniel) and I worked on when we were recently in China together.

***

Dear Sun,

As I am sure you can understand, we cannot divulge secretive information like monthly sales volume. Based on what you have told me, your volume is enough for us to be interested in your factory, especially given your broad range of products and your focus on quality control.

However, my boss is not willing to switch accounts to any new supplier until we prove things out by moving slowly. The steps he would like to follow are:

1. We test a normal and high capacity cartridge internally in our office

2. We test on a broader scale with 100 units, preferably with a different printer line

3. We move to 1,000 units to test happiness with customers in our many channels of distribution

4. Assuming all goes well, we go to 5,000-10,000 units and really begin to migrate to your factory fully for that line

***

Hook, line, and sinker.

This factory replied back that they were more than willing to work with Daniel and he was able to get any MOQ (minimum order quantity) he wanted because they needed ‘prove themselves’ to him.

Shipping is Easy!

One of the biggest hang-ups and mistakes new importers make is trying to learn everything about shipping. I have been working in importing for 8 years and I definitely do not know everything and, to be honest, I don’t want to know everything. Shipping laws and regulations change all the time and to keep up with it is a full time job in and of itself. So… DO NOT try to learn it all or you will drive yourself crazy and worse, you’ll scare yourself out of ever sending a shipment.

Personally, I use the following companies:

DHL, FedEx, UPS, TNT, Kerry Express, Sure Freight.

When you use any one of the above companies, they will take care of almost everything. With DHL and FedEx, you might have them contact you about filling out some forms when clearing customs, but most everything else is covered.

Someone like Sure Freight will take care of everything. You literally do not have to worry about a thing and they will make sure that your product gets from point A to point B without a hiccup. Also, when they give you a shipping quote it will include all taxes and duties, so you are getting everything all in one price.

In the beginning a lot of people ship by Air, but you can also do it by Sea–it just takes a bit longer. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Estimating Shipping Cost

I do the following:

1. Go to DHL.com and use their shipping and rate quote tool
2. After Clicking on the ‘Get Rate and Time Quote’ button you will be taken to this screen:
3. Next fill out the form. You will need a pick up and drop off zip code as well as the size and weight of each of your packages. Press the ‘Search’ button and you should get something like this.

DHL will give you different shipping options and this is a good baseline for comparing against other companies and your factory (you can also ask your factory to ship, they sometimes get really good deals).

If you get an error message like this:

This is DHL telling you one of two things.

1. Your box is too big for the weight that you are shipping, or

2. This is NOT a good product because it is too big!!

You should do the exact same process on Fedex’s website as well as World Freight Rates website. None of these are exact quotes, but they at least give you an idea of where you are at with shipping.

Shipping HACKS

1. Play with the dates. Shipping is like airline tickets, prices change with days and seasons, so mess around with the dates of shipping.
2. Remove excess packaging. When shipping by air you are being charged by weight and size, so ask the factory to remove anything that is not needed in the packaging.
3. Remove any unnecessary pieces. I once cut my shipping cost by 43% on a product when I realized the factory was including mounting brackets inside that NONE of my customers were using.

How to Do Inspections

Once you start ordering larger quantities and sending more money to your supplier you are going to want to start getting inspections done for your shipments.

Inspection companies will go through the packaged good ready to ship and check the packaging and the product. Typically inspection companies will cost anywhere from $250 – $300 for one inspector for one day.

However, it is well worth the cost because they will go through and tell you everything about your shipment and send you a very detailed report about the minor or major flaws that your shipment may or may not have. I personally like the following companies:

V-Trust

Asia Inspection

SGS Group

All three of these companies do a great job, charge more or less the same, and will send you a very detailed report about your shipment.

Help your Inspection Company be Awesome

Inspection companies will check your order top to bottom, but in the end you know exactly what you need. So the more info you can send your inspection company the better. Product specs, material makeup, pantone colors, really any and all info that you have about the product. This will make their job way easier and ensure that you get exactly what you want.

How to Sign up For an Amazon Account

Most people already know how to use Amazon to some degree. You have probably bought something on there at some point and thus probably already have an account. If you click under ‘Accounts’ you will see a button that says ‘My Seller Account’, click on that and it will take you to this page:

Here you have two choices: (1) sell as a professional or (2) sell as an individual. The first thing I would suggest checking is what category your product is listed under. “Sell as a professional” has ten more categories than “sell as an individual” has. However, sell as an individual is cheaper but you can only sell up to 40 products a month under it. Do not stress about this too much as you can always change it later.

Once you do this you will have to do a few things.

1. Enter Personal Info
2. Enter a credit card number
3. Verify your mobile number
4. Complete registration

The next thing you want to do is begin adding your products. To add products all you need to do is click on inventory and ‘add a product’.

When you click on ‘Add a Product’ you have two options. One is to piggyback on an already existing listing, the other is to create a new product.

If you choose to piggyback on a listing, you do not have to do much other than type in the type of product into the catalog, pick your product and then add the amount that you have, the dates you want to sell, and your price for the product.

You will get this form once you choose a product to piggyback on:

Once you fill out this little bad boy and press ‘next’ your product is live on Amazon! Simple as it could be.

If you want to create your own product listing you will have to jump through a few more hoops in order to get your product up, but nothing too crazy.

Amazon Ads

There are two types of Amazon Ads: Amazon Products Ad’s and Amazon Sponsored Ads.

With Amazon Ads you can actually set up ads on Amazon that redirect to your personal website. I suppose Amazons logic is ‘If we can’t sell them the product we will at least make some money on ads’. I have not messed with these much but my gut feeling is that, unless you have some crazy awesome deal, these probably do not convert too well. But again, I could be completely wrong.

On the other hand, Amazon Sponsored ads are RAD! They make your product way more visible and the ROI on them is great.

Some features of Amazon ads:

• Returns based on keywords
• Only pay when someone clicks
• Ad shows under ‘related products’ (check this out below)

Why use Sponsored Ads?

• Improve product visibility with an opportunity to get listings on page 1 of Amazon search results
• Deliver highly relevant ads targeted to customer searches
• Measure return on investment and optimize advertising spend

So how does it work??? Simple…

• Select your products, enter keywords and a maximum bid.
• Select your Targeting Type:

• Automatic Targeting – Amazon targets your ads to all relevant customer searches based on your product information.
• Manual Targeting – Your ads are targeted based on the keywords you choose.

• You ads appear alongside search results if you own the the Amazon Buy Box for your product.
• Shoppers who click are taken to the detail page where your product is offered.
• You pay only if your ad is clicked. Applicable Selling on Amazon fees will apply.
• Complete end-to-end metrics are available.

Here I searched for ‘Yoga Mats’. Once I clicked on a mat I liked a bunch of listings came up at the bottom of the page for similar products. These are ‘sponsored products’ and users are much more likely to click one of the below ads than they are to go back to the main page and look at the first search results.

How to Run Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are awesome, I rarely use anything but them. Their targeting is far more effective than almost any other tool on the market and Facebook knows everything that its users do–thus you are able to niche your ads down and target exactly who you are looking for.

There are a million things you can do with Facebook ads but here we are focused on one thing and one thing only, ‘How to make money’. Because money makes us happy and buys us nice things.

So After you have your product listed on Amazon and you are ready to send an ad to it, follow these 5 easy steps below.

1. Click here and click on ‘Create Ads’

2. Click on the Objective for your campaign

This really depends on what you’re after, but in our case we are going to be looking to get ‘Website Clicks’ because we will not be able to implement our own tracking pixel on Amazon.com (unless you have a REALLY good in with Jeff Bezos).

3. This will take you to this page and all you need to do is enter the URL you are trying to direct people to.

4. After you enter your URL you will be taken to this page, and this is where the fun really begins.

On this page we are going to focus on a  few things.

• How old is our audience?
• What gender are they?
• Where are they from?
• What are they interested in?

But what we are really focused on is this little guy here:

So as you can see the little arrow thingy is in the green, which is actually BAD… We want it in the red. We want really, really specific customers, because those are the ones that convert the best.

For example we do not want the girl that just likes ‘Yoga’ we want the girl that likes ‘Bikram Yoga’ or ‘Brooks Yoga Studio’ because these are the people who are actually doing yoga and practicing on a regular basis.

As you can see below, we are starting to get more defined–and the more specific we get the better results we will see with our ads,

Here I am targeting specific types of yoga. In the next ad set I might target specific yoga studio pages, or yoga mat companies and so on. Also, you can see above my little ‘speedometer’ is more in the middle now and the more specific I get the more defined my audience will be.

5. Pick your spending

Once you have a couple ads you feel good about pick your budget. Personally I would start off with a bigger number $150 -$250 for the day so you can test very quickly which ads are working and which ones are not.

Above is a VERY beginners intro into Facebook ads, once you get better at them you can start using more powerful tools like Custom Audiences, Power Editor, Sumome.com, and so on.

Beyond all of these things there is also good ole ‘door to door sales’

By door to door sales I mean Facebook, Craigslist, or whatever way you can sell. Do not be too proud to ask for money. That is what business is all about.

While at Canton Fair this year Will and I took a group of 25 people and we had a lot of people saying they were having trouble navigating the waters of Amazon, so I went about showing them how I would do it. First thing I did was post this ad on my Facebook.

ehhh… 9 likes, not really what I was hoping for, but I was not going to be detoured so I kept on keepin on. Next I went into our Jumpstart Facebook group and posted the same ad and got a few more sales and likes.

Next I went to reddit, because I had a feeling I could make some magic happen over there.

but to no avail, my fellow redditors were not picking up what I was putting down.

But that’s ok, I still had more tricks up my sleeve, I started to hit up friends directly in my network that I knew would be interested in my new product.

HOOK

LINE!!!!!!

AND SINKER!!!!! BOOM!

I ended up selling 40 for these bad boys, I negotiated with the supplier and got them for $7 a piece and sold them for between $20 and $30 each.

I used this super simple spread sheet I made in Excel to keep track of my sales:

Most of the product was sold in my home town so I was able to put them into my suitcase for free shipping. The rest cost me around $280 to ship. I used a bunch of different companies to get quotes and that was the best I could find on international freight.

All in all I probably spent about 12hrs of hard work on this, so if I spend about 24 hours a week on this I could probably get WAY more efficient. But worst worst case scenario I make an extra $1,025 on this a week, which is $4,100 a month and could be done on my time off on the weekends.

Thanks a lot for reading!

The post How to Make $1k per Month Importing Products from China appeared first on StartupBros.

Christian Rudder is a mathematician and cofounded OkCupid, that crazy dating site. Apparently he wasn’t good enough at math to work at a hedge fund so he started playing with data his company collected instead.

Good thing for us. His book, Dataclysm, is the most fascinating book I’ve read this year. It is simultaneously easy to read, intensely intelligent, and hilarious.

Dataclysm is not a business book by any means. Yet I found a lot of what he had to say more instructive for entrepreneurs than most business books.

I’ve put together a collection of some of my favorite lessons from the book.

“Just Be Yourself”

There’s no excuse for us to be dulled versions of ourselves anymore. Your fear of rejection for being weird should now finally be eclipsed by the fear of being unoriginal. It feels better, sure, we’ve always known that. Data has shown that it also gets us better results.

“In any group of women who are all equally good-looking, the number of messages they get is highly correlated to the variance: from the pageant queens to the most homely women to the people right in between, the individuals who get the most affection will be the polarizing ones. And the effect isn’t small—being highly polarizing will in fact get you about 70 percent more messages. That means variance allows you to effectively jump several “leagues” up in the dating pecking order—for example, a very low-rated woman (20th percentile) with high variance in her votes gets hit on as much as a typical woman in the 70th percentile.

…

Moreover, the men giving out those 1s and 2s are not themselves hitting on the women—people practically never contact someone they’ve rated poorly. It’s that having haters somehow induces everyone else to want you more. People not liking you somehow brings you more attention entirely on its own. And, yes, in his underground castle, Karl Rove smiles knowingly, petting and enormous toad.”

What’s the Aristotle quote?

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”

It turns out that criticism is a byproduct of doing something worthwhile (this is not to say that criticism signals that you are absolutely doing something right, though). Soylent has enjoyed a huge boost in popularity thanks to it’s controversial nature.

Peter Thiel talks about uniqueness of founders in Zero to One:

Perhaps the founder distribution is, however strangely, an inverted normal distribution. Both tails are extremely fat. Perhaps founders are complex combinations of, e.g., extreme insiders and extreme outsiders at the same time. Our ideological narratives tend to isolate and reinforce just one side. But maybe those narratives don’t work for founders. Maybe the truth about founders comes from both sides. 

He pictures this idea with this distribution:

Founders tend to sit at the extremes–both of them.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile has said that his ideas have spread further because of his detractors. People who fit the “perfect” mold (politicians, women with the “standard” type of beauty) are fragile—one misstep and they’re done. People who embrace their faults (artists, “funky” chicks) are antifragile—they actually benefit from breaking the rules.

Rudder continues:

“You can see a public implementation, as it were, of the OkCupid data in the rarefied world of modeling. The women are all professionally gorgeous—5 out of 5 stars, of course. But even at that high level it’s still about distinguishing yourself through imperfection. Cindy Crawford’s career took off after she stopped covering her mole. Linda Evangelista had the severe hair—you can’t say it made her prettier, but it did make her far more interesting. Kat Upton, at least according to the industry standard, has a few extra pounds.

…

So at the end of it, given that everyone on Earth has some kind of flaw, the real moral here is: be yourself and be brave about it. Certainly trying to fit in, just for its own sake, is counterproductive.”

Our biggest detractors at StartupBros have developed into some of our best relationships.

“An enemy who becomes a friend will stay a friend; a friend turned enemy will never become one.” – Nassim Taleb

A couple years ago I went to SXSW and saw Kevin Smith speak on a panel. He has leveraged the early success of his indie film Clerks into a massively successful media business.

His advice? Hold onto that piece of you that you most want to give up. That is the most valuable thing you own. If you give that up you give away a massive chunk of your potential net worth.

You Are Already Connected to the Resources You Need

One of the biggest excuses would-be entrepreneurs make is that they don’t have the resources they need to start their company. They don’t have any connections.

That’s true if you just look through your contact list. Chances are you’re not talking with a venture capitalist on a weekly basis. But maybe someone in your contact list is. If not, you can bet that someone in their contact list is.

“Forty years ago, Stanley Milgram was mailing out parcels (kits with instructions and postage-paid envelopes) to a hundred people in Omaha, working on his “six degrees of separation,” hoping maybe a few dozen adventuresome should would participate. His quaint methods—ingenious though they were—would give him the famous theory, but not quite its proof. In 2011, the unprecedented and overwhelming scale of Facebook allowed us to see that he was indeed right: 99.6 percent of the 721 million accounts at the time were connected by six steps or fewer.”

Now, this is fascinating but not particularly useful to us yet. Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, explains why three degrees of separation is useful:

“Academically the [six degrees of separation] theory is correct, but when it comes to meeting people who can help you professionally, three degrees of separation is what matters. Three degrees is the magic number because when you’re introduced to a second- or third-degree connection, at least one person personally knows the origin or target person. That’s how trust is preserved.

Suppose you have 40 connections, and assume that each friend has 35 other friends in turn, and each of those friends of friends has 45 unique friends of his own. If you do the math (40 × 35 × 45), that’s 63,000 people you can reach via an introduction. People’s extended networks are frequently larger than they realize, which is why an early tagline at LinkedIn was “Your network is bigger than you think.” So how do you actually reach those connections? Via an introduction from someone you know, who knows the person you want to reach.”

So, this:

This is one of the reasons I avoid networking in the traditional sense. Life in general is better when you build solid relationships. When it comes time for you to meet a particular person, you will inevitably know somebody who knows somebody.

Rudder expands on this idea:

“Today, network theory, working on data sets enabled by technology, shows how people can find new jobs, sort information from nonsense, and even make better movies. When they built their headquarters, Pixar famously put the only bathrooms in the building inside the central atrium to force interdepartmental small talk, knowing that innovations often come from the serendipitous collision of ideas. Theirs was an application of “the strength of weak ties,” a concept postulated in the 1970s with samples in the dozens, but since amplified on new, robust network data: it tells us that it’s the people you don’t know very will in your life who help ideas, especially new ones, spread.”

I saw a study recently that showed that most job are filled via networks… but not from strong ties. Most of the time it’s a friend who knows a guy that’s looking to hire someone like you.

The point?

Just like the data from the first point proved to us that doing what we inherently knew would lead to a better life—being ourselves—was also a better strategy for business, we see here that we should do what we know is right: be a good friend and maintain strong relationships even if they don’t have immediate business benefit.

Split Testing Dilemmas

“As Steve Jobs said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” What he didn’t say is that showing them, especially in tech, means playing a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey with several million people shouting advice.”

I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the billionaire founders of AOL said that the best new marketers are closer to mathematicians than what we would normally consider marketers. Why?

Because they can pinpoint what makes you 2% more likely to click something. That 2% increase in clicking can add up to millions of dollars for a large company. (And this is selling them short–we regularly make 20-30% conversion increases based on tests.)

We advocate this “split testing” for everything. We tested 20+ names to get to “StartupBros”, 12+ logos to get to the current one, and 6+ taglines to get to this current one. We used this kind of testing for the Self-Made U book cover. The whole “lean startup” methodology is essentially running tests to validate businesses.

This data is vitally important… but we it’s important to remember it’s place.

“…one of Google’s best designers, the person who in fact built their visual design team, Douglas Bowman, eventually quit because the process had become too microscopic. For one button, the company couldn’t decide between two shades of blue, so they launched all forty-one shades in between to see which performed better. Know thyself: It was etched into a footnote of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But like the rest of the best wisdom that time has to offer, it goes right out the window as soon as anyone turns on a computer.”

If all entrepreneurs made decisions based on what people wanted we wouldn’t get very far.

Henry Ford is famous for saying that we’d still have horse-drawn carriages if we only cared about customer feedback.

When you’ve got a vision for something that people can’t understand until it exists then often the best strategy is to ignore all data and build toward your vision no matter what. It’s not the “rational” decision, but it’s the only way the world can move forward.

What Actually Matters: Ask Better Questions

Another measurement trap that entrepreneurs fall into is confusing easy to measure metrics for metrics that matter.

Our life is defined more by the quality of questions we ask than the quality of answers we get. I can find a lot of reasonable answer to the question, “Why do I suck so much?” but I’m fairly certain paying attention to that question is a bad idea. The question, “What can I do to help people build their businesses today?” will get me much more interesting, productive places.

“People tend to run wild with those match questions, marking all kinds of stuff as “mandatory,” in essence putting a checklist to the world: I’m looking for a dog-loving, agnostic, nonsmoking liberal who’s never had kids—and who’s good in bed, of course. But very humble questions like Do you like scary movies? and Have you ever traveled alone to another country? have amazing predictive power. If you’re ever stumped on what to ask someone on a first date, try those. In about three-quarters of the long-term couples OkCupid has ever brought together, both people have answered them the same way, either both “yes” or both “no.” People tend to overemphasize the big, splashy things: faith, politics, and certainly looks, but they don’t matter nearly as much as everyone things. Sometimes they don’t matter at all.”

The little things are the big things.

Where you put your attention matters. Ask yourself the meta-question: “Is that a good question?”

The Importance of Branding

There is this refrain that we shouldn’t judge people. The thing is: it’s impossible to not judge people. The only people without preferences are dead. Instead, we should be aware of whether our initial judgments of people make sense.

Know that your brain is making shortcuts and you can protect yourself from terrible misjudgments.

“More attractive people get better jobs. They are also acquitted more often in court, and, failing that, they get lighter sentences. As Robert Sapolsky notes in the Wall Street Journal, two Duke neuropsychologists are working on why: “The medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain is involved in rating both the beauty of a face and the goodness of a behavior, and the level of activity in that region during one of those tasks predicts the level during the other. In other words, the brain…assumes that cheekbones tell you something about minds and hearts.” On a neurological level, the brain registers that ping of sexual attraction—Ooh, she’s hot—and everything else seems to be splash damage. “

Chinese corporations will hire tall Western white males to go to conventions to represent them not because they are smarter or know more about the business but because their appearance embodies something the firm wants to connect themselves with.

It’s not just the product you sell, it’s the frame you put around it.

A Tiffany’s box matters as much as the metal and rock inside.

I’m listening to Tony Robbin’s new audiobook, Money, and he spent an hour on the introductory chapter. It was freaking annoying… but I also know he knows what he’s doing. He’s building a framework he wants me to see the book through.

Oh, also, for my entire life I’ve looked at Tony Robbins as a joke. He’s that guy that people my parents’ age talked about for a while.

Then I learned that the founder of Salesforce said that he would never of built his company without Tony Robbins. Then I learned that Bill Clinton called him when he needed help and that Paul Tudor Jones pays him a million dollars a year for coaching.

Now I see Tony Robbins in a different framework. His connections to people I respect made me respect him.

What is a person’s first contact with your business?

What assumptions do they make about your business based on that first contact?

If you are selling design work from an ugly website you’re in trouble.

Autocomplete Your Mind

Our minds are being shaped by technology in ways that we are totally unaware of. The assumptions we make about the world are being shaped by what we’re exposed to.

The most aware among us are careful when we take in content but it’s near-impossible to appreciate how the options we are presented with change our minds.

Our choices are limited to what we consider choices. What if the best option is invisible?

““Why Do White People Have Thin Lips?,” is the title of a recent research paper that explores the dual purpose the feature serves: it reveals trends, of course, but because of Google’s ubiquity it has the power to set them as well. The paper suggests that autocomplete will eventually perpetuate the stereotypes it should only reflect, and it’s easy to see how: a user types an unrelated question, only to have other people’s prejudices jump in the way. For example, “Why do gay…couples look alike?” was not a stereotype I was aware of until just now. It’s the site acting not as Big Brother but as Older Brother, giving you mental cigarettes.”

The best entrepreneurs can see the options that are invisible to others (maybe because they haven’t invented them yet).

Sacrificing the Founder

If you win big and gain public interest you immediately become a potential sacrificial target for the mob. Ask yourself if you really want the attention.

Every person who we choose to worship as a society we will probably collectively attack as well. Consider Warren Buffett, universally admired and seen as someone who’s looking out for the best of the country. He’s giving away all his money and he’s on a campaign to get the world’s billionaire’s to do the same. Yet in the late 1990’ he was losing money and was publicly ridiculed. He was treated with disdain.

Shia Lebeouf got millions of dollars for acting with invisible robots and then put a paper bag over his head.

This happens on a smaller scale as well. Trolls have become famous for shitting on anybody with a viewpoint online.

Peter Thiel dedicates an entire chapter in Zero to One to this. The point is, if you put yourself in a position to be celebrated, don’t be surprised when the cheers turn to jeers. Thiel ties this tendency to our past using sociologist Rene Gerard’s theory of the necessity for sacrifice. Apparently it serves some need we have to feel okay about conflicts in the world. From Blake Master’s notes on Thiel’s Stanford course:

Where warring civilizations didn’t just collapse entirely, the most common resolution involved polarizing and channeling all the hostility into one particular person. Depending on the culture, witches were burned or people had their hearts cut out. The details differed. But the dynamic—a crazed community rallying around the sacrificial scapegoat—was the same. 

Rudder follows a similar line of thought when reflecting on a few people getting torn apart for controversial tweets.

“The stoning metaphor comes up again and again when you read the commentary on episodes like these. It’s no coincidence that it’s the death penalty of choice for the ancient religions: there is no single executioner; the community carries out the punishment. No one can say who struck the fatal blow, because everyone did together. For a burgeoning tribe, fighting to preserve itself and its god in a hostile world, what better prescription could there be? There is strength in collective guilt, and guilt is diffused in the sharing. Extirpate the Other and make yourselves whole again.”

When you build something worthwhile or say something that hits a nerve you will be attacked.

Your friends will envy your success and find reasons to resent you. Your audience will be offended that you changed your mind. People who you never know will despise you.

And, if you weather the storm, maybe they’ll love you again.

Attention-Entrepreneurs & Pseudo-Celebrity Us

Rudder goes on to describe the “obverse edge” of the “empowerment” the Internet has provided us.

You can build your company’s reputation easier than ever before—it can also be destroyed faster. This is actually a good thing in my view because it incentivizes us to have integrity. Still, it can be dangerous.

“Writing in the Boston Globe, Jesse Singal was discussing the motivations of traditional person-to-person gossip but might’ve easily been talking about Twitter when he said, “To the extent people do have an agenda in spreading rumors it’s directed more at the people they’re spreading them to, rather than the subject of the rumor.” The Internet gives people a wider audience than ever before.

The second change is that the Internet has also made everyone a public figure. High-status individuals were once chieftains, and then celebrities and presidents, but, the leveling scythe of technology shows its obverse edge. If anyone can become an overnight celebrity, anyone can become an overnight leper. One of my least favorite Internet-evangelist talking points is about technology “empowering” people—inevitably the most empowered of all is the speaker and his investors. But here we find some truth in the cliché—social media empowers you to the extent that it makes you worth tearing down. At the same time, it gives everyone else the tools to do it. Demon Rumor now has a million mouths.”

Politicians and celebrities spend a lot of energy understanding how to manage their branding. They put significant resources into understanding how to use the media to their advantage.

Now we are all responsible for this to some degree and we don’t have the team around us to support us.

Knowing the dangers of building our public images we can better appreciate how we do so and, perhaps, if it’s the best move.

How to Measure a Movement

Entrepreneurs need to understand the momentum of movements surrounding their businesses. If your business is capitalizing on the fervor of organic potato enthusiasts, you better have a way to measure whether that fervor will last. Here is one indicator to help:

“Using Western movements as his test subjects, MIT’s Peter Gloor has developed software to track the ebb and flow of sentiment in a network of protestors. He calls it Condor, because that’s what projects like this always seem to be called: Condor, spirit-bird of government grants. In any event, the software first establishes a group’s central personalities by looking at its social graph—much like we portrayed a marriage as edges and nodes before, the software lays out the network, then algorithmically determines its most important dots. Next, it looks at what those dots are saying. Condor has found that while the foci of a movement are positive in their word choice, the movement is vibrant. But negative words like “hate,” “not,” “lame,” and “never” signal decline, and when, as The Economist put it, “complaints about idiots in one’s own movement or such infelicities as the theft of beer by a fellow demonstrator” begin to appear, the movement is all but over. Oh, Occupy!”

Nothing keeps people excited forever. This is one way to measure the whether excitement is building or waning for a particular movement.

Old School Branding

As marketers, we like to think they’re cutting edge. In some ways we can be. Knowing how to use the newest technologies can certainly give us an edge.

When it comes to basics, though, little has changed in thousands of years.

“Archaeologists have unearthed branded oils and wine in desert tombs seals five thousand years ago. One label found in Egypt reads “finest oil of Tjehenu” beneath the royal emblem and a pictograph of a golden oil press. Compare that to the “choicest hops, rice, and best barley” beneath the “King of Beers” on a can of Budweiser—as far as branding has come, in many ways it will probably always be a Bronze Age science, because the emotions it plays to are eternal.”

Sometimes it’s best to stick with the basics.

It’s Hard to Focus on What Actually Matter

Followers on Twitter are more unequally distributed than wealth. That’s kind of wild.

Granted, not all followers are made the same. If you’re selling $10,000 consulting packages you don’t need as much attention to make a good living as a band selling 99 cent songs. Still, the disparity is shocking.

“Anyone hoping to build their brand on the service in the mainstream way—to become the one for the many—should realize that Twitter is very much the world of the One Percent. Its most precious resource, followers, is distributed far more unequally than wealth. The top 1 percent of all accounts has 72 percent of the followers. The top 0.1 percent has just over half. It is much, much harder to get to a million followers than it is to make a million dollars. There were 300,890 people who reported over $1 million in income to the IRS in 2011. Right now there are 2,643 Twitter accounts with 1 million followers, worldwide. Perhaps half are in the United States. Being an American with 1 million Twitter followers is roughly equivalent to being a billionaire. {The 2014 Forbes Billionaires list has 1,645 members.}”

Some things aren’t worth fighting for—and I would put Twitter followers in that category.

Emails from people who want to hear more from you, though? Those I fight for.

Why? We launched our first product to our email list, about 20,000 people at the time. The first week we brought in ~$100,000.

We had about the same amount of Twitter followers. What was the response from them? I don’t know, but it didn’t move the dial.

The point is this: some things are worth measuring and some things aren’t—and people spend a lot of money to distract you from the things that are worth it.

Rudder goes on to describe the problem:

“So this is what the self-as-brand can lead to: chasing empty metrics. I know when I tweet, I’m as interested in who shares it, and how quickly, as I am in whatever I was originally trying to communicate. The few times I’ve posted to Facebook I’ve sat there and refreshed the page to catch the new comments, as though I’d never been on the Internet before. Jenna Wortham from the Times describes this mentality well: “We, the users, the producers, the consumers—all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation—are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.” I can tell you from the inside: companies design their products to jam that loop open. OkCupid shows you little counts of your messages, your visitors, your possibilities. We know that those numbers keep our users interested, especially when they go up. Without little bits of excitement, a webpage or an app seems dead and people drift off. The broad term for this is “user engagement,” how many people check in every week, every day, every hour. It’s basically how fast they are running in the hamster wheel that’s been set down for them there in cedar filings, and it’s one of the most obsessed-over measures in the industry. Sites show you counts, totals, badges, because they know you’ll come back to see them tick up. Then they can put your increased engagement on a slide to impress their investors.”

Facebook spends billions of dollars creating a product that is as addictive as possible. It’s engineered to keep you coming back—just like fast food.

If you want to know more about how this happens, how to avoid getting hooked, and, most productively, how to create these types of habits in other people, check out Hooked.

Data & Humans

Remember the Google designer who quit because he didn’t like how many tests were being run?

Did he maybe overreact? It’s easy to get worried that machines are taking over or that our ability to measure everything will turn us into robots.

This is the same kind of fear the Luddites had. It makes sense it’s hard to remember all the good that technological progress has done for you when you’ve been replaced by a machine. The trick is to work with machines instead of competing against them.

It also seems that no matter how much pressure we are under to maintain the perfect “personal brand” we can’t resist being ridiculous—thank god!

“More recently, Mountain Dew ran a “Dub the Dew” contest, trying to ride the “crowdsourcing” wave to cool new soda name and thinking maybe, if everything went just right and the metrics showed enough traction to get buy-in from the right influencers, they’d earn some brand ambassadors in the blogosphere. Reddit and 4chan got ahold of it, and “Hitler did nothing wrong” led the voting for a while, until at the last minute “Diabeetus” swooped in and the people’s voice was heard: Dub yourself, motherfucker.

The Internet can be a deranged place, but it’s that potential for the unexpected, even the insane, that so often redeems it. I can’t imagine anything worse for You! The Brand! than upvoting Hitler. Plus, what a waste of time, because obviously Mountain Dew isn’t going to print a single unflattering word in the style of its precious and distinctive marks. I find comfort in the silliness, in the frivolity, even in the stupidity. Trolling a soda is something no formula would ever recommend. It’s no industry best practice. And it’s evidence that as much as corporatism might invade our newsfeed, our photo streams, our walls, and even, as some would hope, our very sounds, a small part of us is still beyond reach. That’s what I always want to remember: it’s not numbers that will deny us our humanity; it’s the calculated decision to stop being human.”

The more mechanical the world becomes the more valuable our humanness will be. Our abilities to connect to others, to envision a better future, or to make decisions using our new wealth of data are what will matter in the future.

Opportunities in Finding Uses for All this Ridiculous Data

The best books have footnotes that are as interesting as the body of the book.

Let’s use one footnote to explore the uses one particularly interesting technological development. First, the footnote:

*From Nature’s discussion of the [Xbox One]: “It is fitted with a camera that can monitor the heart rate of people sitting in the same room. The sensor is primarily designed for exercise games, allowing players to monitor heart changes during physical activity, but, in principle, the same type of system could monitor and pass on details of physiological responses to TV advertisements, horror movies or even…political broadcasts.”

What!? Your first reaction might be outrage at the invasiveness of this technology. You might be pissed that now the NSA will be watching your heart beat—that now you’re internal bodily functions aren’t even private!

Okay, yeah, it’s an outrage. You have a right to be outraged.

There are a ton of technologies like this being developed that nobody knows how to use productively. If you can figure out how to better use them you win. Peter Thiel says the same about virtual reality—the technology is great, it has a ton of promise, but nobody has figured out how to capitalize on it yet.

The obvious uses for the new Xbox One sensor are mentioned in the above footnote. If you can figure out a new way to design advertisements using this information you will make a bunch of money. If you can help design a more perfect political speech you’ll do well too.

Maybe you can make a meditation app that helps people reach peak states faster by giving them feedback on their heartbeats. Maybe you can make some intimate game for couples. I don’t know—and that’s the point.

We’ve got a ton of data and nobody knows how to use it.

That’s a problem worth working on.

The post 13 Surprising Lessons for Entrepreneurs from New Big Data: Digging Into Dataclysm appeared first on StartupBros.

If you want success on Amazon, you need to understand how Amazon’s Search Algorithm works – right?

Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised…

Most sellers have no idea how Amazon ranks and delivers search results; let alone how (easily) exploitable it can be!

Are you ready for a shocking fact?

THREE TIMES as many buyers search for products to buy on Amazon, rather than Google.

Think about it…

Where do you go when you need to know if a product is worth buying?

What about when you want the best deal on anything from a book to a refrigerator?

Amazon…

Yet, you probably don’t pay attention to it’s search engine – much less consider it as a marketing channel worth optimizing for. Even most ‘Amazon Marketers’ are still spending their days trying to optimize their Amazon Listings for Google…

But, what if you knew how to rank in Amazon instead?

You’d have THREE TIMES more ready-to-buy customers than you’d EVER get in Google – and you’d do it in a fraction of the time!

You’re about to read The Ultimate Guide to Ranking Your Products on Amazon…

But before we get into the meat of the matter, here are some basics you should know…

Introducing A9: Amazon’s Product Search Algorithm

A9 is the name of Amazon’s product search algorithm. Since this is a guide about ranking products in Amazon, it makes sense to start at the source. So, this is A9’s official statement for how they calculate search results.

Our work starts long before a customer types a query.  We’ve been analyzing data, observing past traffic patterns, and indexing the text describing every product in our catalog before the customer has even decided to search.

As we can see here, much of the work is done before the customer even touches the keyboard. Once the customer actually hits “Enter” to perform a search, the A9 algorithm delivers results through a two-step process:

Amazon

It’s a pretty simple process at its core:

1. First, they pull the relevant results from their massive “catalog” of product listings.
2. Then, they sort those results into an order that is “most relevant” to the user.

Now, some of you SEOs out there might be thinking, “Wait a second… Isn’t relevancy Google’s turf? I thought Amazon only cared about conversions! What’s all this focus on relevance doing here?”

The answer is simple: Relevance doesn’t mean the same thing to Amazon that it does to Google. Read this statement from A9 carefully to see if you can catch the difference:

Amazon

See that?

• Google says, “What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”
• Amazon says, “What products is the searcher most likely to buy?”

The difference between those two questions is the difference between how Amazon measures relevancy compared to Google.

On the whole, ranking in Amazon is more straightforward than Google because you’re essentially cutting the work in half. This is because there’s no such thing as off-page SEO for Amazon; they only use internal factors to determine how a product ranks. Backlinks, social media, domain authority… These are all things you don’t need to worry about on Amazon.

That being said, there are a few simple rules you must always remember about Amazon. These 3 rules are critically important to making the most of this guide, so make sure you read them twice:

1. Amazon’s top goal in everything they do is always maximize Revenue Per Customer (RPC)
2. Amazon tracks every action that a customer takes on Amazon, right down to where their mouse hovers on the page
3. The A9 algorithm exists to connect the data tracked in #2 to the goal stated in #1

So far, so good?

Core Pillars of the A9 Algorithm

From A9’s website and from the information that Amazon makes available to us through their Seller Central (login required), we can group Amazon’s ranking factors into three equally important categories:

Conversion Rate* – These are factors that Amazon has found have a statistically relevant effect on conversion rates. Examples of conversion rate factors include customer reviews, quality of images and pricing.

Relevancy – Remember the first step in the A9 algorithm? They gather the results, and then they decide how to list them. Relevancy factors tell A9 when to consider your product page for a given search term. Relevancy factors include your title and product description.

Customer Satisfaction & Retention – How do you make the most money from a single customer? Make them so happy that they keep coming back. Amazon knows that the secret to max RPC lies in customer retention. It’s a lot harder to get someone to spend $100 once than $10 ten times. Customer Retention factors include seller feedback and Order Defect Rate.

*Note that Amazon uses both predicted and real conversion rates for product rankings. For example, if your product is priced higher than other similar products, Amazon will predict a lower conversion rate for your listing and use that rate until real data corrects it.

Okay! We’re finally ready to start talking about how to rank product listings in Amazon. What you’ll find below are 25 Amazon ranking factors that either Amazon themselves or independent marketers have confirmed the A9 algorithm to use.

Top 25 Amazon Ranking Factors

Amazon isn’t like Google where they go to great lengths to hide the factors that they use in their algorithm. Inside Amazon’s Seller Central, they’ll blatantly tell you several of their top ranking factors. You can also visit the official Amazon Seller Support Blog for some great insights. And here’s the UK Seller Support Blog if you’re interested.

Conversion Rate Factors

Sales Rank

After just a couple searches on Amazon, it should be pretty obvious that number of sales compared to other similar products – otherwise known as Sales Rank – is one of the most important rankings factors.

Even now Amazon is testing a new feature in their search results where they automatically append a #1 Best-Seller banner (see below) to the best-selling product in category-specific searches, like this one for “Strollers”:

It’s simple really…

More sales mean higher rankings – and higher rankings mean more sales!

It sounds like a vicious cycle, but luckily there are still many ways for new sellers to compete.

Customer Reviews

It probably doesn’t need to be said that the number and positive-ness of your customer reviews is one of the most important ranking factors in Amazon’s A9 algorithm.

This example product search for the keyword “vacuum” illustrates some interesting points about how Amazon weights review volume vs. review quality:

Let’s dissect this search results page:

1. The BISSEL vacuum (green) has the most reviews AND the highest review rating. It’s also the best-seller in its category, so it ranks at the top.
2. The second-ranked Dirt Devil (red) has more customer reviews, but a lower review rating. It’s also a best-seller, so it ranks second.
3. The third-ranked Shark Navigator (blue) has less customer reviews, but a higher rating than #2, and it’s also a best-seller, so it ranks #3.
4. The Hoover WindTunnel at #4 has substantially more customer reviews than any of the top three listings, but it’s not as highly rated as #1 and #3, and it’s not a best-seller, so it ranks #4.

Answered Questions

This is one of those metrics that Amazon doesn’t specifically state they track. But, it’s data they have access to and Q&A’s are listed close to the top of the product page, which typically means it’s important for conversions.

Furthermore, there products like this (me-approved) Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush, which ranks #1 for the keyword “electric toothbrush” over other equally rated best-sellers because it has almost twice as many customer Q&As than any other listing in the category:

Image Size & Quality

Amazon continues to tighten their image size and quality policies for product listings. Right now, some categories won’t even display results that don’t have at least one image that is 1000×1000 pixels or larger. These are called “suppressed listings”.

The 1000×1000 pixel image size allows Amazon to offer customers their Hover-to-Zoom feature, shown below, which they’ve found has a dramatic effect on conversion rates.

Awful artistry aside, you can see that as my cursor hovers over the image, Amazon automatically displays a zoomed-in version in the product information pane.

Notice that image quantity is not what’s important here. This Tippmann paintball gun is the #1 product for the keyword “paintball guns”, but it only has one image. Since the image is big enough and informative enough to give the customer all the info they need, that’s all it takes to make Amazon happy.

That means it’s better to have one large, high quality image than to have multiple normal-sized images. Not to say that multiple images won’t convert better than one image, just that the benefits quickly taper off after the first.

Price

Remember earlier when we talked about how Amazon’s A9 product search algorithm uses both predicted and real conversion rates to determine which products to show in their search results?

One of the biggest factors Amazon uses to determine predicted conversion rate is pricing – they know that customers tend to seek the best deals. More importantly, Amazon uses pricing as a major factor in picking which product to show in the buy box, which is the part of the page containing the Add to Cart button (we’ll talk more about that later).

Notice here that the top-ranking product for the search term “juicer” has less customer reviews, lower customer reviews and lower Sales Rank than every other listing in the top 4. It still shows #1 because it’s got decent ratings and is priced waaaaay below the category average.

Note that customer reviews are still vital here. And pricing isn’t the only reason that the Black & Decker Juicer ranks #1…

Parent-Child Products

Many sellers create multiple listings for variations of the same product. This is suboptimal. It’s much better to use Amazon’s built-in parent-child product functionality to direct all customers to a single product page.

This has several benefits:

• It maximizes your customer reviews, since Amazon will combine your similar products into a single primary product page
• It makes the most sense from a UX standpoint; keeping customers on the same page makes it more likely they’ll buy your product
• Amazon has shown a preference for ranking products with multiple options in their listing

Let’s look at that top-ranking Black & Decker Juicer again:

If you scroll back up the page, you’ll see that this juicer is the only one in the top 4 results to utilize parent-child product connections. When you enable the parent-child relationship, it shows as an extra option in Amazon’s search results…

This not only increases click-through rates, we can see here that it also helps you rank above the competition!

Time on Page & Bounce Rate

Remember, Amazon can measure every way a customer interacts with their website, so it’s easy for them to track detailed time on page and bounce rate stats.

Here’s exactly what these similar-but-different metrics mean on Amazon:

Time on Page: Amazon believes that the amount of time a customer spends on your listing page is a good measure of how interested they are in your product. A customer who reads your full product description, looks through reviews and investigates the Q&A’s is much more likely to buy than the one that spends a couple seconds skimming the features.

Bounce Rate: A “bounce” is when a customer performs a search, visits your page, and then either goes back to the search results or clicks on a Related Product offer. Keep in mind that Amazon has a much more exact measurement of bounce rate than Google, again, because all user activity happens within their platform.

Product Listing Completeness

Finally, the last conversion metric to optimize for is listing completeness. The individual sections of the product listing mostly have to do with relevancy, as you’ll learn below, but the actual completeness of the listing has an effect on conversion rate.

As a general rule, the more complete you make your listing, the better. Do your best to fill in every single field in the listing setup page to maximize your chances of appearing at the top of product search results.

Relevancy Factors

Title

Optimizing your product title for Amazon is an excellent example of the way that optimizing for Amazon differs from optimizing for Google.

In Google, you want a concise, engaging title with your keyword close to the beginning.

In Amazon, all you care about is keywords. You want to cram as many keywords into about 80 characters as you possibly can.

In fact, you can actually go beyond 80 characters if you want, and it’s better to have too many keywords than too few. I’ve seen top-listed products with titles that make no sense and have over 200 characters, like this top-rated “Nexus charger”:

It should be noted that Amazon is starting to crack down and standardize Product Titles – keep an eye out for this moving forward…

Features / Bullet Points

The other big reason that particular Nexus charger ranks so highly is because it has lots of keyword rich, informative features. Features, which are displayed as bullet points right below the pricing and product options, are an absolute must.

Just like with images, Features are so important that Amazon no longer allows products without bullet points to be featured in the buy box, and not having them is a serious road-block to good Amazon rankings.

Another good example of proper Feature usage is this Asus computer monitor, which ranks #1 for “computer screen”:

Notice how the bullet-points are both extremely detailed and include a ton of keywords? At the same time, they’re easily readable, which means they won’t confuse customers and risk hurting conversions.

Product Description

Your product description is basically where you expand on your Features. It’s also the part of the page you have the most control over. If there’s anywhereto really put a lot of effort into engagement, it’s in the product description.

That being said, keep in mind that unlike with Google there is no benefit to having a keyword appear multiple times on the product page; if it’s anywhere in your product listing at least once, you will be relevant to rank for it.

If you want to see a truly appetizing product description, check out the one for this DeLhongi Espresso Maker – the #1 ranked listing for the term “espresso maker”.

There’s nothing advanced about this product listing – they just covered all the bases. It’s thorough, inviting, easy to skim, includes plenty of images, captions, and they even included extra tech. specs that aren’t listed in the normal Specifications section (which we’ll talk more about below).

Brand & Manufacturer Part #

Remember earlier when we looked at the top results for the keyword “Juicer”? You can refresh your memory below:

Something that every single one of the top listings do right in that category is list the brand and manufacturer number first in the product title. In fact, if you do the search yourself it’s not until the 15^th result that Amazon shows us a product listing without the brand and manufacturer number included in the title.

You always, always, always want to include a brand in your title because it enables your product for search filters AND allows you to capture customers searching for a specific brand. And if you’re in a niche where customers are using the manufacturer number to search for products, you definitely want to include that keyword in your title.

Specifications

These are different than Features – this is the part of the page where you actually list the technical and physical details of your product. This includes size, shipping weight, color, publication date (if you’re doing books), tech. specs and more. You can see this top-ranked product for the “home theater system” search term using their product specifications to the max:

Category & Sub-Category

You probably didn’t realize this, but once a customer has entered into a category – every other search they perform on Amazon will, by default, be limited to that category.

Take a look at the example below:

You can see here that a simple search for “dog food” actually takes us three categories deep into Amazon’s product catalog, indicated by the red lines in the image above. The blue box shows that we’ll stay in the Dog Food category until we either return to the home page or manually tell Amazon to show us All Departments.

When setting up your product listing, make sure you put your product in the most relevant, narrow category possible.

Search terms

In addition to categories, you can also specify search terms that you want associated with your product.

Even though Amazon lists five different 50-character search term fields, you’re better off thinking about it as one big 250 character text box in which you can enter every possible search term you can think of for your product.

This is somewhat complicated to explain, and I can’t do a better job than Nathan Grimm has already done over at Moz (it’s about 1/3 of the way through this article), so just head over there if you want to learn more about this specific factor.

Source Keyword

This is one of the biggest hidden ways that Amazon determines a listing’s relevance to a given product search. This is also yet another example of how Amazon tracks every single minutia of a customer’s activity on their website.  Take a look at this URL that links to a listing for a Black & Decker electric drill, and see if you can tell me what search term I used to find it:

You can see the source keyword right at the end of the URL – &keywords=electric+drill – that tells Amazon that the source keyword was “electric drill”.

Therefore, if I were to buy this drill, Amazon would know that this listing is highly relevant for the term “electric drill”. The next time a customer searches for that term, this listing would be more likely to show at the top.

Here’s a neat little Amazon ranking hack you can do to take advantage of this factor:

1. Construct a URL for your product listing using the [&keyword=your+keyword] query (append the code inside the brackets to your product URL).
2. Use a link shortening service like bit.ly to create a shareable link to that URL.
3. Drive traffic to the shortened link.

Now anytime you make a sale from one of these shortened keyword links, you’re basically tricking Amazon into thinking that these visitors performed a product search for your target keyword.

Customer Satisfaction & Retention Factors

Negative Seller Feedback

Why do I list negative seller feedback specifically, as opposed to just seller feedback in general?

Interestingly, Amazon actually claims not to track positive seller feedback; at least, not for the sake of their product search algorithm.

Instead they track negative seller feedback rates, or frequency. It doesn’t matter how bad the feedback is – all negative feedback is the same, and it all counts against you equally in terms of search result rankings.

To be clear – as a third-party seller attempting to win the buy box (shown below) you want your seller feedback as high as possible. However, negative feedback rate is the only metric with a known effect on product search results.

Order Processing Speed

Amazon knows that one of the best ways to make customers happy is with fast and accurate shipping. Therefore, a vendor or seller who has shown consistent and efficient order processing is more likely to rank higher than a vendor who’s had complaints of inaccurate or slow shipping.

In-Stock Rate

Customers hate it when they want a product but can’t have it. One of the most common ways this problem occurs is when an item is out of stock, or when a seller doesn’t keep proper track of their inventory.

Whether you’re a first-party vendor or a third-party seller, keeping up your inventory is vital to maintain top rankings, both in A9’s product search results and in your product’s buy box.

Two of the big customer satisfaction metrics are Percentage of Orders Refunded and Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation. In both cases, Amazon has found that vendors/sellers with low in-stock rates tend have higher refunds and cancellations, which of course is bad for customer retention.

Perfect Order Percentage (POP)

POP is a measurement of how many orders go perfectly smoothly from the time that a customer clicks “Add to Cart” to the product arriving at their home.

If you have a high Perfect Order Percentage, that means you have a high in-stock rate, accurate product listings and prompt shipping. That’s exactly what Amazon wants for each and every one of their customers, so they’ll naturally rank high-POP sellers above lower-POP ones.

Order Defect Rate (ODR)

ODR is basically the opposite metric of POP.

Every time a customer makes a claim with an order, that’s considered an order defect. Here are some of the most ways an order can defect:

• Negative buyer feedback
• A-to-Z Guarantee claim
• Any kind of shipment problem
• Credit card chargeback

Each of those examples by itself would count towards your Order Defect Rate, which is the number of order defects compared to the total number of orders fulfilled over a given period of time. Amazon says that all sellers should aim for an ODR under 1%.

Important! Buyer-removed negative feedback does not count towards your ODR. So, it really pays to address each and every one of your customers’ issues.

Exit Rate

How often does a customer view your listing and then exit Amazon.com? That’s your exit rate.

If your page has an above average exit rate, Amazon takes that as a sign that you have a low-quality listing. Usually a high exit rate is because your product has a low in-stock rate, or because your listing isn’t fully complete.

Packaging Options

This is a metric that I didn’t used to think Amazon measured, but recently I’ve been seeing stuff like this in product search results:

Clearly packaging options are something that Amazon has found their customers care about. But, even if it weren’t, it’s a great way to separate your listing from other similar products (and rank higher through an increased conversion rate).

An easy way to do this – seen in the example above – is to use Fulfillment by Amazon to offer Frustration Free Packaging. This is where Amazon uses less packaging and fully recyclable materials without sacrificing product protection. You can read more about it here.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

This post is getting dangerously close to 4,000 words, so I know that a lot of you probably won’t read it all.

That’s okay – I’ll forgive you with time

Key takeaways from The Ultimate Guide to Ranking Products on Amazon:

• Maximum RPC (Revenue Per Customer) is Amazon’s top goal.
• Amazon’s A9 algorithm uses conversion rate, relevance and customer satisfaction to rank products.
• Fill out as much of your product listing page as possible, using as many keywords as possible.
• Use FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) to automate customer satisfaction.
• Find ways to encourage customer reviews, and do everything you can to keep your customers happy.
• Above all: More sales = higher rankings = more sales

There you have it! You now know exactly what metrics Amazon is looking at to rank listings in their industry-leading product search engine. All that’s left is for you to go out there and capitalize on your superior knowledge!

In the meantime, do you have any additional questions about ranking products on Amazon? Do you need me to clarify something I didn’t explain well enough?

Let me know in the comments below, I’ll be responding to every last one

The post How to Rank Your Products on Amazon – The Ultimate Guide appeared first on StartupBros.

You’re a smart entrepreneur – that’s why you’re here, right?

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve done our best to re-design the StartupBros website. Fortunately, it’s been a relatively smooth process…

But now that it’s coming time to pull the trigger, I’m a little nervous.

We’ll be sending the design off for development tomorrow night, and I want to make sure we’ve thought of EVERYTHING before then…

So I was hoping to get your opinion on it!

Check out the ‘before & after’ screenshots below, and let me know what you think (either via email or the comments below).

We’ll be giving away $100 Amazon Gift Cards for the best ideas – just in time for the holidays

Logo

Old (Before)

New (After)

I’m not sure if we’re going to stick with this new logo (I’d love to hear your thoughts), but it gives you an idea of the design in general.

Home Page

Old (Before)

New (After)

This is one of the most drastic changes on the site. A few things to note -

• We’re toying around with putting different stats on the front page (would you like this? what are your thoughts?)
• Increased focus on webinars (since you guys love them so much!)
• No longer an endless stream on blog posts
• Shows the ‘Latest Posts’ by default, but you can navigate different categories using the drop down (I think this is very cool)

If you click into a blog post category (Importing, Ecommerce, Testing & Optimization, etc), you’ll be taken to this page -

And if you click on a blog post wanting to read an article, you’ll go to -

Single Blog Post/Article Page

Old (Before)

New (After)

Our goal with this page was to make the text easier to read, plain and simple.

One cool feature -

If you scroll down the page while reading the blog post, the top Author/Social info bar will float down the screen with you.

It will look like this -

I think that’s pretty cool too

About Page

Old (Before)

New (After)

We’ll fill the empty space in this either with an ‘About Us’ Video or Text intro.

Resources Page

Old (Before)

New (After)

Our resources page has been much more popular than we expected. So we decided to spend some time building it out…

As you can see, the new design will send users to categories first (Hosting, Testing, Ecommerce, Books, etc)

From there, you’ll see this page for each individual resource category -

As you can see – we’re getting a little bit more organized over here!

Contact Page

Old (Before)

New (After)

Nice and simple…

 Tell me what you think, get a $100 Amazon Gift Card

Don’t exit yet – I need your help!

Please comment below and let me know what you think of this new website design…

Did we nail it? Or do you have an idea we completely missed?

Let me know, and if we end up using your idea – I’ll give you a $100 Amazon Gift Card!

We’ll announce who won $100 when we launch the new StartupBros site (Jan 2015)…

Talk to you soon!

The post We Need Your Help! What Would You Change About Our New Website Design? appeared first on StartupBros.

[Note: This is a guest post from Hannah Corbett.]

The formal definition of an entrepreneur is, “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.” It’s a fairly standard definition, and is accepted and used by most everyone.

But, with a huge surge in entrepreneurship and business start-ups in the past few years (4.9 million SMEs counted in the UK last year alone), it’s possible that having just a single one-size-fits-all definition is no longer enough. It would be wrong to make any kind of sweeping generalization about all business owners, and so it seems wrong to file them all under the same label.

This seems to have become an increasingly popular opinion, and those in the start-up world seem to have taken it upon themselves to dub themselves and their peers more accurately. As a result, new words describing more specific types of entrepreneur have been slowly creeping into use.

Below is a small glossary of some of the more commonly encountered of these terms:

“Antipreneur”

An antipreneur is the opposite of an entrepreneur. Traditionally, an entrepreneur is someone who tries to build a business to be as large and successful as possible – an antipreneur is completely against large corporations and market-dominating companies.

Antipreneurs try to run their businesses outside of the realms of traditional capitalism. They support the notions of local and independent businesses, sustainable enterprises and a healthy work/home life balance. Antipreneurs often favor non-traditional marketing and advertising methods, and can be closely associated with the socialpreneur, localpreneur and ecopreneur.

“Comfortpreneur”

A comfortpreneur is one who does not strive to change, improve or adapt their business strategies and structures: they are comfortable in their current habits and processes.

Comfortpreneurs often use almost exclusively old hat or outdated techniques and methods to run their businesses – they refuse to modernize or incorporate new technologies in day to day operations. This reluctance can be due to fear or uncertainty of change, or plain old fashioned stubbornness. Comfortpreneurs are most frequently of an older age generation.

“E-preneur”

The word e-preneur comes from the word e-commerce. E-preneurs run their businesses entirely on the internet. An e-preneur can include any business owner from those with extensive online stores and huge websites, to those trading through an online shopping platform (such as eBay).

E-preneurs rarely have official, physical business premises, but instead, tend to operate from home offices. They may rent warehouse or storage premises for stock. E-preneurs are quite often also solopreneurs, too.

It’s worth noting that a shop owner who also sold goods online would not class as an e-preneur, even if the majority of revenue came from the online store. E-preneurs must make their money solely through e-commerce.

“Ecopreneur”

An ecopreneur is one whose business specializes in environmentally friendly products or services, and/or who business’s activities are carried out with the utmost respect and awareness for the environment. Making sure their business leaves as little mark as possible on nature is at the heart of an ecopreneur’s business values.

Ecopreneurs are often associated with socialpreneurs, and even antipreneurs at times, as their business ethic tends to steer clear of traditional capitalist notions, and align more with social, local and sustainable business sentiments.

“Fauxpreneur”

The word fauxpreneur can apply to a number of situations. It can be used to describe someone who:

• Falsely claims to be an entrepreneur – for example someone who does not run a business as they say they do, or to the extent they say they do. They make take credit for more than is true, or perhaps for a partner’s work.
• Does not build a company – but instead buildings something else through which they make money, such as an idea or product which they then sell to a company.
• Lacks industry understanding – often having a very surface level knowledge of the industry they operate in, rather than a complex and in depth understanding.

There are a number of other types of preneurs that can be considered fauxpreneurs, most notably intrapreneurs and minipreneurs.

“Freepreneur”

A freepreneur is someone who only uses free or very low cost methods of setting up and running a business. Freepreneurs source all the materials and resources they need to set up and launch their businesses without investing any of their own money, or by investing a relatively small amount.  They may secure monetary funding from third party and external sources, but spend as little of their own money as possible.

“Infopreneur”

Infopreneurs use information, as opposed to goods or services, to earn their main source of income. Infopreneurs have existed for many years, but in the modern day, it is most commonly online information with which they are concerned. Some infopreneurs are experts in a given market and sell information stemming from their own knowledge, work and experiences, and other infopreneurs may work on a client basis, earning money for commissions.

“Intrapreneur”

An intrapreneur is an entrepreneurially-minded person who works within a larger company or organization. Intrapreneurs embody the same business-mindedness, innovation and creativity that entrepreneurs do, often starting their own ventures, campaigns and ideas without prompting or support.

Sometimes, they are not strictly considered to be entrepreneurs, as they do not technically run their own business, but rather work within someone else’s (see fauxpreneur).

“Localpreneur”

A localpreneur is someone who owns a small business situated within a local community. Often the business’s values and ethics revolve around this community and the ‘local is best’ notion.

Localpreneurs are commonly be associated with socialpreneurs and antipreneurs in their juxtaposition-of-sorts of traditional entrepreneurship.

“Megapreneur”

Also referred to a superpreneur, a megapreneur is essentially a celebrity or superstar of the entrepreneurial world. Megapreneurs are usually owners of businesses which started as small startups, but have grown into large companies – even global companies – usually through pure innovation and creativity.

Megapreneurs are highly respected, and even somewhat idolized, in the start up world, and their advice can be considered as good as law. Sir Richard Branson is an example of a megapreneur.

“Minipreneur”

There are a few different definitions of minipreneur.

1.)   The exact opposite of a megapreneur – someone who runs a start up business, but has not fully committed themselves to it. This could be because the person still has another job, because the start up has not yet taken off the ground, or for a number of other reasons.

2.)   An owner of a very small business. These entrepreneurs are also sometimes called micropreneurs, in accordance with the term micro-business.

3.)   Part time entrepreneurs, such as those who work on a freelancing basis, run side-businesses.

Minipreneurs often do go on to develop into being full-fledged entrepreneurs, but until they do, they are sometimes also considered to be fauxpreneurs.

“Mompreneur”

A mompreneur is someone – usually a woman – who runs a business and is also a full time mother. Mompreneurs often start their businesses while they are pregnant or during early motherhood, meaning that their children are usually very young. Mompreneurs have to juggle starting and running a fulltime business, as well as carding for their child(ren).

“Multipreneur”

A multipreneur is someone who pursues more than one entrepreneurial avenue or opportunity at one time. For example, this could be someone who has started up multiple businesses, or someone who is exploring their entrepreneurial options before committing to one thing or another.

Multipreneurs usually embody the traditional entrepreneurial mindset, ambition, and innovation – they aim high and are very committed to their entrepreneurial pursuits.

“Passivepreneur”

A passivepreneur is someone whose entrepreneurial efforts have resulted in them having a passive income that requires little to no effort.

For example, many people in the rental property market spend time building up a portfolio of houses – and income from each of them – until the point where they have enough money coming in to stop working. In this situation, any low levels of maintenance that are required could be outsourced to a letting agent, leaving the passivepreneur virtually work-free.

Passivepreneurship can be viewed as the entrepreneurial equivalent of having a pension.

“Skepticpreneur”

The word skepticpreneur describes a business person who is somewhat cynical and often very wary of taking business risks. They are overly cautious, and will only aim for low hanging fruit and easy wins. Their motto is to play it safe, and don’t take unnecessary risks.

Skepticpreneurs are usually very clued in on potential business risks, and rarely suffer them. However, this tentativeness also means that they frequently miss out on some business opportunities.

 “Socialpreneur”

A social preneur is the owner of a social enterprise. A social enterprise is a for-profit company that focuses on human well-bring more than it does making money. This concept is at the center of a socialpreneur’s work ethic.

Often, socialpreneurs have a dislike for larger corporations and are pro local, micro and small businesses, and they also have an awareness of their impact on the environment – closely linking them with antipreneurs and ecopreneurs, respectively.

 “Solopreneur”

A solopreneur is a business person who operates entirely on their own, and without support from others. They do not have business partners, and any help they do need, they usually pay for through a professional service.

Solopreneurs are all about being independent and not relying on anyone else, and because of this, they do not have to deal with the consequences of being let down by other parties. However, at the same time, their businesses often grow at a somewhat slower rate than other, multi-person businesses.

 “Studentpreneur”

The term studentpreneur is used to describe someone who starts a business while they are still in education – either full or part time. Usually, it is students of a higher level of education, such as university. Often, the entrepreneurial endeavors of studentpreneurs are on a smaller scale than other types of preneurs.

Studentpreneurs are often connected with minipreneurs, as their attention and efforts are split between their education and business venture. This also means that studentpreneurs are also considered fauxpreneurs, as they are unable to fully commit everything to the business.

 “Twitterpreneur”

A Twitterpreneur is someone who makes their money – mostly or entirely – through the social platform, Twitter. It could also be someone whose business relies largely on Twitter for its success or income.

Many entrepreneurs use social media as a standing stone on which to build their customer base, and to increase their market and industry authority. If Twitter is the main traffic-driving channel for an online business, it could be said that the success of that business largely depends on Twitter.

“Wantrepreneur”

A wantrepreneur is someone who wants to start their own business or entrepreneurial pursuits, but has not yet taken any actions to get the ball rolling. All entrepreneurs are technically wantrepreneurs in the idea stages of their start ups.

There are many, many wantrepreneurs in the world, as the term applies to all people who dream of running their own businesses and escaping the rat race. Relatively few of these people actually go on to get their ideas off the ground and running.

“Wingpreneur”

This term describes someone who is, essentially, the wingman for an entrepreneur. A wingpreneur is someone who provides something essential to a start up business – be it funding, support, knowledge, skills, etc – but who takes a backseat in the overall running of a business.

It’s worth noting that the term wingpreneur is not synonymous with an investor, as investors are not technically entrepreneurs – they are not starting their own businesses.

As an example, imagine a young couple who start a business together. They are both equally entrepreneurs as they both invest equal parts into the start up. But, then person has to step down slightly and take a back seat to raise a child (effectively becoming a mompreneur) – they could still be an essential component to the business overall, but they take a much smaller chunk of the workload.

*********

If the small business boom continues as it has done in recent years, there’s no doubt that we will start to see more of these words come into use – perhaps some will even be adopted into more widespread usage outside of the business start-up world.

Which type of entrepreneur are you? Are there any that we’ve missed out? Let us know in the comments below.

The post The Entrepreneur’s “-preneur” Glossary: What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You? appeared first on StartupBros.

“Are you mad?!”

 That’s the first question my mother asked when I quit my retail job. Because, somehow throwing away a $1000 a month ‘stable’ income was the craziest thing I’d ever done in my life.

Not the time I threw myself off a cliff into a pool full of Jellyfish, apparently.

But, I was done selling shoes, taking instructions from managers and getting absolutely no joy from going to work at all.

I wanted to be a writer. And, no matter who told me that I was Mad, Crazy or Bold to do so, that’s what I was happening. Evidently, stubbornness seems to be one of my more favourable character traits.

However, to an extent, those concerns were right. As a Freelancer, whether a writer, a graphic designer or anything else, there is no such thing as a ‘stable’ income.

You’re paid for the work you do (if you get hired at all), and you’re constantly fighting an uphill struggle to try and get yourself enough work to make a living.

But, here’s the thing about Stable Incomes: they’re not all they’re cracked up to be.

A stable income guarantee’s you a paycheck at the end of the month, but it wont guarantee you anything else.

In fact, there are some limitations to having a stable income that completely cancel its benefits out:

• The amount you can earn is restricted
• Your free time is limited
• You have little room for progression
• You can’t watch Cat videos and Sip Coffee all day

Thankfully, as a Freelancer (or Start Up Owner) you’re not bound by any of these conventional premises. Because, well, you’re in charge.

However, it’s important that you learn to build a guaranteed income. Because, you still have bills to pay, mouths to feed and coffee to buy.

And, it is possible to guarantee yourself a monthly income, without ever having to worry about when a job is coming to an end. Or maybe you are unexpectedly fired.

How do you do it?

I’m going to show you how I and all of my coaching clients manage to do it month after month.

In fact, I’m giving you the whole contents of my paid training course, because I’m just a swell guy (or, really like helping the StartUpBro’s community–you decide).

In this article you’re going to learn:

• How to build a simple, effective business model that works
• The difference between a Stable and a Guaranteed Income
• How to pitch to absolutely anybody
• How to play the ‘numbers game’ to guarantee yourself an income
• Why Phil Collins shouldn’t be allowed to make CD’s anymore
• How to never worry about losing Freelance work
• How to grow your business as much (or as little) as you want to

It’s going to be a long one, so if you’re looking to build from this, I’d suggest giving it a bookmark and coming back when you’ve completed each stage.

What Is A Guaranteed Income?

Taking this right back to basics, a Guaranteed Income is a little different to a Stable Income.

A stable income is the exact amount an employer is going to give you, each and every month right into your bank account. That number is usually your yearly salary divided by 12.

However, a guaranteed income is your income for that week/year/month that you’re going to get paid from multiple clients and income streams.

It’s guaranteed because you’ve calculated that’s what you’re going to earn, but there is always room for expansion, growth and change.

If you say you want to earn $2,000 this month in income, you generate work that equates to that amount.

With a stable income where you would have to find a way to prostitute yourself to add extra to your pay packet.

This article is going to focus on how you can build a guaranteed income from doing work that you love.

First Things First, Let’s Make A List…

The biggest problem I find with freelancing is that your mind wanders.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re using content mills or more established websites, you get lost in the clutter that is the job boards.

You’ll bounce from one job to another, without really knowing what you’re looking for. Just that you want to find work, and get paid for it.

By adding structure to this initial job search, you can increase your productivity tenfold. And, find work for the right price in the area’s that you love.

Considering you probably don’t really enjoy creating anything for Alabama Chicken Farmers, that’s only a good thing.

In order to bring this laser-targeted job search, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a list of everything you want to build your work around.

For example, I’m a writer, so I would create a list of all the topics I love to write about:

When it comes to my job search, I only look at jobs in these niches. If it doesn’t explicitly say it, then I don’t spend my time applying for it.

If you’re working in a different sector, such as Graphic Design, then you can base the list on the categories that you would like to build a business around.

The second part of this list is to set yourself a minimum price that you’re willing to work for.

By having a minimum income rate, you’re able to exclude all work that doesn’t offer to pay what you’re looking to earn.

Don’t Panic.

If you’re worried about excluding people from your freelancing reach, don’t be.

You are able to negotiate, and adjust prices as time goes on. But, starting from ground zero it’s good to have a minimum price in place so you don’t sell yourself short.

Value Your Time (You Can Never Get It Back)

There is no gimmick or right method to picking your prices.

There is only what you feel comfortable charging, and what you feel that your time is worth. And, it’s always worth a lot more than you think it will be.

Trust me, you’re a lot more valuable than working for $10-15 an hour, but if that’s all you feel comfortable charging that’s fine (and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise).

Set your minimum price in alignment with what you want to earn that month, and how many hours you want to work.

If you want to earn $2,000 this month, but only want to work 40 hours, your minimum hourly rate would be $50.

As long as you’re happy with the price you’ve set, and how much it’s going to bring you then you’re onto a winner.

Another route here is that you can create your, ‘ideal world’ price and your ‘real world price’.

You may want to earn $600 per hour in the ideal world, but you may only feel comfortable asking for $50 right now. And, the gulf in price doesn’t mean anything in particular.

But, this does give you a goal to shoot for so you can start to bridge the gap.

Task #1: Create Your List

Spend the next 10 minutes creating a list around the topics you’ve just read about.

• Pick 5-10 topics or elements you want to build a business on
• Set your minimum price based on how you work

o   Hourly

o   Project Based

o   Per Month’s Work

When you’re done, move onto the next section. You’ll see how this list can really benefit you a little later on.

Where To Find Work

If you’re completely new to the scene and are using this post as a guideline to build from, then here’s a list of great places you can look for work in different niches.

I’ve kept this to three main niches and a general one. However, if you can think of a niche and want a respectable job board, comment below and I’ll provide you with a list.

All Freelancing:

• Elance:
• oDesk
• Freelancer
• Craigslist
• Fiverr

Regardless of what anyone tells you about content mills, they’re a great place to start your freelancing career.

They give you thick skin, a great idea of how to interact with clients, a tonne of practice pitching, and some real momentum to build.

However, for the rest of the article, I’m going to overlook content mills a little, but all the same principles apply.

Writing:

• ProBlogger
• All Indie Writers
• Freelance Writing Jobs
• Blogging Pro

Graphic Design:

• Design Jobs Board
• Design Week
• It’s Nice That Jobs Board
• Creative Pool

Software Development/IT:

• Smashing Jobs
• The IT Job Board
• SoloGig
• LinkedIn

All of these boards are free, and I don’t believe you need to sign up to a paid job board to make a living as a freelancer.

So, don’t worry about that.

The Most Simple Business Model You’ll Ever Need

This process starts with the most simple business model in whole entire world.

This model is going to guarantee you an income, ensure you never have to worry about running out of money, and gives you the tools you need to achieve total freelance domination.

All you have to do is learn how to play the Numbers Game.

The Numbers Game

There is a mathematical solution for absolutely everything in the world, and your freelance business is no different.

However, here’s a secret, I’m not able to count past 10 without taking my shoes off terrible at math.

So, that’s why this business model is so insanely easy to use.

In order to find your solution, you’re going to need to identify and track three separate areas.

1. How Many Jobs You Applied For: This is a tally chart of how many listed jobs you’ve applied for.
2. How Many Responses You’ve Got: How many people reached out to you and said, “Hey, I’m interested in working with you”.
3. How Many Guaranteed Pieces Of Work: This is where the terms have been agreed, and you’ve actually started the work for them.

You can track this through Excel, Evernote, or go completely old school (like me) and use a tally chart and a piece of paper.

How This Works

Let’s use really simple numbers to illustrate this point, so you can see what I mean:

If you applied for 10 jobs, and 2 clients responded to you, which resulted in 1 piece of work, how many jobs would you need to apply for to guarantee yourself some work?

That’s right, 10 jobs.

If you wanted to obtain a second piece of work, how many would you apply for?

Another 10 jobs.

Now, your numbers make be better than this, and they may be worse than this. But, once you understand your numbers, you can cater your time to maximise this.

Even if you were to apply for 10 jobs a week, you would guarantee yourself one new piece of work each and every week.

Where Does The List Come Into It?

Excellent Question.

The list mostly serves to keep your mind focused and targeted for all the jobs you’re applying for.

But, it’s also a great asset for helping you form a daily habit of applying for jobs in the niches you want to work in.

Take the following scenario:

You’ve decided to look around the job boards and find some jobs to apply for. But, you can’t find anything in your price range in the niches you’ve chosen. This is where you’d usually throw in the towel right?

“Oh, there’s nothing to apply for today, maybe tomorrow then”,you say to yourself as your drag yourself off to get another coffee.
But now, you don’t have to. Because whilst there may not be something to apply for in your top choice, you just check down to the next one.

So, if you’re really not able to find something in, say, ‘Database Management’, you can move onto the next choice in your list. Until, you’ve filled the quota of jobs you need to apply for.

Neat, huh?

How Many Jobs Should You Apply For?

I call this method Intentional Freelancing, because everything is done with intent.

This really depends on what you’re looking to achieve. If it takes 10 applications to find work, but you’re only looking to expand in the next two weeks, you may only apply for five each week.

However, if you’re furiously trying to build up a portfolio and get some work, you may apply for four or five each day.

It solely depends on you, your numbers and what you’re looking to gain from your time in the trenches.

I’d always suggest youstay applying for at least a few jobs a week, though. Even if your dance card is full.

It’s much easier to turn down work, than it is to pick it up at the drop of a hat.

Common Red Flags

The beauty of this model is that as you become more efficient at what you’re doing, your numbers will begin to come down.

For example, I’m now at the stage where if I apply for three pieces of work, I’m guaranteed one paid job.

However, if your numbers start to go up and get worse, you can identify a few common red flags:

• Sloppy Pitching: You may have started to take some slack on your pitching, and become lazy.
• Poor Job Choices: You’ve started to apply for jobs on the cusp of your niches, as supposed to jobs you can or want to do.
• Insufficient Portfolio Pieces: You’ve got a portfolio; you’ve just not presented the person with the right ones.

But, regardless of the way your numbers are going to go, you’re going to learn how to be on-point all the time.

Task #2: Create A Spread Sheet

Build a spread sheet with three separate columns:

1. Job Applications
2. Responses
3. Guaranteed Work

You can do this on paper, Excel or anywhere you see fit. But, you need to be able to access it and input data into it the whole time.

Once you have that set up, you’re ready to lock and load on pitching.

How To Pitch To Anyone, Any Time

Neil Gaiman once said, “People get hired because, somehow, they get hired”. Which, I’ve come to learn, is a pretty true statement.

But, it is possible to give yourself the optimal chance and really up your chances from, ‘somehow’ to ‘almost certainly’.

The answer to that, is pitching.

The best article I’ve read about pitching to influencers comes from this site. The How To Blast Out Of Obscurity guest-post is a treasure trove of information, and I suggest you check it out.

However, when it comes to pitching for paid work, the tables turn a little bit.

Whilst the basics of pitching never really change, it’s important to differ your approach slightly to have the largest chance of getting work.

There is one place where freelancers almost always fall down.

Stop Pitching Lists, Start Pitching Solutions

I can almost guarantee that 90% of the time, your pitch is mostly you blowing smoke up your own behind.

Why?

Because that’s how you think you’re supposed to pitch.

The general thought process being, “If I can prove myself to be the best person applying for the job, I’m going to get it”.

But this is entirely the wrong way to think about pitching for work. Instead, you need to pitch about how you can solve that person’s problems.

How, all the wonderful work you’ve done (and can do) is going to absolutely rock their world. Why, all those guest posts, previous designs and time spent practicing your craft is going to help that person achieve their goals.

Your standard pitch probably looks something like this:

And, to be really blunt, it sucks.

Why?

Because, you’ve essentially listed all the things that you can do, and that qualify you for a job:

• I’ve worked for ‘X’ client
• I’ve created work about ‘Y’ subject
• I’ve got experience doing ‘Z’

Which is all well and good, but you’ve not helped the potential client achieve anything. And, they honestly don’t care about what you have done in the past.

They care about how you can help them solve a problem.

And, most of your pitches don’t do that.

What needs to change so that you can begin to help your clients, then?

Start Asking Yourself A Different Question

When you’re writing your pitch at the moment you’re answering the question, “What can I do to get the job?”

Instead, you should be answering the question, “How can what I’ve done, help this client?”

That means that when it comes to writing your pitch, you’ve got a completely different set of answers to what you had before.

Think of it in terms of this:

• Instead of saying, “I write in a conversational tone”, explain how that can help them engage their audience.
• Instead of saying “I create up to date designs”, explain how it displays professionalism and authority.
• Instead of saying “I create software that’s unique”, explain how your software will set them apart from other in their niche.

Once you start doing that, you can create a proposal that looks like this:

By answering questions and showing how your skills can have a greater effect on their outcomes, you’ve suddenly created a pitch that is much more powerful.

Other Pitching Tips (To Make You Shine)

Here are a few more elements to consider whilst writing a pitch, which will make stand out from the rest of the Freelance World.

RTFQ: In the Military my Father used to have a saying for all of his students on exams, and that was to RTFQ. Or, in realterms “Read the f*****g question”.

A lot of you will fall down on this, and completely exclude yourself from the running by simply not being able to follow an instruction.

If a job description asks you a question, you better be damn sure to answer. Read it at least three times and make sure you understand everything that’s been written there.

Some will ask you to pitch using a certain title:

Whilst others, will ask you a specific question for you to answer in your pitch:

This are a non-negotiable, you have to address these in your pitch if they’re there.

Show Personality (But Be Professional): This is someone’s brainchild you’re working on here, and they want to know it’s in the hands of someone they can trust.

And, they cannot trust a robot. So, be sure to show you’re a human being through your pitch.

But, never cross the boundary of becoming too friendly and dropping your guard. They’re still going to be an employer, after all.

Never Copy And Paste: As someone who hires freelancers as well, I can smell a copy and pasted pitch a mile away. And, it’s straight in the trash with my leftover Burrito.

Reference the person, speak to them directly and take the extra 20 minutes to actually write your proposal, instead of focusing solely on the volume of proposals you’ve done.

Have Social Proof: Testimonials, guest posts and previous works all add an extra level of trust to your pitch. The less risk they have to take, the better your chances.

Have A Solid Portfolio: Because, how do they know you can do it, if you’ve not got any proof?

Task #3: Go Out   

Well, sort of.

Head to one of the job boards from earlier in this post, and pick one to apply for. You don’t need to actually send it off yet. But, write it and compare against the points made so far in this article.

If you think it bombed, do it again. But, remember to answer the question, “How can I help?” as supposed to just listing what you can do.

Oh, and for the first 10 days after this post goes live, if you comment with one pitch and a link to the job you applied for – I’ll critique it and show you what you could do differently.

Tying It All Together

By now, you should have the following:

• A List: Of all the jobs you want to do.
• A Price: How you much you intend to charge a client.
• A Place To Find Jobs: Three of four different job boards you can flit between to find work, and get yourself in front of the right people.
• A Spread Sheet: With applications, responses and guaranteed income.
• Knowledge Of How To Grow Your Business: Once you know your numbers, you can take your business in any direction possible.
• Practice Pitches: And a solid idea of how to pitch to someone who is going to pay you to do what you love.

Within those five elements, you have the makings of an incredible, simple Freelance Business you can take anywhere in the world.

On Effort, Traveling The World And Growing Your Income

Within this article, you’ve discovered how to start a lifestyle business. And, I’m probably going to get it in the neck off some gurus for giving it all away for free.

This model has taken me around the world, and has given countless people the opportunity to start a fruitful business that grows.

But, it doesn’t happen overnight.

It takes effort, consistency and a thick skin. You need to apply for jobs often, accept rejection just as often and be prepared that sometimes things wont come off.

But, once you start to build momentum, you’ve now got the tools to create a business that caters to your world, no matter what.

My first month Freelancing, I made $600. In three months, that turned to $3,500 a month, consistently.

Now, it’s grown exponentially.

The question is, are you willing to put in the effort and grow your business, or are you just going to become another poorly fed freelancer?

The post How To Guarantee Yourself A Freelance Income (And Make It Grow) appeared first on StartupBros.

The biggest mistake people make when they want to start a blog is that they start a blog.

Well, they start a blog without a plan.

Abraham Lincoln knew the power of preparation:

Lincoln wasn’t just a politician with a metaphor, he was being literal. Before he became famous for politics he was known as one of the best axe-wielders around. The guy knew how to chop down trees better than anyone. (Lucky for us, he expanded his skill set beyond swinging sharp, heavy objects.)

Everyone wants to start a blog, and they should.

You can use a blog to generate massive amounts of revenue or just fascinating opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

A well-known local paper has about 40,000 copies in print. StartupBros gets about 150,000 unique views per month. We’re not that huge of a blog, but we’re still outpacing many traditional papers.

We don’t have a massive email list, just over 30,000 of the most active in the StartupBros community. That modest-sized list has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue in the last several months.

Will and I have been seriously working on StartupBros for just over a year. A lot can happen in a year:

I recently read that there is a blog started every few seconds.

The harsh truth is that virtually zero of these blogs will attract any meaningful attention. That’s fine for people who are using a blog as a sort of personal journal or résumé. It’s daunting for those of us who want to build a tribe and make money.

Putting in the work is necessary–few people deny the grind anymore–but it’s not sufficient. There are just too many people putting too many hours in for that to be your competitive advantage. You’ve got to have a better strategy than them too.

Using a proper sequence will organize your energy so that each step builds on the next. A solid launch strategy will put you ahead of the majority of people blindly starting blogs because of some vague urge that they “really ought to”. proper sequence will organize your energy so that each step builds on the next. A solid launch strategy will put you ahead of the majority of people blindly starting blogs because of some vague urge that they “really ought to”. This initial advantage will compound through the entire lifetime of your blog.

A good strategist understands that strategies are not one-size-fits all. Instead, they use the best method for the situation. Napoleon’s genius was not that he was more learned than the other generals. He had a feel for the situation. He knew how to improvise.

This sequence is malleable like the best strategies must be. It’s also designed to be implemented step-by-step. Especially for those who fit the descriptions below:

Who Is This Sequence For?

The use-cases for this strategy vary widely and we’ll get to some of the more popular ones shortly.

First, let’s talk briefly about the person who inspired this post.

This girl, let’s call her Jess, owns her own business and has worked as a yoga teacher for more than a decade. She is able to make a decent income and her business is extremely fulfilling. Her message so far has stayed mostly within her yoga studio and the many events she leads. She has more reach than most, but no place for her tribe to congregate online.

I worked with her to apply this strategy to her goal of reaching a wider audience online while building a stronger connection with those who already know her. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from her soon

There are a ton of people who can benefit from using this strategy:

• The author building an audience for his book while he writes it. Even authors who have six-figure advances from major publishing houses are responsible to bring their own audiences to the books they publish. Waiting for publication to market the book isn’t an option—you’ve got to have buyers ready. The best way to do this is to build a list of people who want to be told every time you release something new. This applies to established authors as well as new ones.
• The entrepreneur launching a business. What if you could launch your product to a ton of people who are just waiting to buy?
• The coach or consultant launching their business. It’s the same deal… having a group of buyers waiting to be sold is always going to be better than paying to get in front of people who may or may not want to hear from you.
• The established consultant or entrepreneur who is expanding his offerings. If you already have a service up but want to begin building demand for another branch of your business you can also use a variation of this strategy.
• The future blogger. If you know you want to build a readership and are starting from zero, this is the single most powerful way to launch. You will take advantage of other people’s traffic and avoid burnout by wasting your energy on ineffective activities.
• Any person or business who is building their email list. Email has remained the most powerful form of communication online. The connection you can build with people by showing up on their social feeds can’t compare with the power of an email in their inboxes.
• Anyone starting in the expert industry. You need to be heard to build authority. Not just once, but many times. Authority builds exponentially. The strategy you’re about to learn allows you to continue your relationship with readers that would have forgotten about you before the end of the day.

We’re going to get into a bird’s eye view of this strategy next. First, I want to specify one group who this strategy is not for.

If you know that you want to build your business in the expert industry and you know what product or program you want to sell then there is an advanced sequence that you can follow. It’s higher risk, demands more certainty from you up front, and takes more (time, effort, money, organization) to launch effectively… but it’s powerful and enables you to monetize immediately. If anyone falls into this category feel free to ask about it in the comments (or email) and I’ll be happy to give extended answers.

Now, onto the Expert Blog Launch Sequence!

Expert Blog Launch Sequence: The Overview

Let’s look at each piece of the strategy in brief. You’ll want to keep this overview in mind when reading through each step.

1. Define your goal. The way you execute this strategy will be defined by your aim.
2. Discover your value proposition (loosely). You don’t need to get hyper-specific at this point. You just need to have a general idea of what you’re going to do. StartupBros launched with the tagline “You don’t need a job…” and our mission ever since has been to provide you the tools to create your own business to create an income. We didn’t know what specifically would work but we knew we would find something.
3. Create a free resource. Have you seen the “5 Levels of Entrepreneurship” in the top right corner of our site? It’s the free ebook that we offer anyone who comes to StartupBros.com. It’s also an integral piece of our strategy. When we deliver the ebook to someone we create trust with them—and we gain permission to contact them in the future. This permission is one of our most precious assets. I will show you exactly how to create a resource like this quickly using information you already have. Then I’ll show you the technical requirements to deliver it.
4. Create a landing page in 5 minutes. This is going to serve as your home base while you build your initial list. The page has a single purpose: collect email addresses. You will use this page to deliver the free resource you made above. It’s difficult for people to accept this step. They think they need to have a full site with a dedicated page to themselves. This is the key that multiplies the value of your efforts.
5. Drive qualified traffic. We will focus primarily on guest posting as a way to drive traffic to your landing page. That way the only people hitting your landing page have read your work before and thought, “I want more!”

You should have some serious questions at this point. I’m confident that they’ll be answered as I unpack each of these steps and show you exactly how to execute them. If I don’t answer your question feel free to ask in the comments.

Now that you have an overview of the Expert Blog Launch Sequence, let’s zoom in on the first step.

1. The Easiest Goal You’ll Ever Set

You’ve got to know your North Star

This is the simplest step.

And if isn’t simple, you’re doing it wrong.

The 3 requirements for your goal:

1. What topic you are building an audience for so you know who to talk to and what to talk about.
2. How many emails you want to collect so you know how big your audience will be before you launch your blog.
3. A timeframe so you stay on track.

Here are some possible goals you might set:

• Get 1000 readers for my fitness blog by September.
• Collect 3000 readers that want to hear about my new investing book by the time I send it to my publisher.
• Collect 5000 emails from people who want to hear more about my mindfulness teachings by the time my course is ready.
• Get 500 highly targeted potential clients on an email list that might be interested in my online marketing consulting services.

Again, don’t stress about this. If you don’t know what is realistic then I’d err on the low side. Try 500 emails in 3 months. Then add a who and what and you’re good to go.

One of the few ideas from Napoleon Hill that has stuck with me is the “Definite Chief Aim”. This is the overriding goal of everything else. Every decision you make and action you take should move you toward this aim. If your Definite Chief Aim for this strategy is to Get 1000 readers for my fitness blog by September then everything you do in the following steps should be done with this in mind.

2. Define Your Value Proposition

What are you going to offer?

Why would someone choose you over anyone else?

You don’t need to be totally clear on the answers to these questions yet but you should be thinking about them.

When we launched StartupBros, we knew that we wanted to talk about entrepreneurship. We wanted to show people a way to get out of shitty jobs and build their own things. Our tagline was “You don’t need a job…” and we’ve been striving to deliver on that promise ever since.

Just today someone emailed about how he was able to quit his job because of our importing training program. Now he can spend more time with his family, especially his newly born baby girl. That’s life-changing value.

You might not know exactly how you’ll deliver on your promise yet, that’s fine. (If you are clear about exactly how you want to serve others then you may want to use the advanced method I mentioned above.)

What’s important is that you have an idea of the problem you can solve for other people. It shouldn’t be that vague, either. You’re not an expert at everything. Stick with your area of competency and you’ll do well.

“You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge.  And you’ve got to play within your own Circle of Competence.” – Charlie Munger

We can often be blind to our own competencies. Severe versions of this leads to the impostor syndrome. You are blind to what is most natural to you and things feel natural because you’re good at them. You can ask these questions to start to hone in on your competency: What can you do easily that others struggle with? What do you love talking about that annoys others? What do people pay you to do?

To give you an idea of the breadth of possible value propositions, here is a short list of some of the problems people will pay to have solved:

• Teach unhealthy people to get healthy.
• Teach fat people to get ripped.
• Show guys how to get girls.
• Show girls how to get guys.
• Show people how to make more money in their job.
• Show people how to make more money outside of their jobs.
• Show people how to relieve their depression.
• Help people get started playing the guitar.
• Help young people get clear on what to do with their lives.
• Help people later in life figure out what that’s all about.
• Teach people how to take perfect Instagram photos.
• Show businesses how to use Instagram to market their products.
• Teach people how to start a podcast.
• Teach people how to start a blog.
• Teach people how to get their book published.
• Show people how to self-publish their books.
• Show people how to get better at basketball.
• Teach people how to master Call of Duty or any other game.
• Teach people how to ace high school without trying too hard.
• Teach people how to travel cheaply.
• Show people how to develop addictive products.
• Show people how to eat well on a pescatarian diet.
• Show people how to teach their dogs tricks.
• Show people how to make their dog trick videos go viral on YouTube.
• Teach people how to speak another language quickly.
• Teach people how to make a business creating third-party cell phone attachments.
• Teach people how to make money with their photography.
• Show people how to master negotiations.
• Whatever it is you’re interested, you can make money talking about that.

Almost all of these came from real-world examples—many of them multi-million dollar businesses.

The problem you’re solving doesn’t have to sound “world changing”. PewDiePie has 32.6 million subscribers on YouTube. His value proposition was Entertain people who like video games.

Decide on the value you want to deliver first. Then look at other people who are succeeding at delivering on a similar value proposition and see what you can copy and what you can do differently.

This kind of competitive analysis is a huge subject. For now all you need to do is decide on your value proposition. Some examples:

• I’m going to show entrepreneurs how to use YouTube to drive sales.
• I’m going to provide a program to help relieve depression for new mothers.
• I will help show people how to have more self-esteem.
• I will show people how to make money selling their art.
• I will show freelancers how to double their rates.
• I will show people how to work remotely while traveling.
• I will show people how to pick the perfect piece of fruit, every time.

Once you have this down you are ready to get into the nitty-gritty.

So far our focus has been on planning. You know your aim now and you know the problem you’re going to solve for people. From here on we’ll focus on technical execution.

3. Create A Resource To Give Away For Free

You’ve seen them before: the ebook, the free PDF, or the video series that are offered in exchange for your email address. Then you’re sent the resource and continue to receive emails unless you unsubscribe.

You may have already downloaded our free ebook, The 5 Levels of Entrepreneurship. It’s our free offering for people who want to hear more from us. Our email signup rate doubled when we began offering the ebook instead of just saying, “Sign up for our value-packed newsletter!”

People email us regularly telling us just how much the love the ebook. It doesn’t feel like a “bribe” or a trick. It’s real value that we deliver for free.

Clay Collins from Leadpages recently did a webinar with us where he revealed that shorter free resources actually convert much better than long ones. He started using a list of the gear he uses instead of a long ebook because it did so much better. A lot of people, including David Siteman Garland from The Rise to the Top use “cheat sheets” as their resources. These are converting well too.Remember who you’re talking to, then solve a universal, basic problem for them.

Here is a sampling of possible free resources:

• 4 Tools to Start Making Great Video for Less Than $100
• 3 Quick Ways You Can Optimize Your Website Today
• The 7 Foods That Are Sapping Your Energy
• 5 Unique Exercises To Get A Six-Pack Fast
• 9 Strategies To Multiply Your Productivity as a Designer
• 7 Hacks to Re-Ignite Your Creativity
• A Cheat Sheet For the Perfect Blog Post
• The Startup Finances Cheat Sheet
• 9 Steps to Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant, The Cheat Sheet
• 3 Ways to Get A Raise This Month
• 7 Trends Every Investor Needs To Know About

To give you an example, here is David Siteman Garland’s current freebie promo:

Four things to notice about this freebie that you will want to incorporate into yours:

• It’s a list. Lists work well for basically everything.
• The promise is obvious. By the time you’re done reading this freebie you will know how to launch a successful online course.
• It’s easy to take in. It’s a “cheat sheet”, not a 100 page report. The reader doesn’t know if they want to invest that much time with you yet. The idea is to solve a problem quickly.
• It’s related to other parts of the business. David’s main product teaches people how to create online programs. He is most interested in gaining readers who want to create online courses so he designed his freebie to attract them.

Three format types for free resources:

• The PDF. This is the most common format and it’s most likely the one you should start with. Cheat sheets and ebooks will both be delivered as PDFs to your readers.
• Auto-responder series. This is an automated email series that will be sent over a period of time. You can make a six-week program that will help your readers solve a certain problem.
• Video series. This is an advanced auto-responder. You can have a video segment released to your readers each week. These take a bit more planning and work but can be extremely effective at collecting emails, building a relationship with your audience, and priming them for purchase.

Don’t let this step stall your progress. If you spend a week on this then you’ve spent too much time.

Make a great cheat sheet to start. You can change it later if you want.

4. Create A Landing Page

In this step you will create a simple landing page that is designed to collect emails and deliver your freebie.

This is the current landing page for our ebook:

Notice how sparse it is. There isn’t anything there except an image of the free resource and an opt-in box.

When readers hit this page they almost always get the book. It’s not because the page is so great, it’s because they got to this page with the goal of hearing more from us.

When you set your landing page up, remember the context in which the readers are arriving. They saw you elsewhere on the web and wanted to get more from you.

This landing page is not a permanent solution; it’s a stand-in solution to collect email addresses while you build your audience. You want to launch your blog to thousands of readers, not zero.

We use LeadPages to create all of our landing pages. They make it ridiculously simple to set the page up, allow us to collect emails, and to deliver the free resource.

You’ll need to get an email service at this point in order to collect email addresses and send people your free resource. We use Ontraport but to start you may want to go with something like MailChimp or AWeber.

5. Drive Qualified Traffic

This step will require the most effort by far.

If you really want to, you can knock out steps 1-4 in a day. After that, it’s all about getting people to give you their email addresses. That means driving traffic to your landing page.

There are several ways you can do this. Among them are publishing Kindle books and running Google or Facebook ads. Kindle publishing is a massive topic beyond the scope of this post. Facebook ads are effective if you’ve got a product to sell but probably aren’t worth the investment if you don’t have a product yet.

Let’s focus on guest blogging.

Why?

There are a lot of people with a lot more traffic than you. Why not take advantage of other people’s traffic?

Let’s assume you are trying to get 1000 readers before you launch your blog. How many guest posts would you need to do?

It depends on the posts and the blogs you get on. To help you gauge this, Daniel DiPiazza wrote a kickass guest post for us and got 200 new subscribers from it. Between two guest posts at ArtOfManliness I’ve gotten 600 new subscribers.

From Leadpages

It’s not going to take you too long to reach 1000 or more readers if you consistently publish on quality channels.

To get started you need to get a list of sites you want to publish on. There are detailed ways to do this but if you are already an active participant in what you’re talking about (and I hope you are) then you probably can get started by pitching your favorite blogs to read.

I read probably 50 guest-post pitches a week and delete almost all of them immediately because the pitch was crap. You’ve got to learn how to write a killer email pitch.

Ludvig Sundstrom has one of the most popular guest posts on StartupBros (How to Blast Out of Obscurity). Not coincidentally, he wrote one of the most effective email pitches I’ve received:

6 things to learn:

• The purpose of the email is in the headline. I don’t have to read any of the body to guess what he’s talking about.
• He introduces himself and immediately provides 3 reasons why I should keep reading.
• He acknowledges that we’re busy… and doesn’t continue to talk about himself for ten pages. This happens all the time. What the hell are these people thinking?
• He provides more proof that his work performs well and that serious publications have published his work.
• He then provides three specific article ideas. What you can’t see in the screenshot above is that he also provided a brief outline for each post. Just the headline and then the three main ideas.
• The whole things is broken down and organized well. I can glance at the email and get to the important information. It makes reading it super easy.

A great guest post pitch doesn’t take a lot of effort and it will radically increase the rate at which you get accepted for submissions.

The other thing here is that you need to be able to write a post that people love. Learning some basics about powerful writing will serve you well. I’ve put together a writing guide for entrepreneurs that you will find useful.

That’s that! Let’s review…

Expert Blog Launch Sequence: The Review

This is a simple strategy that you can implement this week. By using this specific sequence you will avoid wasting time writing posts that nobody will read.

You will avoid stretching yourself thin trying to build your own site while simultaneously creating an outreach program.

You will guarantee your success by building it before you even launch.

You will be able to monetize your blog before you even launch it.

These wins can’t be exaggerated. It’s the difference between becoming a successful entrepreneur and staying in the rat race.

What Now?

Today, right now, complete the first two steps.

Then outline your free resource.

You can do all of this in less than 15 minutes and you will have begun laying the foundation for your future business.

If you have any questions about any part of this process, let me know in the comments!

If you already have a product, coaching program, or consulting service idea that you know you want to launch and are interested in the advanced method, let me know as well.

Looking forward to talking with you below!

The post Expert Blog Launch Sequence: How To Start Your Blog The Right Way appeared first on StartupBros.

Why would a tech giant – with billions of dollars – willingly choose to wear a black turtleneck, Levi’s 501 jeans, and New Balance 992 sneakers day-in and day-out for over a decade?

One of the reasons he chose to wear the turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers every day was that it removed unimportant decision-making from his life.

According to the Steve Jobs biography, Jobs wanted to implement a corporate uniform at Apple. When he wasn’t able to sell the idea to his workers he had to settle for a personal uniform.

When you open your closet and have a hundred black turtlenecks staring back at you don’t have to consume mental energy picking a shirt and the rest of the outfit.

President Obama does the same thing. He only wears a solid navy or charcoal suit.

In an interview with Vanity Fair he says this about his wardrobe:

“I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

He then explains the benefits:

“You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

So just like me and you, tech giants and presidents are super busy and exhausted. They know that as humans we have a limited amount of working mental energy. The tasks and decisions being fired at us throughout the day slowly chip away at our mental energy.

As the day wears on:

• It takes us longer to comprehend information.
• The time it requires us to complete a task expands.
• At some point we give up because our mental energy is depleted.

I’d absolutely love to have more mental energy at the end of the day so I can continue checking tasks off my list. Instead I’m microwaving a frozen Amy’s burrito and binge-watching Breaking Bad.

So I decided to systematically streamline three areas of my life to free up my limited mental energy. What I discovered is that most small and routine decisions, like what to wear, can easily be eliminated or simplified. Let’s get started!

1. Building the Perfect Wardrobe

So I like the idea of wearing the same thing every day. But I’m a realist and know that I’m not ready to be “that guy”. And even though Obama says that he only wears two suits he still wears dad jeans on the weekend!

I started minimizing all my “stuff” years ago and eventually that lead to my clothes closet. I got rid of the majority of my clothes and then built a classic wardrobe from the ground up, sprinkling in summer and winter essentials.

This is what my closet looks like (if I had women’s clothes):

My now pared-down closet has 12 long sleeve shirts, 6 sweaters, 6 polo shirts, 6 t-shirts, and 8 pairs of pants/jeans. I feel much better having a simple wardrobe, my bank account is fatter, and because I’ve mathematically reduced possible outfit combinations I save mental energy in the mornings.

There are people who do wear the same thing every day like Nadia. But if you’re like me and not quite ready for that level check out my friend Un-Fancy for women’s wardrobe “capsules”, and the aforementioned links for men’s.

Action Steps

Pare down your closet to 38 items: shirts, sweaters, pants/jeans. Don’t include outerwear or shoes. Why 38? Well, that’s the number that’s worked for me but change it (slightly!) to suit you.

1. Sort – take everything out of your closet and sort it into three piles: A) I wear this all the time, B) I wear this but rarely, C) I haven’t worn this in a year.
2. Save – put the “I wear this all time” items back into your closet.
3. Box – put the “I wear this but rarely” items into a box and store it. You’re free to pull something out of the box within one year, but after that point it gets donated/sold.
4. Donate – right away donate/sell the “I haven’t worn this in a year” items.
5. Assess – count the items in your closet. If it’s equal to 38, good job! Even better if it’s less than 38, you have some wiggle room to add some new items to your wardrobe. If it’s more than 38 then move some items to the “I wear this but rarely” box until you reach 38.
6. Maintain – now, as you’re holding steady at 38 when you buy one new piece of clothing you need to say goodbye to one. This ensures your closet doesn’t bloat, it will remain simple just as your decision-making will.

2. Deconstructing Food

I want you to stop and think for a minute. How much mental energy do you think you burn three times a day just on eating? If you’re like me it goes something like this:

• You decide what food you’re going to eat, “Do I feel like a burrito? Indian food? Something healthy like a salad?”
• You decide where it’s coming from, “I want a burrito. Chipotle, or Qdoba, or that little taquería?”
• You decide who you’re eating with, “Oh, my buddy wanted to try that taquería. I should text him.”

That’s three decisions which all drain mental energy.

During the workweek I have the same breakfast every day. A cup of coffee and a smoothie: banana, berries, coconut milk, whey protein, and leafy greens. Then for lunch I have fruit and a peanut butter and honey sandwich on sprouted bread. Much to my girlfriends amusement this routine has been going on for years. But I tell her I’m in good company, my pal Warren Buffet eats a hamburger and fries every day for lunch.

Taking this routine to the next level is to completely rid yourself of all food decision-making. That means Soylent. Created by a software engineer, it’s a dry powder you mix with water that’s a complete food substitute. You can make your own powder or buy the commercial version (it raised $3.5M in crowdfunding).

I’m not ready for Soylent. You might not be either. But I feel like I made a good compromise because during the workweek I’m not wasting my limited mental energy on food decisions – my bank account is happier and my grocery list is the same every week – and for all other meals I get the benefits of choosing what to eat.

Action Steps

Target one meal per day Monday through Friday that you can simplify. Breakfast is the easiest because you can wake up and prepare it (you do eat breakfast, right?) before you start your workday.

1. Decide – pick a wholesome breakfast meal you’ll be content eating throughout the work week. Some ideas: a smoothie, two eggs and two pieces of toast, a fruit and yogurt parfait, oatmeal with raisins and nuts. Plus coffee of course.
2. Shop – put the ingredients for your breakfast on your weekly grocery list so you’re ready to go.
3. Prepare – first thing when you wake up Monday through Friday is to prepare and enjoy your routine breakfast.
4. Expand – if week one is successful then extend the routine to a second week, and then a month. Keep going!
5. Replicate – once you have breakfast routinized take the simplified meal concept to a second daily meal, like lunch, but keep at least one meal a day variable for fun.

3. Effortless Personal Finance

I don’t think anybody actually enjoys taking care of their finances (I do, but I’m a weirdo like that). It’s a chore and one that many people waste mental energy on. The good news is that there’s a solution – some time ago I invested a few hours into automating my finances and now I’m reaping the benefits from my money moving around automatically while I’m doing other things:

There are two tangible benefits to automating your finances:

• You preserve the mental energy spent on transferring money between accounts, finding and paying bills, filing away statements, driving to the bank to deposit checks, and remembering when you need to pay bills or make transfers.
• You don’t run the risk of late payment penalties, fees, or the other service charges that banks love to charge because everything is just automated.

With my money automated I’m happier, my money is happier, and I have more mental energy. It’s beautiful!

Action Steps

The central component of automating your finances is your bank account. It’s where the money comes in as income and where the money goes out as expenses. By setting up the automatic transfer of income to the account and the automatic withdrawal of expenses we achieve the benefits from end-to-end automation of our finances.

1. Income – when feasible set up direct deposit to your bank account for any income you receive from a regular job, freelance work, product sales, or services you provide.
2. Retirement – set up a percentage of your monthly income to be automatically transferred from your paycheck to a 401(k) or IRA for retirement. If your income is lumpy you may wish to configure a set dollar amount to be transferred to your retirement account on a quarterly basis.
3. Emergency Fund – if you don’t have a 3-6 month emergency fund then open up a separate savings account at an online bank like Capitol One 360 or request another savings account be opened at your bank (most banks will do this). The purpose of having a dedicated account for your emergency fund is so you’re not tempted to dip into it. Set up your emergency fund account to pull a fixed dollar amount from your bank account on a monthly basis until you have built 3-6 months of expenses.
4. Brokerage Account – if you’re debt-free, maxing out your 401(k), IRA, or similar retirement account, plus you have a fully funded emergency fund, and you still have some extra money leftover that you don’t know what to do with (congratulations!) then open up a brokerage account and begin investing. See my free guide “Lazy & Uncomplicated Investing” to get started. Set up your brokerage account to pull a fixed dollar amount from your bank account on a monthly basis.
5. Bills – set up every bill you have to automatically get charged to your credit card. Some bills like mortgage payments or utilities might not be payable with a credit card so have these automatically withdrawn via ACH.
6. Credit Card – set up your credit card bill so it’s automatically paid on the due date by pulling from your bank account.

Hacking Your Mental Energy

We all have the same number of hours every day and the truly top performers get a massive amount of work done in the same amount of time that we have. Kyle and Will have written fantastic material on getting motivated and taking action. If you’ve incorporated their advice (you should, really) and want to keep improving then try eliminating decison-making from your life.

A couple guidelines for hacking your mental energy:

1. Know Yourself

What works for me or someone else might not work for you. You might discover you’re perfectly okay at the extremes: having one outfit, eating Soylent, or automating all your finances, and that’s great.

But if you’re super passionate about food you’ll never swig Soylent. However, maybe you don’t care so much about clothes so that might be the area where you tackle minimizing decision-making by paring down your wardrobe. To be successful you need to know yourself and find the right balance that’s going to work for you.

2. Test it Out

Spend a few weeks testing a change out. Maybe you try eating the same lunch Monday through Friday for an entire month. Or you wear the same pair of jeans for a couple weeks. Does it work for you? Test it out, nothing bad is going to happen!

The post How to Scale Your Mental Energy Like President Obama and Steve Jobs appeared first on StartupBros.

Our last blog post about how Amazon’s algorithm ranks products was a huge hit, but everybody kept asking us one question…

Are there any quick hacks you can use to rank a new Amazon product FAST?

I’m happy to report that YES – there are several

Here’s the most effective tricks, hacks, and schemes you can use to rank your new product on Amazon quickly…

Hack #1 – Winning the Buy Box

As an Amazon seller, you need to know how to win the Buy Box. This is a crucial part of successfully selling on Amazon, especially if you’re not creating and manufacturing your own products.

Here’s an example of what it means to win the Buy Box:

Be a winner…

Of the 20 sellers for this product, only 4 of them are shown on the product page. You can bet that these four sellers are getting most of the sales for this listing…

If you’re one of the 16 losers for this product, what could you do to win the Buy Box?

Important Buy Box Metrics

First, let’s take some time to review known Buy Box metrics. They can basically be grouped into three categories. For reference, you can see the first page of sellers for the kettlebell listing above, shown to your right.

Pricing! – This is without a doubt the most important Buy Box metric.

Even though the image of the product listing above says that there are other offers “from $15.65”, closer inspection of the listings reveals that those cheaper options are actually more expensive once you take shipping into account.

By default, Amazon lists products on this page in order of Price + Shipping, and that carries into the Buy Box unless one of the other metrics are way out of whack.

Shipping Performance – Amazon puts an enormous priority on fast, hassle-free shipping for their customers. That’s why they encourage sellers to use their Fulfilled by Amazon program.

Shipping performance includes a number of individual metrics, including Order Defect Rate (ODR) and Perfect Order Percentage (POP), both of which we talked about in our last post on Amazon ranking factors.

• ODR (Order Defect Rate) is how many orders are cancelled, returned, shipped improperly or get negative feedback for any reason.
• POP (Perfect Order Percentage) is how many orders go perfectly smoothly without any customer intervention.

Amazon also keeps track of how often you run out of stock, so try to maintain a 100% in-stock rate.

Seller Rating – It seems to me that the magic number for seller rating is 90%.

The listings shown to your right are a great example. Every seller on the first page has a 90% rating or above. However, you can see that a seller with a 90% rating ranks higher than a 100% rating. It seems that as long as you hit 90% positive feedback, anything extra won’t have a huge impact on the Buy Box.

Conversely, it’s uncommon for a seller with a <90% rating to win the Buy Box.

How to Win the Buy Box

One of the top sellers you see in the list above is WayFair. As I was poking around Amazon, I noticed them showing up a ton in our searches. They have over 200,000 reviews and this seller clearly knows what they’re doing… Just about every item in their shop is winning its Buy Box.

You can see another of their Buy Box-winning products below, shown here from inside their Seller profile shop:

So, what are they doing right? What are the specific steps to win the Buy Box? Turns out, there are only two:

1. Make sure you’re eligible – Your product must have the same ASIN as the listing you want to be featured on (more on this below). You also must meet all the criteria listed above.
2. Lower your price – If you’re eligible, pricing is pretty much the sole determining factor. All you have to do is find out what your competitors are selling your product for, and offer to sell and ship it for one cent less. Voila, you rank higher in the Buy Box.
3. Use Fulfilled By Amazon – You’ll get a special orange Fulfillment By Amazon icon (see above) on your seller listing when you use FBA. You’ll also be able to compete on Amazon Prime listings, which is reason enough to join by itself. Plus, Amazon is constantly trying to push sellers onto FBA, so the sooner you hop on the bandwagon, the more rewards you’ll reap.

(NOTE – While lowering the price is certainly a good strategy to rank higher, it is not always a good long-term business strategy. You do NOT want to compete on price alone, as this will only start a price war/race to the bottom)

Hack #2 – ASIN Piggybacking

If you know how to win the Buy Box, your earning potential on Amazon instantly skyrockets. One of the most powerful tactics you can use is ASIN piggybacking.

Here’s how it works:

1. Identify a successful non-unique product and find its ASIN. It will be listed in the Product Details section of the product listing. (shown below)
2. Research the manufacturer to figure out how you can start reselling the product for yourself. Find out how much it will cost wholesale, and calculate what it will cost you to ship. Is there room between that number and $0.01 less than the current Buy Box-winning price for you to make a profit?
3. If the answer to and #2 is YES, contact the manufacturer and start selling. You’ve just found a gold nugget!
4. If the answer to #2 is NO, you may still be able to work out a special deal with the manufacturer if you ask for it. However, if you don’t think it’s worth it, look around for other products in the same niche… Chances are, there’s money to be made on a slightly lower ranked product.

Blackhat ASIN Piggybacking

As you can probably guess, some sellers have developed a blackhat form of ASIN piggybacking. Basically, it involves finding knockoffs of popular products and listing them with the same ASIN as their non-knockoff counterparts.

This works because the process Amazon uses to identify and spend misleading sellers is extremely cumbersome. The seller whose listing is being illegitimately piggybacked has to order one of the suspected counterfeit seller’s products to prove that it is indeed a different product.

It should be noted here that Amazon doesn’t have anything against selling cheap knockoffs. They just don’t like it when you lie about what it really is or who really made it. So, I’m not telling you this method because I condone it, but merely to keep you informed doesn’t Amazon seller. Someday it could happen to you!

In order to keep your ASIN piggybacking above the table, make sure that you’re shipping the exact same product – with the same brand, SKU and manufacturing code – as the listing you’re trying to piggyback.

Hack #3 – Custom URL Queries

The other really common follow-up request we had after our last post was for more information on how Amazon uses URL queries for search results and what you can do to take advantage of that.

To show you what’s going on behind the scenes when you use Amazon, let’s start by looking at the URL for a search term you might want to rank a product for. When I search for “stove top espresso makers” from Amazon’s home page, here’s the URL that we get, shown in the image below:

In case you can’t see, this is the URL:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=stove+top+espresso+maker

If we dissect this URL, it’s easy to see that the &field-keywords= string is what Amazon uses to ID which search results to show. The /s/?url=search-alias is how Amazon tells itself to query a search results page, automatically sorted by best-sellers.

So, if we’re building links or promoting this page, we could strip the URL down to this:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias&field-keywords=stove+top+espresso+maker

Quick Note: For some reason, removing the ?url=search-alias returns a different set of search results… Not sure why, but either way make sure you keep that in if you want to make it look like someone searched for that keyword from Amazon.

Now, let’s see what happens when we click on a product from the search page:

http://www.amazon.com/Primula-Aluminum-Stovetop-Espresso-Coffee/dp/B001J1L59E/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1422041743&sr=8-2&keywords=stove+top+espresso+maker

The part of the URL that’s bold is all that you need to bring up this product page in your browser. Everything else is there to tell Amazon how the viewer arrived at the listing.

You can see the &keywords=stove+top+espresso+maker tells Amazon that I arrived at the listing by searching for “stove top espresso maker”.

There are a couple other keyword strings to be aware of. You may have to do some experimenting one your own to figure out specific URL string combinations that delivers the page you want to see, but knowing these queries will give you a great starting point:

&node= is what Amazon uses for categories. If you click on “All Departments” and enter the Kitchen & Dining category, you’ll get this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/kitchen-dining/b/ref=sd_allcat_ki?ie=UTF8&node=284507

Just like with the &field-keywords= string, the only part of the URL necessary to tell Amazon to bring us to the “Kitchen & Dining” category is the &node= query, in this case &node=284507. So, if we wanted to link to this page, you could strip down the URL to this:

http://www.amazon.com/s/&node=284507

&field-brandtextbin= is another URL string you’ll want to be familiar with. It’s what tells Amazon to filter your search by a brand name. Since many customers already know what brand they want, you may be able to use this query for tracking and SEO purposes.

To bring everything we’ve learned about custom URL queries together, let’s say we wanted to bring up the search results page for the term “espresso maker” in the Kitchen & Dining category, filtered by the Breville brand. Here’s what the URL would look like:

http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=espresso&20maker&node=284507&field-brandtextbin=breville

One important thing to note here the use of the &20 character instead of the + character in the URL. This tells Amazon to separate your keywords with spaces instead of actual plus signs.

How to Use Custom URL Queries

You may remember that Amazon keeps track of which products people end up buying after searching for a given keyword. They then use that data to help them decide which products are most relevant to the original search term.

This means that you can drive traffic to a product page using a custom URL and make Amazon think all those people came from a search result for your target keyword or brand. That way, every sale you make from that link counts toward that specific search term’s relevancy!

Make sense? No? Don’t worry, here’s a real-life example:

Let’s say you want to make this product rank higher for the “best espresso maker” keyword in the “Breville” brand:

You could theoretically make Amazon think that every visitor to this page came from the search page for “best espresso maker”, filtered to the Breville brand, by directing traffic to this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Breville-BES870XL-Barista-Express-Espresso/dp/B00CH9QWOU/&field-keywords=best%20espresso%20maker%20&field-brandtextbin=breville

Now, every purchase a visitor makes through that link would count as coming from our target search term, “best espresso maker”.

Keep in mind, this isn’t 100% proven to work, but everything we know about Amazon’s ranking algorithm tells us it should. Plus, the absolute worst-case scenario is that you’re driving extra sales to one of your products… Amazon isn’t like Google where they’ll punish you for trying to optimize for their search engine.

By the way, if you’ve got lots of capital, you can fast-track this process yourself:

1. Search for a term you want to rank a product for
2. Click on your product
3. Buy it
4. Change your IP (make sure to clear your cache) or get on a different computer.
5. Repeat!

Of course, it you had that much capital – it may be better to spend them on Amazon Product Ads

Hack #4 – Vendor Powered Coupons

If you’re an Individual Seller with a Pro Merchant account, a Professional Seller or a Vendor, then you can use Amazon’s built-in promotion tools. The savviest of shoppers always make use of Amazon’s daily deals.

You can access these deals for yourself by clicking on the today’s deals link in the top-most navigation menu next to the Amazon logo (underlined in green below). That link will take you to a page like this:

As you can see, this section of Amazon’s website is almost a department unto itself. Promotions are given their own unique links and listing pages. The part I’d like to draw your attention to is the Coupons link, highlighted in the blue box above. This page takes you to a list of Amazon’s most popular Vendor Powered Coupons (VPC) in a variety of categories. See the page for yourself below:

Scrolling down the page, we see coupons for Outdoor Gear & Clothing, Grocery & Gourmet, Baby, Household Supplies, Electronics, Personal Care Appliances, Kitchen, Industrial & Scientific, and Other Coupons. There are coupons categories for just about everything except for digital content!

Here’s what a coupon page looks like:

(Note: you won’t see this page if you’re signed into Amazon; instead the coupon will automatically be added to your cart)

Depending on your seller status, you can create your own VPCs for any products you sell.

What Can You Do With Vendor Powered Coupons?

Lots of stuff!

Here are three straightforward ways to make the most of your VPC promotions:

1. Promote VPCs just like you’d promote any other Amazon product listing. Coupon pages have their own independent sales rank. So, if you’re a new seller or trying to compete in a tough niche, you may be able to get more eyes on your product by promoting a coupon for it instead of the listing itself.
2. Create a bigger discount or coupon than your competition. This is a similar tactic to winning the Buy Box… Since Amazon tries to give customers the best possible deal, you only need to offer a little bit better of a coupon than your competition to maximize your chances of getting showcased on the Coupons page.
3. Promote your VPCs on third-party deals sites. This is a really sweet hack that can get you decent levels of traffic with very little effort. Simply search Google for “submit a deal” and you’ll get a list of 500,000+ websites that all want to showcase your deals. Submit your coupons to 10 of these sites per day (not all of them will take online coupons) and if your deal is eye-catching enough, you should start seeing some steady traffic flowing in.
4. Give your VPCs out to friends and family in exchange for reviews/sales metrics. This is also an awesome hack, which most of our clients use with great success. You can set up a VPC and discount your product down to your total costs (so you’re not taking a loss on each sale, but breaking even). Then give this VPC out to friends and family, and have them buy it through Amazon on their own. Most people will be ecstatic to receive such a deeply discounted product, and you’ll get a ‘Verified Purchase’ review – as well as a boost in your initial sales data!

Important – For #3 to work you really need to offer a standout deal. The penny-pinching you can get away with on Amazon probably won’t be enough to get you featured on the most popular Daily Deals sites.

Again, not everybody can make use of Vendor Powered Coupons or Amazon’s other built-in promotion tools. However, if you have the right type of account, be sure to check them out!

Hack #5 – Automated Tools for Amazon Sellers

Finally, no discussion of Amazon hacks would be complete without talking about the most important part of scaling any e-Commerce business…

Automation!

As you continue reading, we’re quickly going to look at three of the most powerful ways you can automate selling on Amazon.

Please note! This is not one of those posts where we’re secretly trying to get you to buy a bunch of stuff. We’ve found free alternatives where possible, and there are no affiliate links anywhere in this guide.

1. Keyword Research

One of the most common questions we hear from entrepreneurs transitioning from SEO for Google to selling on Amazon is, “How do I find good keywords?”

Well, the short answer is that there is no built-in keyword tool for Amazon.

Sorry.

However, you can manually perform keyword research for Amazon. (1) Identify a popular root keyword in Google’s Keyword Planner, then (2) enter that keyword into Amazon’s search bar followed by a letter to (3) get Search Suggestions for that keyword.

You can see this process in action below:

It won’t take long for you to realize that manually finding and recording the Search Suggestions for even one root keyword would quickly turn into a huge task.

What if you had a tool that automated this whole process for you?

Turns out, there’s a 100% free tool that does exactly that – it’s the KTD Amazon Keyword Tool. When you enter a keyword, it automatically queries Amazon’s search box for all the long-tail Search Suggestions for your keyword + each letter of the alphabet.

If you want a premium alternative, we’ve heard good things about MerchantWords (not an affiliate link), but keep in mind that these types of services don’t get their data from Amazon… At least not fully. They typically use a system that pulls data from major search engines, identifies matching queries in Amazon, and then use an algorithm to combine that data and give you estimated traffic numbers. Still may be worth checking out for some.

2. Product Re-Pricing

Once you win the Buy Box a few times, you’ll start running into a problem… Your competitors using the exact same tactics on you that you’re using on them. They’ll undercut you by a small amount to get placed above you in the Buy Box for your products.

What can you do about it?

Easy – invest in a tool that automatically reprices your products so that you always stay on top of the Buy Box. This is almost a requirement when you have lots of products for sale; there’s just no way to stay on top of pricing for all of them.

You have a few options if you want to invest in a product repricer, but the best one we’ve found is Sellery. It’s a straightforward application that gives you control over when and by how much you reprice your products. Here’s a screenshot of the interface:

For more info, here’s what one of their tech. guys had to say about how their system works and what it can do after Amazon updated their API a couple years ago:

This new API lets us provide real-time repricing (basically we can make changes to your prices as your competitors make changes, rather than waiting an hour to see if any changes need to be made), 100% accurate knowledge of Amazon’s offer, featured merchant status of your competitors and we’ll always know the lowest FBA offer, even when the “bucket” system would make it unavailable.

An alternative to Sellery is RepricerExpress. It does pretty much everything Sellery does with a similarly easy-to-use interface. The perks are that it’s a flat monthly rate instead of commission-based, and it claims to be one of the fastest large-volume repricers on the market.

(NOTE – Be careful when using Repricing Tools, and be sure to keep a close eye on all your product prices. Repricing errors are not unheard of, and they can be devastating.)

3. Listing, Inventory & Shipping Management

Finally, large volume sellers and vendors, especially those who sell their inventory across multiple platforms, will inevitably need a tool to manage inventory and shipping.

If you’re an Amazon-only seller, the best tool we can recommend is InventoryLab. It’s an all-in-one inventory management system. You can create product listings, keep track of shipments and inventory, manage income and expenses, and analyze your business’s growth and performance over time.

If you’re an Amazon seller AND an eBay seller (or a NewEgg seller, or one of the other six supported platforms), we recommend SellBrite. It sacrifices the accounting, financial and analytics tools of InventoryLab in favor of multi-channel inventory and listing management tools.

For example, SellBrite automatically keeps inventory for your Amazon store, eBay store and Etsy store all synced up so that you’re never showing duplicate products. You can also manage multiple stores on the same channel (if you have two Amazon accounts, for example). You can learn more about specific features on their website.

Final Words

Selling on Amazon doesn’t have to be intimidating, even if you’re a new seller. It’s the largest e-Commerce platform in the world, and now you have all the tools you need to make the most of it. But in the end, nothing beats getting your hands dirty and actually putting these Amazon ranking hacks to work!

What are you waiting for? Get out there and make some money!

TL;DR

• Win the Buy Box by making sure your offer is eligible, accurate, and priced a penny lower than the competition.
• Get easy sales by piggybacking on the ASINs of successful products.
• Drive traffic to your product pages using custom URL queries to “trick” Amazon into ranking your products for high-volume search terms.
• Create Vendor Powered Coupons if you’re competing in a tough niche because they’ll have their own independent Sales Rank.
• Automation is the ultimate secret to seller growth – identify which tools will help you make the most sales.

If you have any other Amazon ranking hacks, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below! See you there

The post 5 Dirty Hacks for Amazon Sellers to Dominate the Marketplace appeared first on StartupBros.

If you have been blogging for six months and haven’t made any money, this post will show you how to finally make money blogging.

If you are considering launching an online business, this post will make sure you don’t wait six months to make money.

If you have an idea, this post will show you how to make it matter (and make it profitable).

***

Everyone says, “Just help people and the money will follow.”

Not true.

First, you need a structure that captures value.

Then you can focus on helping people.

Each is “necessary but not sufficient”.

We were helping people with StartupBros for nearly two years with nearly zero compensation.

In the last couple months we brought in more than a quarter-million dollars.

We went from charging nothing for a set of ideas, to charging $497, to now charging $997.

How did this happen?

And how can you apply it to your own ideas?

Let’s take a look…

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” – Charlie Munger

The set of ideas I’m talking about is Will’s epic blog post: How You Can Make Big Money Importing From China–The Rise and Fall of My Empire….

It’s had millions of views and over 1400 comments. It’s used in forums and online communities around the world as the place to start if you want to start building an importing business.

It was valuable, but no money was coming in. What happened?

There was no quantum leap in the quality of information. No new breakthrough in technology.

The real improvement was in making the ideas more applicable.

We infused the ideas with power by building a structure and community around them. We’ll call this process institutionalization.

This matters for those who want to make money and/or change the world.

Let’s look at each.

1. Make More Money

It’s hard to make money blogging or writing a book. You need something else. Take a look:

The Bible vs James Patterson

James Patterson is one of the most widely read authors living. More people read his books to completion than the Bible probably.

The $96.96 billion difference is that the ideas of the Bible have been thoroughly institutionalized.

“Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all succeeded in relating larger ideas about the salvation of mankind to such subordinate material activities as managing weekend retreats, radio stations, restaurants, museums, lecture halls and clothing lines.” – Alain de Botton

The potential profit and power of an idea are found in their integration with everyday life.

If copies of the Bible were just passed out to be studied by people in their free time Christianity wouldn’t have gotten far.

It’s the rituals, communities, traditions, and live stories that ensured the ideas would matter for millennia.

Jesus didn’t pass out pamphlets. He told stories and made demonstrations.

The Billionaires’ Buddy

Peter Diamandis is a multi-multi-millionaire and friends with some of the world’s best-known billionaires. He hangs out with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Ray Kurzweil, and Richard Branson. He started an asteroid-mining company with a few of them. Tim Ferriss had him on his podcast recently and Tim talked about how lazy Peter made him feel.

Anyway, Peter released a new book recently. It’s supposed to be groundbreaking but it really isn’t. It’s about how new technologies allow change to happen rapidly at massive levels. We all know this.

I bring this up because the interesting thing is that he released the book not to release the book but to introduce everyone to his coaching program, Abundance 360. He doesn’t make money blogging, he barely makes any money on his book, he makes money creating educational platforms that provide structures for his written ideas.

Peter appreciates the power of books, sure, but he knows that any real change that comes out of his ideas are going to come through an institution. He’s created a massive structure to ensure that the ideas from Bold are actually used by creating a thoroughly structured program and vibrant community around them.

Some Examples:

• Star Wars is more than movies because it was institutionalized. Most of its profits have come of from activities that have little to do with the screen.
• Disney isn’t the empire it is today just because of it’s wonderful characters. It’s the process of bringing those characters off the screen and into our lives that makes it “magical”. The theme parks where we can go to live pieces of our favorite fantasy worlds, the stuffed animals, lunch boxes, and everything else that enter our everyday lives.
• Paul Graham reinvented the VC industry because he created a structure (an institution) around a series of popular essays and talks he gave. Y-Combinator is the manifestation of this. (Interestingly, Graham maintains that his essays will matter more in the long run.)
• Tony Robbins wrote a couple books decades ago then spent twenty years finding more powerful ways to deliver that information. He created structures that forced people to change. I would guess that 1% or less of his revenue comes from book sales. Books matter, freeing their ideas matters more.

“The task of a man is not to see what is dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” – Thomas Carlyle

Examples of simple, existing ideas being amplified:

• The Internet existed for many years before Marc Andreesen made it widely usable (and profitable for entrepreneurs) with Mosaic and then Netscape. It was always interesting, but it needed to be usable to be powerful.
• Microsoft unveiled the first tablet a full decade before the iPad, it just wasn’t easy enough to use. The same is true for MP3 players and smart phones. They each existed before Apple monopolized the markets. They made them easily useful.

• Warren Buffett follows investing rules that are mostly understandable. He has just been able to apply them within Berkshire Hathaway in ways that others couldn’t.
• Every sports player knows that mental toughness matters. John Wooden has been able to help his players actually get it.
• We all know that many of our anxieties are irrational. It may take a psychotherapist to help us make that knowledge applicable.

In our case, Will wrote an excellent post on creating an importing business. Millions of people read it. A few started businesses.

For most people it wasn’t actually useful though. They’d read it and forgot it. It was just too much to consider.
We read too much every day to put it all into action. Too many conflicting listicles. Too many potentially profitable ideas.

When the information was translated into a coaching program­–our now-infamous Importing Empire Jumpstart Group–it became much more powerful.

When a structure, improved delivery mechanism, motivation, community, and just-in-time information were added the ideas became exponentially more useful for those interested in starting their importing businesses.

It also became exponentially more profitable.

The blog post on it’s own made just about zero dollars. The coaching program brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars just in the last couple months.

There is money in leveraging great ideas.

2. Change the World

This section is for those who shun profitability in favor of changing the world. I argue that those serious thinkers who are sincere about changing the world have a moral obligation to institutionalize good ideas.

The British philosopher Alain de Botton makes this argument in Religion for Atheists:

“In his Republic, Plato conveyed a touching understanding (born from experience) of the limits of the lone intellectual, when he remarked that the world would not be set right until philosophers became kings, or philosopher kings. In other words, writing books can’t be enough if one wishes to change things. Thinkers must learn to master the power of institutions for their ideas to have any chance of achieving a pervasive influence on the world.”

We tend to overvalue the novel and undervalue the obvious solutions staring us in the face. Many times we just need to invest in a preexisting good idea, not find a new one.

The major problems of humanity aren’t novel:

• We want to feel like we’re a part of something.
• We want to believe in a better future.
• We want to make more money.
• We want to feel that this all means something.
• We want to have fun.
• We want to feel confident.
• We want to eat better food more conveniently.
• We want be entertained.
• We want Amazon same-day delivery!

A blog post about creating an importing business can be useful for some, entertaining for most. For a few, it was the only thing they needed to start their business.

When we created a coaching program out of it, though, we met a whole host of needs that a blog post couldn’t:

• A sense of community. They feel less lonely on their entrepreneurial journey. The power of this cannot be overstated. We’ll explore this more in-depth in the next section.
• The right info at the right time. The biggest challenge with reading books and blog posts is that the exact piece of information you need is never there. When you have smart humans to talk to you don’t need to guess at where to look.
• Motivation. MIT, Yale, Stanford and others put all their courses online for free. Virtually zero people take advantage of this. Why? Because they don’t have the professor motivating them. We are there to support our clients through doubts and get them excited about their future.
• New information. The program evolves to meet the needs of the clients. Some very popular books go through editions to stay up-to-date. Some information changes too fast to capture in any way but live.

Spreading an idea widely matters, sure. Depth may matter more.

A Buzzfeed article that reaches 1million people matters less than a coaching program that fundamentally changes the lives of 100 people.

This is hard to appreciate when everyone tells you to measure things by the amount of views or “Likes” something gets. The problem is that these don’t measure the actual impact something has. A funny gif is good for a laugh, but it won’t make any kind of shift in your life.

If you truly care about an idea, you have a responsibility to make it spread in the most powerful way possible.

Let’s look at how we turned a blog post into an institution, creating huge profits and impact.

How To: Identify, Create, and Deliver Your Online Course (OR: Make Your Idea Matter)

Time for the nitty-gritty.

There are a lot of ways to institutionalize an idea. We’ll focus here on only one: creating an online training program based on a set of ideas.

Following is an overview of everything you need to know to create a coaching program or course around your idea. Here is an overview:

1. Identifying a worthy idea
2. Fundamental decisions about your program
3. What you need to provide
4. The technical delivery mechanism for the program

1. Identifying A Potential Course

What course should you create?

For us, this was obvious. Will’s importing post had 1200+ comments that was driving a huge percentage of our traffic. Our inbox was flooded with people asking about importing—some offering to pay for help. Importing was the way to go.

Many times the answer is less obvious.

Here are some ways to get ideas:

• What do people ask you for advice about? This may be by email, social media, or in comments. Maybe it’s in person. If you can’t figure this out, try asking your best friend. Many times people close to us have more of an appreciation for these things than we do.
• What are other people in your niche selling? If someone else is doing a course on something successfully then there’s a market for it. (This is not to say that just because nobody is teaching a course there isn’t a market for it.)
• What blog post on your site has the best engagement? If it has a “how-to” element then this subject is a strong contender.
• Ask people what they want to know more about. If you already have a platform, ask your audience.
• Poke around in forums, Quora, reddit, and other online places where people look for advice. What are the common questions people ask?

There are a few filters that you need to run every idea through:

• Is it obvious who this information is for? If not, you may need to focus the idea.
• Can you promise a specific outcome for the course? The more specific the outcome the easier it is for people to envision what their life will be like after completing the program. This boosts sales and allows you to charge a premium for your product (the more specific the more you can charge, generally).
• Can you provide step-by-step instructions to complete the course? We all want to work with a program that works. It doesn’t have to be completely rigid but you should be able to break the program down pretty thoroughly. This makes it much more likely that (1) people will be interested in the program and that (2) people will complete the program.
• Have you used the information in the program? You should be able to show the results of you applying the steps to your own life. If you can’t do this, then using someone else’s results can work as well. For us, Will can talk about how he built a sizable importing business when he was in his early teens using the information in the program. There was more important information to be had, though, so we brought in specialized experts to fill in knowledge gaps. You don’t need to know it all!

If your idea is getting a lot of engagement and you can answer “yes” to the above four questions, then you’re on to something.

2. Fundamental Decisions About Your Business

Once you know what you’re going to teach your course in, a ton of new questions pop up. They can be overwhelming and feel like difficult decisions.

With the right frame these decisions become simple to make.

Static course vs live coaching program? (And our hybrid alternative.)

A static course is a collection of video files and PDFs that you can create one time and then deliver immediately to anyone who purchases it.

The benefits of a static course:

• Create once and then you can sell it forever.
• There is exactly zero extra work per new sale.
• You can sell this whenever you want, no need to stick to a schedule.

The drawbacks:

• It’s often more difficult charge premium prices.
• It’s more difficult to get feedback to know if it’s working.
• You aren’t able to create as strong of a connection to your clients.
• If you get popular people will pirate your stuff.

A live coaching program is delivered to a group of people live. You meet regularly with a group of people online to deliver new content and provide personal help as they need it. The benefits & drawbacks are essentially the reverse of a static course.

The benefits of a live coaching program:

• You can easily charge a lot more money.
• You can adapt the course in real time to make sure it’s meeting the needs of your clients.
• You create a powerful connection with your clients.
• It’s easier to build a community around the product that you will then be able to sell to others.
• Your coaching can’t be pirated.

The drawbacks:

• It takes a lot more time. You need to be there to help in real time.
• Every sale adds a level of new work.
• You have to launch on certain dates.
• You need to re-deliver the course every time.

Most people recommend the static course because it’s much more straightforward and you don’t have to give people ownership of your time.

We stumbled into a hybrid option with the importing coaching program. The thinking was: Well, we’ll start with a live course and then create a static course once we know exactly what people want.

After a while, we ended up in this “dynamic-static” program where we were doing live coaching while building up a library of static resources. Below is what our program looks like now. Think about which elements might be useful for your own program:

• Each Tuesday we hold a live presentation with an expert and record it. These recordings are broken up into chapters and uploaded to a member’s area where clients can reference them whenever they need to.
• We have a library of links, PDFs, templates, and other static resources that clients always have available.
• We have a vibrant client-only Facebook group where importers can discuss details of their businesses, the challenges they’re facing, and their successes.
• Forums for a more structured place for the community to interact. These community features have become some of the most useful bits of this program. It takes a lot of tender loving care to get them going, but completely worth it.
• A secret email address where clients can reach us and quickly get detailed responses.
• Significant discounts to the most important services that our group uses.

You can see here that we are able to take advantage of the benefits of the both the live and static programs.

My Recommendation:

If this is your first time at this and you have the time to do a live coaching program I would go with that. You will be able to charge more money and thus not need to get as many sales.

You’ll also be able to refine the structure of the program. This will help you create an effective static product later on if that’s what you want to do.

Pricing

Always charge more than you think you should.

With your first course, you won’t think you’re worth much money. We all take for granted the knowledge we have. You need to charge an uncomfortably large amount.

If you charge $97 when you should have charged $497 and you’re teaching a live course, you’re going to hate yourself and your clients halfway through.

We originally priced our program at $497 and thought it was way too much.

As soon as we started making sales people were blown away by how cheap it was. So we doubled the price to $997, it might go up again.

People are happy to pay for things that work.

If you don’t have information that works, don’t sell anything. If you do have information that works, sell it for what it’s worth. You can use your competitors to help make this decision.

Charging more also makes it much more exciting to make a sale. Two $497 sales in a day is something to be excited about, two $97 sales not so much. This helps keep your momentum going.

You’ll notice every price I mentioned ended in a “7”, it converts better than other numbers for some reason. I would follow that rule.

Also, accept payment plans if you can. Our $997 program has 3- and 6-month payment plans that help a lot of people get in that wouldn’t otherwise.

Minimum Amount of People

What would make it worth creating the course?

$1,000? $5,000? $10,000?

The number you pick really doesn’t matter, it’s just good to have a bar to aim for. A bar that, once hit, makes you happy to deliver the course.

For example, I was going to launch an e-book writing program a while ago. If I could get $10,000 in signups (that would be twenty at $497) by individually emailing those who expressed interest then I’d be happy to do it. I wasn’t able to hit that mark so I decided not to deliver the course.

To do this you’ll need to establish a launch date in the future so people don’t expect immediate access to the program.

Who Will Deliver the Course?

Can you do it or do you need to bring in outside experts?

Most people teach the entire course themselves.

Both can work well.

Experts can fill in your knowledge gaps while boosting the value of your course (making it easier to charge more money).

Should You Worry About Competition?

Yes and no, but mostly no.

If there are 100 other courses out there teaching exactly what you want to be teaching, that means it’s a healthy market.

Use your competition to help you find a gap in the market.

Are all the programs too complex? Make a simplified one.

Are they too basic? Make a more in-depth one.

Are they bland? Add more personality.

Are the unprofessional? Maybe you’re the one who can bring some class.

A lot of times the only differentiator you need is you. What is your story using this information? Once you can tell a compelling story about your experience you rarely need much more to make a sale.

Remember, at $497 a pop, ten sales amounts to $4970. You can make great money without making a ton of sales.

3. What Your Program Needs to Provide

Remember that you are creating a structure to make a set of ideas matter more.

That’s all your course needs to provide: a structure to make a particular set of ideas extremely actionable.

You can break this into two essential elements:

• Step-by-step Roadmap
• Motivation

Everything you do within the course will serve one of these two requirements.

Step-by-Step

In order for your program to be effective it should always be obvious to your participants what the next step is and the how to implement that step.

People need to know where they are in a process in order to gauge progress and make sure they’re heading in the right direction.

Let’s look at how this plays out in our importing course.

Anyone can read Will’s posts on importing and get the information they need to start an importing business. It’s even broken into a fairly thorough roadmap for the most part.

When people join the program, though, there are thorough instructions on the exact problem they are on. They know exactly what needs to be done and how to do it before moving to the next step.

The live part of the program strengthens this, they can ask if they are ready to move onto the next step and we can tell them.

They can focus on the step in front of them because they know it’s part of a larger system.

Of course, many things (like entrepreneurship) can’t be broken into an exact roadmap. That would be too simple. The job of the roadmap is getting them going in the right direction in a way that will allow them to find out everything they need on the way.

Motivation

Maybe the biggest downfall of books and blog posts is they’re overall inability to inspire us to put they’re information into action.

This ability to inspire action is becoming a more and more valuable skill. When all the information in the world is available to everyone, it’s the people who use it most effectively who win.

“The professor is then a good motivator first and foremost. Let’s hire good motivators. Let’s teach our professors how to motivate. Let’s judge them on that basis. Let’s treat professors more like athletics coaches, personal therapists, and preachers, because that is what they will evolve to be.” – Tyler Cowen, Average is Over

Doesn’t it feel like everyone is a life coach now? Everyone’s purpose in life is to inspire you.

These people, for the most part, are frightened, unemployed, and not worth listening to. However, more serious “motivators” are only becoming more important in our economy. Tyler Cowen explains in Average is Over (this is a little long):

When a person is not doing what he or she is supposed to be doing, someone has to deliver that message in just the right way. Show up on time! Don’t shop online at your desk! Sell more of our products! Listen more closely to our customers! It is a complicated communication because you are both making the person feel bad about what they have been doing and getting them willing to achieve better results. Expert coaching or motivating will be a competitive growth sector for jobs.

And just as conscientiousness will become a more important quality in labor markets, so will teaching and instilling conscientiousness become more important in the economy as a whole, a theme outlined by Daniel Akst in his brilliant yet neglected 2011 book We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess. A lot of new jobs will be coming in the area of motivation. These jobs will require some very serious skills, but again they won’t primarily be skills of a high tech nature or skills that are taught very well by our current colleges and universities. And again, these high expertise coaching jobs won’t be shipped overseas.

High-skilled performers, including business executives, will have some kind of coach. There will be too much value at stake to let high performers operate without a steady stream of external advice, even if that advice has to be applied rather subtly. Top doctors will have a coach, just as today’s top tennis players (and some of the mediocre ones) all have coaches. Today the coach of a CEO is very often the spouse, the personal assistant, or even a subordinate, or sometimes a member of the board of directors. Coaching is already remarkably important in our economy, and the high productivity of top earners will cause it to become essential.

What’s the point?

Being able to motivate people to use your information is essential.

If you’ve got a solid step-by-step roadmap down then you can often point to that and re-invigorate their belief in the process. Remind them of their goals.

This type of motivation is easier if you go with a live coaching program. You can hear people’s concern and remind them that many others have faced and triumphed over that very obstacle.

You can’t be providing one-on-one coaching sessions for everyone in your group, though. So you’ve got to build motivation into the structure.

Here are several ways you can build motivation into your program:

• Communities. This is the best way possible to keep large amounts of people motivated. You need to foster a positive community where people share their successes. In our group, people post “sample selfies” when they receive a sample order–the first large hurdle to creating an importing business. They will also post pictures of the first sizable paycheck they get from selling products. It’s no all positive, however, people need to be able to share their concerns as well. People will post in our Facebook group something like, “I’m feeling disheartened, I’ve been doing research for hours and nothing is working.” These are answered by successful importers who have gone through the group and know how tough it is at the beginning–it’s a group that will applaud you when you win and support you when you’re down. To implement this at first you may just want to create a private Facebook group. You can also use member only forums.

• Testimonials. We often collect stories from people doing well using our program. This is a HUGE help to motivate people because it’s proof that the roadmap you’ve given them does in fact lead where you say it does. Keep track of those doing well with your information and save their stories
• When people progress, cheer them on publicly. This boosts their motivation and everyone around them.
• Create a kind of achievement system to help participants appreciate how far they’ve progressed. It’s very easy to only see what you haven’t yet achieved and this can be demotivating, it’s up to you to remind them to look at what they’ve done.
• Reminders of the finish line. Many of our clients’ favorite live sessions are when someone comes on who has done exactly what they want to. In many cases it’s more important to have them show that it is possible than actually provide any new information. It’s hard for us to believe in a level of success we’ve never had before, so we default to thinking it’s not for us. Of course this is bollox, we just need to be reminded that it’s possible.

There are all sorts of ways to boost people’s motivation.

This isn’t optional. If you have the best information in the world but can’t convince anyone to use it, you’re screwed.

If you have sub-part information but get people to put it into action, you win.

And, let’s not forget: your customers win.

4. The Tech: How to Deliver Your Course

I am not going to go deep into this. There are new options popping up every day, most of them aren’t very good.

We’ll look at an overview of the tech we use to deliver our importing training program:

(Keep in mind this is nowhere near an exhaustive list. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask in the comments.)

• We use GoToWebinar host our live sessions. There are a ton of newer options with cool features out but none are as reliable. Reliability matters a lot, and GoToWebinar does everything we need, we’re sticking with it.

• After recording the videos from GoToWebinar, we upload them to Wistia, a video-hosting service. This is expensive; you may want to go with Vimeo

• Once these videos are uploaded, we need to embed them in our member’s site so that everyone can access them. This area was built with OptimizePress. It’s where our members can log in and view past recordings. Here are a couple screenshots from our OptimizePress Members’ area:

• Amazon S3 to host many of our recourses like PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, etc.

• We used Facebook exclusively for our private community at first. Recently, we’ve added forums using InvisionPower Board.

• We use Help Scout so that our growing team can make sure that we answer all of our client’s emails quickly while keeping track of other team member’s interactions with a client.

This is deceivingly simple. Here are some of the important services that we use to get manage clients and get ready for the program:

• LeadPages helps us easily create landing pages to collect email addresses. (This is one of our essential tools, you can see a demo here.) You’ve probably seen this page:

• Office Autopilot(Ontraport) allows us to manage the various email addresses we collect, manage our clients and potential clients, send out emails to large groups of people, create payment pages, and all sorts of other stuff.
• Visual Website Optimizer allows us to test our pages to make sure they are converting at the highest rates possible. This tool alone has the potential to multiply the value of a single landing page.
• PayPal and PayLeap process payments so that people can actually join our programs.
• WordPress enables about 23% of the Internet and StartupBros is a proud member of that 23%.
• Facebook Ads have been the best advertisement outlet for us by far. This may change, but for now it’s treating us well.

Again, this list is not meant to provide a comprehensive list of tools you need in order to deliver an online course. My aim is to provide you an overview of some of the essential tools that you may want to use when launching your own course.

If you’re interested in learning more about how specifically to implement these tools, let me know, I’m happy to talk about this quite a bit more.

TL;DR: Bringing It All Together

College graduates today are expected to change their careers three times by the time they’re 38.

Going back to get another degree each time isn’t an option. They need faster, cheaper, and more effective education. If you have an idea of how to solve this, you’re in luck.

This is one of an infinite set of possibilities.

There are a slew of other problems and skills that universities don’t even attempt to help us with. Just a few:

• Nutrition
• Self-control
• Purpose
• Depression
• Internet marketing
• Copywriting
• Storytelling
• Creating sales funnels
• Selling
• Networking
• Self-confidence
• Exercise
• Public speaking
• Typing
• Programming
• Raising capital
• … on and on

If you can create a solution to any human problem, you’ve located an opportunity.

You can write a book or blog post, but this is leaving a lot on the table. If you stop at writing about something then your work will be worth much less money to you and much less to society.

In order for an idea to change the world and create true wealth it must be institutionalized.

This means embodying it, creating a structure around it, and making it actionable.

You can do this in many ways. Different ideas require different structures. I have provided one possibility: that of creating an online training program around your idea.

This model has been popular with charlatans and “internet marketers” for years but is now reaching the mainstream and is demanding to be taken seriously.

Coaching and consulting are massive growth industries in a world where the efforts of certain individuals are becoming more leveraged than ever before. Creating an online training program is the most effective way to take advantage of this trend.

You are already capable of creating a course. You just need to realize it. Use the indicators I suggested to looks for ideas you may be able use for your own training program.

If this idea meets the requirements we discussed then begin to move forward.

You don’t need a degree or a certification. You only need to deliver valuable information in a valuable way.

Don’t let the impostor syndrome hold you back. If people ask your advice on a certain subject it’s safe to say that you know something about that subject. You’ll never know everything–nobody does–but you know enough to help people make better decisions than they’d be able to otherwise.

Traditional jobs aren’t coming back. The economy is doing well, but this only matters for people who know how to do well in this economy. Great teachers, coaches, and consultants are doing great.

Stop getting frustrated because your ideas lay dormant. Give them the power they deserve.

What Do You Need? (I Need You!)

I am going to be discussing this much more but I need to know from you what specifically you need to know more about.

What is unclear? Where are you getting stuck? What are your fears about this?

The post The Best Way to Make Money Blogging (And Change the World) appeared first on StartupBros.

“I quit!”

There, you said it. Or you said it in your mind. You dreamed it again. You dream about starting a company and walking into your boss’s office and quitting your job.

What’s stopping you? Oh, about a million things including your mortgage and putting food on the table. You’re probably thinking, “I’m not rich. How in the world can I start a company?”

But you have an idea, and you’re sure it’s a good idea. How can you take your good idea and turn it into a company while you still have your day job?

I have worked with, invested in, and advised a lot of different founders as a venture capitalist, a founder myself, and a mentor to startups. I have also interviewed dozens of ‘mid-life’ entrepreneurs for my forthcoming book Never too Late to Startup. One thing I hear pretty frequently is from people with ideas who can’t figure out how to turn those into businesses.

Here are 12 proven steps to starting a business while working full time:

1. Throw Away Your Business Plan!

If you have taken any business classes, or perhaps got an MBA, you almost certainly heard about a “magical” document called a business plan. Perhaps you even wrote one. I sure did when I got my MBA. When I was a venture capitalist, I read hundreds of them. It used to be startup gospel that you had to have a business plan.

The reality of the startup world is that business plans are obsolete only moments after you write them. Extensive market research doesn’t really help you come up with a great product that customers will love. Detailed financial plans will be wrong as soon as you change the price point, or the marketing channel, or the features.

But it’s not as though planning itself has no value. It does. It’s just that what your product is, what your value proposition is, and how you’re going to market and sell it, is likely going to change significantly after you start building and getting real customer feedback. The boxer Mike Tyson once said “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Instead of a business plan, I recommend using a 1 page document to list out your assumptions about the business. There are a number of templates out there to help you do this in an organized fashion. The most popular one is called Business Model Canvas, although I prefer a variant of it called Lean Canvas created by Ash Maurya (named after the so-called “Lean Startup” movement which emphasizes moving quickly and staying small until you have validated many of your assumptions).

Here is an example from Furld.com, a web based tool to help startups. (I have no affiliation with Furld.)

Any of these types of tools will do the job of helping you think through and write down your most important assumptions:

• What problem does your product solve?
• What is your product?
• Who are your target customers?
• What is really unique about it?
• How are you planning to distribute your product to customers?
• Where will your revenue come from?
• What are your major costs?

This type of plan is perfect if your have a day job, because it takes a lot less time than an old style business plan, and your time is precious.

2. Get Your Legal Ducks in a Row to Make Sure You Don’t Cross Your Current Employer

One thing you need to do is to make sure you are on solid legal ground so your employer can’t come after you when your startup is a raging success. The easiest way to avoid any trouble is to be sure you are working on an idea that is unrelated to the business of your employer, and to work on it on your own time and with your own equipment.

Look through your non-disclosure and other employment agreements to see what your company’s policies are. The law varies by state as to what your employer can and can’t ask of you. It also really depends if you are working on something that will compete with them, or something that came out of your work with them. Typically, both of those are no-nos. The other document to look at, if you signed one, is your assignment agreement. This says that your ideas related to your employers’ business belong to them.

You might want to consult with a lawyer. John Gilluly, partner at DLA Piper and one of the leading startup lawyers in the country, suggests that getting this wrong can result in getting fired, or in having your new company’s intellectual property be subject to claims from your employer. Make sure you go through these documents and this process so you don’t have to worry about any of that.

3. Look for Co-Founder Who Fits Like a Glove

Startups are tough, and they are even tougher when you try to do them alone. While there are plenty of examples of great startups with one founder, having a good cofounder increases your chances of success. Cofounders add to your company’s skills, they share the workload and improve company productivity, and they are someone with whom you can share the emotional burden.

Don’t take my work for it. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and investor in tons of successful companies recently said:

“Most often two or three people is much better. When I look at these things as an investor, and I say ‘What is a good composition of a project and founders that are likely to succeed?’ It’s usually two or three of them.”

That said, cofounder disagreements are one of the leading causes of startup failure. So what to do?

Think about it like a marriage. Try to start your company with someone you know you are compatible, preferably someone you have worked with before. If that’s not possible, think about a “try before you buy” arrangement where you both “test things out” during your night and weekend work.

And always, always put in place a vesting schedule for equity in the business so if your cofounder decides to leave (or any employee for that matter), they don’t take a large chunk of the ownership of the company with them.

But don’t delay starting your company because you can’t find a cofounder. You’re better off starting, getting some momentum, and then finding someone. It will probably be easier that way, anyway, since your cofounder will see the progress you have made.

4. Test Your Idea Like Crazy

Just because you have a great idea does not mean the market is going to agree. You already listed out your assumptions in the Lean Canvas exercise above. Now it’s time to put those assumptions to the test.

Testing your idea rigorously is the best way to reduce startup risks. Doing this while you’re still working is a little tricky, and time consuming, so it’s going to require thought and planning. Here are a couple ways to begin:

1. Customer Interviews: As startup guru Steve Blank preaches, you need to get ‘out of the building’ to interview your prospects and see if they actually have the pain/problem that you think they have. You can find out a lot from these interviews. Try to learn how big the problem is to them, how they would use your product/service to solve it, how entrenched they are in their current way of solving it, and what it’s worth to them to solve it a better way.

2. Prototypes: The goal of a prototype is to deliver the bare minimum product that meets the highest pain point of your customer. In startup lingo, this is called an MVP, or Minimally Viable Product. Keep it inexpensive at this point. The goal here is to get user feedback so you can change the product. The most important thing at this stage is to keep an open mind. The customers may not share your vision–you need to meet them where they live. After all, they’re the ones who matter.

A good example of this is Van Barker, who spent decades in corporate America working for companies like Hewlett Packard and Pepsico before founding Yardstash, an outdoor bike storage company, as a side project. He was able to get it to over $250,000 in sales through eCommerce before quitting his day job.

For Van, the prototype process allowed him to significantly improve the product. “With our prototypes, I got them in the hands of bike owners and learned a lot. We were able to use the feedback to improve the quality, and we changed the design to make the units easier to assemble. The next design cost less to make as well.”

3. Surveys: Surveys are a great way to reach hundreds or even thousands of prospects. Surveys are a extension of customer interviews because it’s hard to interview enough customers. Tools like SurveyMonkey make it super easy to run a survey and get analysis of the results. Unlike in interviews, you want to ask more ‘closed’ questions with a range of numerical answers, and don’t pitch or sell in the survey. Use a 5 point or 7 point scale, so respondents can answer on a range. It makes it MUCH easier to find patterns in the answers.

Example of Bad Survey Questions:

What do you think about XYZ idea?

Tell me about your problems with medical paperwork.

Examples of Good Survey Questions:

Do you file your medical bills?

1. Never, I don’t even open them
2. Sometimes.
3. I try to but sometimes I can’t get to it
4. Almost always
5. Always. I make a point to do it

4. Use the Interactivity and Reach of Internet: It is pretty easy to set up a basic web site and test your concept very inexpensively on real live prospects. You can use an inexpensive product like LeadPages to set up a few different descriptions and see which ones customers like more. You should also use Google Adwords to see if people are using Google to search for answers related to your startup. This is a good sign, because it means there are customers out there for you. You can test advertising on AdWords or Facebook to see if you can get consumers to click. This can be a good proxy for how much it’s going to cost you to get new customers.

5. Don’t Make This a Hobby

All of us have hobbies like cooking, gardening, Yoga, reading, dancing, etc. But I can’t think of anyone who sets goals with their hobbies, with targets and deadlines, and tries to rigorously adhere to them.

To turn your idea into a thriving business, you need to set goals for your startup and hold yourself accountable to them. Plan out your next steps, with dates and specifics as best you can. This is one more reason why it’s helpful to have cofounders, since you can help hold each other accountable.

I get it- you have a busy life with a job, family, kids, book club, etc. It is simply way too easy to put off the work on your business until tomorrow. Setting concrete goals like “Write Web site copy by next Tuesday” or “Interview 10 customer prospects in the next 30 days” will help you get past that natural inclination to put things off.

I am NOT suggesting that you try to create a detailed plan for everything for months and months. There is simply too much that you don’t know for that to work. But knowing the next few steps, and forcing yourself to get it done on a time schedule, will create positive momentum and also will create clarity about the steps that follow. As noted entrepreneur and former corporate CEO Michael Hyatt says, “We only begin to get clarity when we get in motion.”

6. Don’t Be a Scrooge

Your natural instinct might be to save aggressively in preparation for the time when you are full-time on your startup and you have a much lower income. Certainly many financial experts will tell you to do that.

I think about it a little differently. I think you should take any extra money you have and invest it in your startup. Spend some money on Google Adwords and start building an email list. Get some inventory of your new product. Get professional business cards. Attend networking events. Hire a virtual administrator.

Obviously, you don’t want to go crazy here and waste tons of money. But small investments to get your business moving faster—generating more revenue, building your network, getting good legal counsel or patent protection, setting the stage for this business to be viable and support you and your dreams- these are good investments.

Good investments: Anything that helps you get your idea to market quickly & grow your customer base

• Basic URL and web site
• World class people, either full time or contractors
• Surveys, interviews, and prototypes to get closer to understanding whether the market wants your product/service
• Marketing that brings in interested customers and is testable (like Facebook, Google, Twitter)
• Legal counsel (expensive but worth it)- See if you can get discounts

Not so good investments: Most other things that you can avoid, penny pinch on, or defer

• Overhead like rent (work out of your house), furniture, expensive computers, travel (unless it’s to see prospective customers)
• Branding
• Expensive logos
• Market research studies / reports
• Accountants (your numbers are simple, use Quickbooks)

7. Start Generating Revenue

If you have done your homework and spoken with enough customers, you will find customers willing to pay you for your MVP or a variant of it.

Paying customers changes everything. It takes you past the “Yeah that sounds like an interesting solution” to “I’m willing to pay you for your solution to help solve my problem.” Once you have paying customers, you can ramp up marketing and sales by looking for more like them. You might be able to use your early customers as testimonials. They might even refer you to other prospects.

Trust me, emotionally, there is almost nothing that makes you believe that “This can be a business” than paying customers. And eventually, you’ll have enough of them for your business to support you and let you get rid of your day job.

8. Network Like Crazy

Use the fact that you still have a job as fuel to network like crazy. Having a job is great, because you interact regularly with other employees, customers, vendors, even competitors.

Network inside the company as well as outside. Try to meet people who can be potential employees, potential customers, potential contractors, potential advisors and mentors, and potential investors.

These connections are all potentially valuable. You know how it goes with networking: you’ll meet someone who knows someone who is looking right now for a solution to the one your startup will solve.

Do not overlook the idea of finding mentors now, before you need them. Those could be formal relationships, or they could simply be people you will call when you have a question that they can answer.

9. The Secret to Why You Don’t Want Investors

It’s not that you don’t want investors ever, it’s that you don’t want investors yet.

When I was a venture capitalist, we used to see founders with good ideas who wanted investment so they could quit their jobs and pursue their business. I understand the logic, it makes sense.

But to the investor, if you have not moved the business along, tested the concept on real customers, built a prototype, or tested your marketing assumptions, you simply don’t look serious. Investors almost always want to see you working full time on the business so they think you are maximizing their chance to get a return on their investment.

Even if you could get investors interested, your lack of traction would put a very low value on your company at this point. So low that you would need to give up a very large piece to the investors.

Finally, there is your time to consider. This isn’t like Shark Tank, where you show up and pitch. The process takes much longer than that to identify the right investors, to pitch them, and to go through their due diligence process. You are much better off at this point using that investment in time to move your business forward.

10. Make Your Nights and Weekends Count

I think it was Oprah Winfrey who said, “You can have it all, just not all at once.” This is the perfect quote for the time when you’re pulling double duty in your day job and building your startup. If you have other commitments, like kids or a spouse, it can feel like triple duty.

If you’re starting to see traction in your startup, now is the time to make those nights and weekends count. I’m not saying drop everything, but be willing to make some tradeoffs so that you can meet your goals. Your time is your most valuable resource right now, so use it wisely.

The reality is that this might be the time to put some things on the back burner. For these next six months, you might not be able to coach soccer, or take a long vacation, or do your regular poker night or book club.

If you find yourself getting stuck, as many of us do, just try to keep things moving. You can get yourself unstuck by only focusing on the next step. Break down the problem, write it out, and use baby steps to get yourself moving again.

11. Act Like a Big Company even When You Have No Employees

It’s easy to think that you are a 1 person business (or 2-3 person if you have some cofounders or employees). But the outside world doesn’t know how big you are, only that you have a product/service they are interested in. It is important to project a professional image about your company in terms of your web site, your customer service, your fulfillment, your appointment setting and your follow up.

You can find freelancers who can help you to test the concept, and to execute on it. It’s all there on the Internet. If you need freelance programmers- try oDesk or eLance; outside suppliers or manufacturers- try Alibaba; graphic design or marketing- try 99designs or Fiverr; personal assistants to answer phones, set appointments, or book travel- try eaHelp.com, GetFriday, or Brickwork; eCommerce fulfilment- try Fulfilment by Amazon; general tasks and To Dos- try TaskRabbit or Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The bottom line is, you can use these outside services to manage a pretty extensive operation without YOU needing to do it all. This will enable you to grow the business to a sufficient size that you can consider quitting your job.

12. Jump In Full Time (and Quit)

If you have taken all of these steps, you have a growing business that has launched a basic product or service. Starting a business while working full time is much different than running and growing a business while working full time. You have paying customers and a good idea of how to market and sell to find more. You have tapped your network for help and you know your go-to mentors and advisors. And you’re using virtual resources to help grow your business and project a larger more professional company to the outside world.

When is it time to quit your job and go full time on your startup? It’s probably before you’re ready. The right time is probably once you have proven that you can deliver a product or service that customers want. It’s likely before you can replicate your full day job salary, but when you have line of sight as to how that will happen.

As Michael Hyatt says,

“It’s not when you feel comfortable. At some point you say, I’m going for it.”

The Reason Most “Wantrepreneurs” Never Make it Happen

It’s easy to read a list like this, but really, really hard to actually do it. I know it feels like you need more time and a bunch of money to start a company.

You don’t.

Achieving your dreams requires work. It will take time, energy, dedication, and courage.

Close your eyes and think about your “I quit” moment or about walking into your new office with your company’s name on the door.

Now open them again and start planning your future as an entrepreneur.

The post 12 Steps: Starting A Business While Working Full Time appeared first on StartupBros.

If you run an online business you’ve probably learned that it’s a HUGE battle to get traffic, especially if your website is new.

You’ve got no search engine rankings, no connections and no idea how to get thousands of people to your site.

You have to fight to for every single visitor that you get.

I feel your pain. I’ve been there. But I learned how to overcome that problem by using reddit to drive high quality traffic to my sites for the last 9 months. It’s been a total game changer!

In fact, one simple reddit post got 625 sign ups to my brand new product in just 9 days. Yes you read that right! Not 625 visitors, 625 sign ups.

Not too shabby!

I’ll be honest with you. Right now, you will not be able to replicate these results. Why?

The truth is…

Redditors Hate You

If you were to start promoting your site on reddit right now, you’d be likely to join the thousands of “Reddit Marketers” that get laughed off of the site. You see, the trick to reddit marketing is, well, to not market.

Redditors aren’t big fans of self promotion. In fact, there is a special fiery hatred within every redditors’ heart toward shameless self-promoters.

They can smell marketers from a mile away, and they’re not afraid to let you know that they hate you. If they don’t like your post, they will downvote it, bad mouth you, humiliate you and try to get you banned.

So what can you do? Most marketers that I know have either actually got banned, or have just given up.

I don’t blame them either…

It’s true that reddit marketing is a tough cookie to crack, but I’m here to tell you, you can crack it. I’m going to show you how I use it to regularly promote my sites.

My First Shot Case Study

Way back in the day, Spring of 2014 that is, I decided to figure this reddit thing out.

I already liked the site, and I still visit it on a regular basis for an endless supply of GIF images to laugh at:

It was here that I witnessed some “Reddit Marketers” being treated in some of the worst ways imaginable. I knew I couldn’t do what they were doing, if I wanted my share of the 71 billion pageviews reddit gets each year.

At the time I ran a site that allowed me great flexibility in what content I could create. I found myself constantly using reddit to find ideas of things to write about.

Then it hit me…

A Reddit-Revelation in Plain Sight

I thought: I could come up with so much content that would fit in well in these subreddits.

This was an invaluable lesson…

In order to be successful with reddit marketing, you can’t be a marketer. You have to be a redditor

You have to share their passions! But more importantly, you have to share their hatred for self-promotion. Only share something with the community if you think it’s awesome.

That’s exactly what everyone else on the reddit does! It doesn’t matter where the content comes from, even if it’s from your own site.

After I realized this, I started to use reddit normally. I interacted on the site, posted cool links that I found and upvoted other posts. Just as the average redditor would do.

One day, I decided to post an article of my own. Here are the results:

(I have no idea why I was using Statcounter instead of Google Analytics back then)

reddit was the only public place that I had ever promoted this site. I only posted 2 links and they managed to get a large initial influx of visitors as well as “stick” and generate some consistent traffic over time.

Here are the 2 posts that I used on reddit:

Nothing too special about them right?

But as Confucius once said “It’s not the reddit post, but the redditor behind that post that defines you.”

I knew I was onto something.

I moved on from that project, but I kept this in my tool belt. Over the past 9 months I have spent a lot of time refining and testing this process into a system that I’m going to share with you below.

There are 10 steps you need to follow to be successful on reddit. Skipping even one of these can ruin your reputation on the site, or risk get you banned.

Follow these steps closely, though, and you’ll have the power to send thousands of visitors to your site on demand.

10 Steps to reddit Marketing Success, and the Results that They Bring

Beginner Steps:

1. Keep It Relevant

If you want to get large amounts of traffic from reddit, you have to keep your posts highly relevant to the users.

This means that the more that you can tailor your posts to the subreddit that you’re posting in, the better. Avoid posting content that addresses too broad of an audience.

This requires you to do a little bit of research into your subreddit and see what kinds of posts are already popular. Get a feel for your audience there. Then you will be more equipped to create a popular post of your own.

If the end goal of your site is to sell a product or get subscribers, you will need to do some customer development first.

This will ensure that you’re in touch with what your audience wants, while saving you a ton of time in the long run.

2. Only Post Great Content

Only post your best content on reddit!

Short and generic content will not perform well. It will also get down-voted and you’ll lose any valuable reputation points (karma) that you have.

Only post content that is in-depth, unique, well-written, helpful and actionable. Wherever you post your article, reddit users are going to click on it to check it out. What they think of it (either upvote or down vote) will dictate your results.

3. No Double Dipping

Don’t start getting greedy on me now!  

I’ll admit, the big win is addictive. 

When you log in to your analytics account and see that spike in traffic and realize: “Oh yeah, I posted on reddit –  and it only took me 2 seconds!”

Usually the next natural thought is “I should be doing this all the time!”

But that’s where you can get yourself in trouble. Stay out of “hot” areas. This means that if you just posted a link in a subreddit, let it rest for a while! I usually wait 2 weeks to a month before I post another link of my own in the same subreddit.

4. Have fun

This is possibly the most important point on the list that impatient marketers overlook.

This is why ‘the other guys’ are terrible at getting traffic from reddit.

You need to be a normal reddit user.

Remember, you can’t be a marketer, you have to be a redditor.

Interact with the rest of the site. Build up a post history that shows that you’re a normal user. Build up your karma points by posting helpful or funny comments on other posts.

Does this mean that you’re going to have to spend hours on end seemingly wasting time on the site?

No way!

All it takes is about 10 minutes a week talking about your favorite subjects or commenting on some of those funny GIF images. The interesting thing about reddit users is that they are generally very passionate about the site.

If they think that they smell a “marketer,” they WILL go and look at your post history and see if your posting pattern confirms their suspicion. If you have a good amount of normal posts, you will prove them wrong!

Not to mention “having fun” on subreddits relevant to your niche will give you a sense of what posts are popular there, so you can model them to create popular posts of your own.

Following the above guidelines has allowed me to achieve these results to the site that I am working with now.

reddit never existed as a traffic source for this site before I began applying these techniques.

Do you know what it took to get those 1,104 clicks from reddit?  Drumroll please…

A grand total of 3 posts.

I’ll be modest and say that it took me a minute to create each post. That’s not bad traffic ROI for only spending 3 minutes.

Here’s a screenshot of the reddit traffic my first week helping promote this site. This was from a single post.

Advanced Steps:

Follow these steps and they will allow you to keep a positive reputation on reddit and sustain the above results.

5. Address the Concerns of the Community Before They Have Them

Steps 1-4 can get you far, but if you want to take it to the next level (which I’m sure you do) you can’t stop there!

Addressing the community’s concerns before they have them ties in with step 4 on the list. If you post links to your site on reddit, there will be a lot of users that will to try to find an excuse to down vote your posts, report you to moderators, bad mouth you etc.

What you have to do is beat them to the punch and address all of their concerns before they can get a word in.

I’ll show you how I did it while promoting my first Udemy course.

You can use text posts to help you promote something. The idea is to provide value and explain yourself before you ask users to click through to your site. You can be honest about the content being yours as long as it is genuinely helpful

Here’s exactly how I did it:

Posting Udemy courses in the entrepreneur subreddit has been a hot topic lately. So many of the users there complain because people make terrible courses and spam the entrepreneur subreddit. There are some posts like this that are actually valuable content (like mine ) but many users want to ban these types of threads and down vote them viciously.

Even in the midst of all of that trouble, by using this technique I managed to attract zero negative comments, and make the controversial list because lots of users were upvoting, while others were down voting.  In the end, making the controversial list only got me more traffic. More on that a little later.

 6. Don’t Ever Let Your First (or second) Post be a Promotion

This should go without saying, but if you’re new to a subreddit, be sure to post a few other things in that there first before you decide to promote anything of your own. I made this point short, since the last one was so long.

7. Don’t Over-Promote.

You may think that if you don’t promote your site repeatedly in the same Subreddit that you’ll be fine. But this is yet another big reddit no-no.

reddit moderators and users can see your site-wide activity.

Not to mention that they have automatic spam filters.

If you post links to the same domain name too often you run a huge risk. reddit’s automatic spam filters will blacklist your domain, so that if ANYONE posts it, it won’t show up. They can also “ghost” your account which is a special kind of punishment for spammers. Getting ghosted means that none of your posts ever show up to anyone but you. So you can post as much as you want, but they will never show up to anyone else.

Don’t abuse the system, and you’ll be safe.

So what happened with the Udemy course?

Long story short, other people began to do my work for me.

reddit is a great source of content for everyone. If users see something of value, they will share it. I only posted that text post 9 days before I wrote this post.

The results?

Look at that—652 students enrolled in the course!

And yes, reddit is the only public place that I’ve posted the link. Other redditors shared my link in many other places, which boosted my traffic and got me a surprising amount of sign ups, considering I was only shooting for 50. I’ll attribute about 15-30 students to me privately emailing people. So let’s call it 625 students resulting from one post on reddit.

Here is how google analytics registered the traffic that I was getting:

Notice the high rate of engagement! All traffic driven to this campaign was very interested in what I had to offer, which again is no easy feat with many other traffic sources.

Pro Tips

 8. Share Your New Posts With Your Friends

Even if you do not have a team, you should still have a group of people or a network that you can share your content with. This step entails you sending your new reddit posts to your friends (or Twitter followers) that are also reddit users. If they like what you posted, they’ll give you an upvote, which will attract other reddit users, and get the ball rolling for your post to get very popular.

Whenever I post anything on reddit, I immediately send it to a few of my friends that are on reddit. This popular post of mine, started with just a few upvotes, by the first people that I sent it to.

Once it was upvoted, other redditors knew that the post was worth their time to check out.

9. Comment and Reply to Everyone

Activity on your reddit post breeds more activity.

This means that when someone comments on your post, reply to their comment to double the comment count. When posts have lots of comments, it gets more redditors to click on your post, and join the conversation.

You can even be the first one to comment on a link that you post. I’ve used this method before to explain the content that I’ve posted and get the conversation started. With the same post above, I’ve stayed very active in the comments, to add lots of activity to the thread.

Here’s the comment count:

This looks like a lot of activity on a post, although 10 of the comments are my own.

 10. Be Humble

Most people take criticism on their post as a bad thing.

But you can use it as one of your biggest advantages.

Here’s how:

When you post and reply to comments, be sure to keep your tone humble.

Not only will this help you with number 5 on the list (Address the Concerns of the Community Before They Have Them), it will also help you to get better at using reddit to drive traffic and customers to your website. When you reply to comments, be sure to learn as much from your commenters as you can.

If they criticize you use their criticism to ask questions.

State that you actively follow the rules, and that you aim to add value to the community.

The reddit self promotion guidelines they state: “It’s perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it’s not okay to be a website with a reddit account.”

If you follow this checklist, you will be following the rules of reddit.

Remind the community of this, and ask how you can better contribute your content. You’ll be surprised how much the commenters will help you get better at promoting your content.

I practice this in all of my posts, and it has allowed me to keep a very positive reputation on reddit, while learning how to get better at driving traffic to my sites.

To make sure that these points stick with you, we’ve created an infographic “cheat sheet” that you can always use as a quick reference.

Download it, share it, print it, but whatever you do be sure to use it.

Too Long, Didn’t Read–The Cheat Sheet:

11. Bonus Step: Advertise

If you have an offer that you’d really like to send a lot of traffic to, then ADVERTISE!

Getting started with reddit ads is super cheap ($5 minimum) and you can send targeted traffic directly to an offer for $1 for 1000 ad impressions.

Paid ads that I currently run get 1%+ click through rates when everyone else averages 0.2%.

That’s 5X the average CTR of reddit ads!

Not only are the click through rates good, but the traffic to my landing pages has converted between 20-25%.

I’m not 100% done testing this out yet, but I’m planning on creating a guide on this very soon once I get some solid results and continue to fine tune the process.

Stay tuned, and I’ll be sure to send it to you for Free!

Conclusion:

Don’t be a “Reddit Marketer!”

Be a redditor.

Spend an extra 10 minutes a week to use the site normally, and get a feel for the community.

Follow this guide and you will be well on your way to being an upstanding reddit user, that also happens to own a website. You’ll also be well on your way to being able to drive thousands of visitors to your site on demand.

I’ll be hanging out in the comments, and responding to everyone’s comments and answering any questions.

The post Cracking Reddit: How to Get Thousands of Visitors to Your Campaign with Reddit Marketing appeared first on StartupBros.

[Kyle’s note: Remember that product ideas are business ideas. Sarah knocked it out of the park with this post, I think you’ll love it.]

It’s daunting, isn’t it?

You want to start a business, but you don’t have the time or money to test idea after idea only to discover that they won’t be profitable.

You don’t want to be a statistic: just another wantrepreneur whose business idea failed.

But what if I told you that you can learn exactly what people want?

That your target market will practically come to you with ideas. And that if you do the right research, your idea is almost guaranteed to succeed.

It’s true.

And the best part is that you can do it in a weekend.

After reading this post, you will know exactly how to do this research to find the perfect business idea that people will actually pay you for.

You don’t need a 160-page business plan. You don’t need focus groups. You don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars to test the market.

You just need to get into the minds of your target market.

Luckily, that’s easier than ever before.

4 Free Tools To Get Into Your Target Market’s Heads and Find Out Exactly What They Want

When you are frustrated with something, or have a question, what do you do?

Chances are, you’ve tried to find a solution online.

Maybe you’ve asked a question on Twitter or searched Google to find experts who can answer your question or fix your problem.

If you’ve ever done that, you’re not alone.

That is why it’s actually easy to get into your target market’s heads to find out exactly what they struggle with.

Which is great because successful businesses all have one thing in common: they solve a problem that the target market is experiencing.

And when you can discover problems your target market is experiencing, you can develop a business that solves those problems – a business you know will be successful.

You just need these four free tools that you may already using.

Read on to learn which tools will leave you with a profitable business idea.

Tool #1: Use Reddit to Snoop Your Target Market’s Conversations

Have you ever found something so useful to you that it almost feels like cheating?

You feel like you’re snooping or taking shortcuts, even though what you’re doing is completely legitimate.

That’s how Reddit is for market research.

Reddit is a social networking, news, and entertainment community that allows users to submit links, images, and questions.

Reddit sees over 174 Million unique visitors per month.

The volume of users on Reddit and the nature of the site make Reddit an incredibly useful tool for market research.

You can use Reddit in two different ways to find a successful businessƒ idea:

1. Subreddits
2. Search Reddit

To illustrate both of the ways Reddit can be used to find the perfect business idea, I’ll use an example of finding a business idea with my target market of photographers.

Subreddits

Subreddits are smaller communities within Reddit surrounding a specific topic.

A Subreddit can be found two ways:

1. Typing in the Subreddit keyword using this formula: com/r/[keyword]
2. Using the Subreddit directory.

For example, with my target market of photographers, the photography Subreddit is: reddit.com/r/photography.

The photography Subreddit is nicely laid out, so you can sort the different topics: questions, official threads, info threads, and wikis:

Note the up and down arrows beside a question or link, with either a number or a dot between the arrows. That shows how many times the comment has been “upvoted.”

The more a question has been upvoted, the more likely other people have the same question.

Start by copying and pasting every question you see into a spreadsheet.

As you use all of these tools, paste the entire question, including the wording that the asker uses.

Click on the question to find out more about what they’re asking:

Not all questions are problems that need to be solved. Sometimes, they are rhetorical or conversational, so only make note of the questions and statements that qualify as questions, as opposed to conversations, like the example below:

There is often more than one Subreddit that will meet your needs. In the photography example, /r/itookapicture, /r/photocritique, and /r/analogphotography may also be helpful.

Spend a couple of hours combing through these Subreddits.

Search Reddit

Because Reddit is an extremely active community and some of the larger Subreddits (like the photography Subreddit) consist of hundreds of thousands of users, valuable questions will be pushed down to other pages quickly.

Since these questions represent the problems your target market is having with your topic, you don’t want to miss out.

Using the method outlined above, going through several pages will score you dozens of questions to paste into your spreadsheet, but to ensure that we’re finding the best idea of the problems your target market experiences, it’s important to dig for as many as possible.

To capture older questions, or questions in a different Subreddit, use Searchreddit.com as a search engine to plug in some keywords.

In the example below, I typed in “should I” and “photography?”:

As you can see, the search brought up a myriad of questions.

Search Phrases

We all phrase questions differently.

For example, I might say “How do I change the shutter speed on my camera”, whereas you might phrase the same question as “how can you adjust the shutter speed on a camera”.

Therefore, you’ll get the best range of questions if you search different phrases with your keyword.

In addition to my original search, I also searched “what should I do photography?” to find a different result from above:

Typing in “photography” will also bring up results for “photographer” and “photographs.”

Try your keyword with the following:

• How do I [keyword] ?
• How to [keyword] ?
• Can I [keyword] ?
• What is [keyword] ?
• What are [keyword] ?
• Which [keyword] ?
• Is it possible [keyword] ?

As you continue to enter different keywords, you will find a treasure trove of questions.

Use alternative keywords as well. In the case of my example, I might use “camera,” “photo editing,” “DSLR,” “lighting,” etc.

Just as you did with the results from Subreddits, copy and paste these questions into your spreadsheet.

After you’ve accumulated a number of questions from Reddit, another great place to do some amazing market research is on blogs.

Tool #2: Use Popular Blogs to Pan For Gold

Popular blogs with active, engaged communities are one of the best free market research tools.

In fact, I used this method to come up with the idea for this post.

If you aren’t aware of the popular blogs in your topic, read on to the next section. If you already know of popular blogs in your topic, move past it to the Finding Popular Posts section directly after it.

How to Find Popular Blogs In Your Topic

To use popular blogs as a market research tool, you first need to know which blogs are popular in your topic. Use Alltop.com’s search field to find out.

See the screenshot below demonstrating how I used Alltop to find the most-popular blogs about photography:

Alltop will bring up related topics, as you can see in the screenshot. Some may be useful to you. In the case of our example, I could also look in the Photoshop category.

See the screenshot below for a list of top blogs related to photography:

In our photography example, top relevant blogs include:

1. Digital Photography Review
2. Advancing Your Photography
3. Improve Photography
4. The Phoblographer
5. Digital Photography School
6. The Online Photographer

There are other blogs, but they don’t fit within the scope of what I’m looking for.

Alltop lists the most recent blog posts for each of these blogs, so you can usually determine relevance by the post titles.

For instance, the blog Stuck in Customs showcases travel photos, which I could see by the titles of their latest articles.

The target market is not photographers; it’s travel enthusiasts and people who appreciate the art of photography, so it’s not useful for my research.

When you’re finished noting the popular blogs that fit within the scope of your topic, it’s time to start finding popular posts and scour the comments section for gold.

Finding Popular Posts

Visit the first blog on your list, and check for a “popular post” section on their sidebar or homepage. If it doesn’t have one, use a tool like Quicksprout.com to find the most popular posts on the blog.

In Quick Sprout, enter the URL of one of the blogs and press Search, and then click on the Social Media Analysis tab.

The results are a list of the most popular posts on the blog based on social media shares.

If the post has 2,000 Twitter shares, it will usually have a lot of comments as well.

In this example, Digital Photography School’s top post is: /21-sample-poses-photographing-female-models.

This is simply the end of the URL after digital-photography-school.com.

So when you type the URL in, it will look like this: http://digital-photography-school.com/21-sample-poses-photographing-female-models.

As you can see on Quick Sprout, the post has over 2,000 Twitter shares, but the amount of Pinterest shares knocks it out of the park with almost 67,000 repins.

The next step is to type in the URL of the popular post as I did above, and find the comments on the post to get to the good stuff.

Find Gems in the Comments Section

On popular posts, the comments section is usually full of questions from the audience of that blog. Sometimes, they want to know more about the topic of the post, and sometimes they are more general questions for the blog owner.

Now, here is a trick so you don’t waste hours scouring the comments section, reading every comment and finding that half of them are useless:

Use the “Find” function by pressing control+f (or command+f on a Mac) and type in a question mark.

That will find each question mark on the page – including in the comments section – and bring you straight to them.

Sure, you might miss a few good questions where the commenter forgot a question mark, but this method will save you hours.

Every post will have its debates, so you’ll have to vet which comments are actual questions and which are not useful to you.

For instance, you’ll see that my finder found a question mark (highlighted) in the below screenshot. This isn’t a question related to what I’m looking for, so it wouldn’t help me:

Paste the questions into your spreadsheet like you did with Reddit.

Repeat this exercise for at least three posts on three popular blogs for a total of nine posts and you’ll have a great list of questions.

The more the merrier, so if you have extra time, don’t stop there. And once you’re done with the comments sections of popular blogs, you can move on to the next helpful tool.

Tool #3: Use Facebook to Stalk Your Target Market for Tons of Ideas

Facebook is one tool has been right under your nose this entire time.

It’s been disguised as a time-waster, a procrastinator’s dream, but it’s so much more than that.

Don’t worry; you won’t be using it to stalk your high school girlfriend.

You know what Facebook is, but you may not know how useful a tool it is for market research.

While I was planning for the launch of Unsettle, I decided to join a course put on by Jeff Goins at Goinswriter.com about intentional blogging.

I’d been a blogger for years, and while I did okay with my previous blogs, I was committed to doing Unsettle right. I was going pro and taking my education to the next level by learning from an incredibly successful blogger.

One of the best parts of the course for me, besides the connection I was able to make with one of my favorite bloggers (Jeff), was the private Facebook group for course members.

My target market on Unsettle is people who want to become online entrepreneurs, and while not all members of the Facebook group wanted to become online entrepreneurs through their blogs, some of them were starting blogs for that reason.

So the discussion that took place and questions they asked in the Facebook group were gold for me.

They were indirectly coming straight to me with their problems.

Finding tight-knit groups with a sizeable amount of members (over 500 if very active or 1500 if not as active) is a source of ongoing inspiration and market research specific to your target market.

With our photography example, a quick search of “Photography” in the Groups section of Facebook brought up dozens of results.

Become a member of the larger closed groups.

I used this method to find the idea for my Etsy shop. I ended up finding the idea in a wedding buy/sell/swap Facebook group, and the shop made $5,000 within the first three months – with zero effort on our part. No advertising, no professional photography, and we didn’t even have the product to sell yet.

Facebook groups are a wonderful method of market research, and once you’ve spent some time scouring the Facebook groups, it’s time to check out Quora.

Tool #4: Search Quora to Have Your Target Market’s Problems Served to You on a Platter

Quora is the one tool that is so perfect for market research that it’s almost as if the target market’s problems are being served to you on a platter, begging to be solved.

It actually lists questions under various topics, straight from the target market’s fingers — no digging required.

Quora is a community of people asking and answering questions. Within Quora, you can subscribe to different categories and find dozens of questions and answers around that topic, making it easy to see patterns.

People can “upvote” or “downvote” questions, so if you see a high number of upvotes, you’ll know you’ve come across questions that many people share, just like with Reddit.

To use Quora for market research, use the search bar at the top to type in keywords related to your niche.

In our example, I searched “Photography:

Comb over relevant topics as well to attain the best breadth of questions. In the example below, I’ve typed in “photo” for a list of suggested topics:

Quora makes research even easier than the other tools because when you click on the question, it brings you to a page that lists related questions:

Copy and paste the questions directly from the “Related Questions” bar on the right into your spreadsheet, thereby eliminating some legwork.

Rinse and repeat until you have 50 or more questions from Quora.

And after you’ve spent some time combing Quora, you will have conquered these tools, and you should have hundreds of questions asked on your chosen topic.

How to Turn Your Research into a Killer Business Idea

So you’ve done the research.

You’ve peaked into the minds of your target market.

You know what they’re struggling with. What they want. What questions they have.

Now, you’ve arrived at the fun part:

Idea generation.

Find patterns within your spreadsheet of questions, and begin to brainstorm solutions.

In the photography example, I happened to find a pattern of 8 or 9 people asking for posing guides for men.

The problem:

They don’t know how to pose men for photos.

Solutions:

• An eBook on how to pose men
• A course on how to photograph men, including the top poses
• Posing props for men
• An App that shows different posing techniques for men

Repeat this process for any worthwhile patterns that seem to come up within each category. If you are unsure what makes a worthwhile pattern, consider:

• Are the askers willing and able to pay for the solutions?
• Did more than 4 people ask about the problem?
• Are there solutions you’ll be able to charge for?

In my research, four people also asked whether they should take photography in college. So the problem these people are experiencing is indecision as to whether or not they should take photography.

While this is a pattern, it’s not worth pursuing for two reasons:

1. The market with the problem is more than likely going to be recent or soon-to-be high school grads, who don’t have a lot of money (so they may be willing to pay for a solution, but not able).
2. I could not generate even one idea off the top of my head to solve this problem that you would be able to charge for.

Even factoring out the problems that aren’t worth pursuing, you should have dozens of business ideas that solve common problems by the end of this exercise.

And that’s what makes a successful business.

And the only thing left to do is pick an idea and validate it.

It’s Time to Let Your Market Choose Your Winning Business Idea

Nothing is guaranteed.

No matter how much market research you do. No matter how well you understand the problems of the target market. No matter the validity of your idea, you will never know 100% whether you’ll be successful until you launch.

But you can boost your chances of choosing a profitable business idea.

By hanging out where your target market is, getting into their minds, and letting them feed ideas to you straight from their thoughts, you will skyrocket your chances of success.

And the sooner you start doing this research, the sooner you’ll have a winning business idea.

And your soon-to-be customers will be begging you to take their money.

The post 4 Free Tools to Help You Find a Winning Business Idea appeared first on StartupBros.

Your head is probably hurting right now from the sheer volume of articles you’ve read about what you need to do to make it successful.

Let’s start by quashing an assumption: You don’t need to know everything, ok? You’re going to find it far easier to start your business if you just give it a go, and learn by doing.

However, things change quickly in the online world. What worked for a business launch five years ago – even two years ago – isn’t necessarily what is going to work today. But there are some simple strategies you can adopt from the outset that will help you get a head start.

Ignore the noise. Get these nine strategies embedded in your business. Then launch and learn.

Strategy 1: Build Your Email List

Let’s start with something that has remained constant in online marketing. Email lists are still the #1 marketing strategy for the majority of online businesses. They should be your priority from the very outset.

What makes email lists so effective?

When you sign up to someone’s mailing list, you are telling them that you are interested in their services.

You have a warm customer list to market to, rather than a cold list of new site visitors. Email is your most valable asset when starting, as research shows:

Here’s what you can do to kickstart your email list:

• Get signed up to an email service. Mailchimp, AWeber and GetResponse are all good options for a beginner.
• Place an email signup form on your homepage.
• Haven’t built your website yet? Create a single landing page and put your signup form on there. Here’s a good example:

• Start building your list: advertise; blog; guest blog; network; or use social media. Whatever your preferred marketing tool is, use it now to begin growing your list from day 1.

Strategy 2: Use Video

Video has become more a mainstream marketing tool, so it doesn’t have the competitive edge it had a few years back, but it is still one of the best ways for you to get your message across to your audience. Research by Diode Digital found that 60% of visitors watch video content before they read site text, and these visitors continue to navigate your website for an extra 2 minutes after watching a video.

There are a couple of reasons why video is effective:

1. It’s a faster way to build trust than words alone. People can see you (or hear your voice) and they can build a picture of the type of person you are (and the type of business you are).
2. Video is an easy way for people to digest information. Technology today allows customers to view video on the go via their phones or tablets, so it’s often a nicely lazy option for busy customers than reading a lengthy ‘About’ page.

Here’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of how you can use video effectively to promote a product:

Here’s what you can do:

Think about the message you really want to get across to your audience. Do you want them to understand how your product works? Do you want to demonstrate your expertise in a particular topic?

Decide on a single key message that you want to get across to your audience and make that the starting point for your video. Check out this “How Kiva Works” video.

Message: This is exactly how your loan can help people in the developing world

Now decide on the best way of delivering that video. This is about what works best for your business. First, choose from a wide variety of video types. Some examples:

• Customer testimonials, case studies, success stories
• Product demo
• Explainer video (screen capture, presentation, animation, live action)
• Advertisement or infomercial
• Free webinar (on camera or voiceover with text)
• Free video training series

You also need to decide where you plan on promoting your video. You could choose to promote it:

• On your website, for example on:
  • Your homepage
  • Your about page
  • A dedicated sales page
• You could also promote the video externally:
  • Youtube
  • Wisia
  • Vine
  • Instagram
  • Vimeo

Strategy 3: Network

You’ve heard it before…

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know

This has never been more true than today. Partnering with other entrepreneurs, networking, sharing business strategies, and supporting each other’s launches is one of the most important ways for you to get a big start in your business….even if you are a complete unknown in your industry.

Established internet entrepreneurs can open a lot of doors for you. You need to help them before they do so.

Here’s what you can do:

Join an online network or mastermind group. Here are some starting points:

• Facebook groups
• Meetup.com
• Ask your existing contacts for recommendations
• Create one of your own

 There is one rule to follow if you want to network successfully: give your support to others time-and-time again before you ask for anything in return. Here’s how you can make yourself invaluable within a network:

• Share examples and case studies when you’ve experienced success, so that others can learn from you
• Give valuable advice in areas where others are struggling, particularly if it is your area of expertise (you could even host a short Q&A session)
• When someone is launching a product, ask them how you can help promote and support their launch (for example, sharing their launch on Twitter and Facebook)

If you abide by the principle of helping others, you’ll find that when you launch your own business you’ll have plenty of friends and associates who will go out of their way to support you.

Strategy 4: Launch An Affiliate Program

Launching a new business presents a tricky catch-22: you need to start marketing to an audience, but you don’t yet have an audience you can market to.

One smart strategy is to create an affiliate program. Here’s how it works:

You recruit existing website owners to promote your product to their existing audience in exchange for a share of the profits in any sale they refer. As a product owner, you would normally set the profit percentage, and those figures can vary wildly; there are affiliate programs on the market offering anything from 1% to 300% of the sale price for each customer you refer. But it can be worth the cost.

Having affiliates promoting your business in exchange for commission is like having a ready-made sales team with a ready-made audience.

Here’s an illustration of how the affiliate model works:

Start by marketing your business idea to a handful of website owners. If they believe in what you are doing, then they might agree to become your affiliate and give you an immediate platform from which to sell.

Note that I said a handful of affiliates, not hundreds. If you cast your affiliate network too wide, it is going to damage your business. You will have affiliates who are promoting your brand to people who aren’t your target customer, and who don’t value what you have to offer.

So at the start, limit the number of affiliates you recruit to a number you can comfortably oversee on a day to day basis. That will allow you to keep tabs on who their audience is, how they are marketing your product, and how well it fits your brand.

Here’s what you can do:

Search online or use your business networks to find businesses and entrepreneurs who are closely aligned with your business model. This could mean:

• They have a similar business philosophy
• They have a similar demographic of customer
• They sell products that compliment your own

Don’t cold-call these people and expect a response. You need to build that relationship over time. Find out how you can help them first before you begin discussing the idea of an affiliate relationship.

It is worth investing your time in one or two joint venture partnerships (“JV”s) before you look for affiliates. The main difference with a joint venture partnership is that it offers a closer working relationship with another entrepreneur. The relationship is mutual beneficial (for example, you could launch a joint product together).

Strategy 5: Be Authentic

Authenticity should be at the core of your brand.

Why? It goes back to trust.

Customers in today’s online market place a high value on authenticity. If you can demonstrate openness and honesty with your brand, your customer service and your product, that approach will go a long way to building trust.

Here’s an example of a company putting authenticity at the heart of their brand:

They have a very simple philosophy. For every bag you purchase, they donate a school kit to children in Africa or Asia. It is a clear premise, and their principles and aims as a business come across incredibly clear on their website.

Here’s what you can do:

• Avoid corporate speak on your About page. Instead, talk about your own story. Explain why you started your business and why you are passionate about it. Include a high quality profile picture so people can see the face of the person they will buy from.
• Understand what your principles are as a business and make them central to your brand. Remember, branding isn’t just about color schemes and designs. It is about the message you want to put in front of your customers.
• Include a behind-the-scenes look at your business on your blog.

Strategy 6: Be Brave

Successful entrepreneurs take risks. If you are launching in today’s competitive market, you have to be prepared to take some tough decisions that will make your adrenaline pump. Here are some examples of how you can be brave with your business in 2015:

Launch early and launch before you feel ready

There is always something you can be doing to improve your business. If you wait to perfect your product, website, or sales process, you’ll be missing out on precious opportunities to simply get in front of customers. Interacting with customers is going to be a better learning experience than any time you can spend “just getting everything lined up”.

These words resonate with me because they represent what many of us feel in the early stages of our business:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ResTHKVxf4

Invest in your business growth

You don’t have to run a business funded by a 6-figure venture capital investment to be able to invest in your idea. Even if you are bootstrapping your business, you can still use low-cost services such as fiverr to outsource to freelancers who can pick up a few of your tasks. Outsourcing things you are weak at will allow you to spend more time in your own personal ‘genius zone’.

Get out of your comfort zone

It’s natural to want to avoid doing things in your business that scare you, whether that’s selling, speaking, or spending. The sooner you take the plunge, the easier you’ll get over your fears. If there is a strategy that can help you forge ahead with your business, then have the courage to push past your personal fears.

Take a brave stance with your web design

Web design has a habit of following trends. You’ll notice this when you browse new startup business pages and see a striking familiarity with how their pages are laid out.

The problem with trends is that you tend to blend in; you become part of the noise. So if you want people to sit up and take notice of what you have to say, be brave with your branding and your web design.

Here’s an example of a website from menswithpens that on first glance, seems to follow standard design principles. If you look at the navigation menu and the overall structure of the website, it is nothing unusual. However, they’ve injected some personality, quirkiness and humor into the design and it makes it very memorable:

Here’s what you can do:

Launching early:

• Create a one month, three month and twelve month strategy. Decide what can be put off until a later date whilst you get your product and services in front of customers.

Investing in your growth:

• Assess your strengths and weaknesses. Set aside a small part of your budget to outsource your weaker tasks to other companies or freelancers.

Getting out of your comfort zone:

• Do something today for your business that you’ve been putting off. We all have fears. Once you recognise that you a scared of doing something, you can address it head-on.

With your web design:

• Good design principles never die. Trends do. So before attempting something daring, read up on usability. This will tell you about the core design principles that have stood the test of time.

Being brave means understanding what people need to get from your website and helping them achieve that in the best way possible, but doing so by adding a splash of personality.

Strategy 7: Prioritize Social Influence Over Social Presence

It is easy to get sucked into the belief that you are growing your business by having tens of thousands of Twitter followers, or thousands of page likes on Facebook.

However, gone are the days where a business could thrive simply by playing a numbers game; there is too much competition. If you really want social media to work for your business, then focus your efforts on influence rather than presence.

What do I mean by influence?

I’m talking about how engaged your fans are in what you have to say. Having a good social influence online means that people are commenting on your blogs, re-tweeting your tweets and sharing your Facebook content.

A high level of influence can be great for your business. Irn-Bru, for example, has a high engagement level on social media and far outstrips better known brands such as Pepsi. Research by Marketing Week suggested that brands with a lower-level of engagement had a much harder time reaching out to their followers on social media.

Why is engagement important to a brand?

Because customers are influenced by social signals, and if they see their friends interacting with a brand, it will increase their awareness and trust of that brand. Hubspot found that customers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on a social media referral.

Here’s what you can do

• Use a tool such as Klout to give you a benchmark in what your social influence is online, and work on improving it. Here’s a quick illustration of how Klout (and influence in general) works:

• Engage with your users with every social media post. Think about posts that are likely to get commented on and shared. Look at your past performance to give you an indication of what works and what doesn’t work with your followers.
• Never pay for followers (on any social media network). It will damage your social influence and the level of engagement you achieve with your fans.
• Understand what social medium your customers use. There is no point trying to get engagement on Facebook if the majority of your customers are more likely to be found on LinkedIn.
• Having success with engagement means understanding what works on each social network. In-depth articles work well on LinkedIn. Video works great on Facebook. High quality product images and infographics tend to do well on Pinterest. Understand the medium before you decide on how to engage your followers.

Strategy 8: Give Back

In marketing language, the technical term is the law of reciprocity. It refers to a known psychological behavior of customers when they experience kind or generous actions; they are compelled to do the same in return.

Think of this law as giving as much as you can before you ask for anything in return. If you are starting from zero and you want to build an online following, then the best way to attract an audience is to be generous with your time and your efforts, and excite them time and time again with genuine value (and without expecting anything in return).

Here’s what you can do

• Help out other business entrepreneurs: re-tweet and share their content, comment on their blog posts and offer advice and support.
• Create something free (and of high quality) for your audience, and make that part of your email opt-in. What you offer depends on your business, but it could be anything from a voucher, free video training, or free consultation. [Kyle: This is the first thing you should do.]
• As you build loyalty and grow, keep that spirit of generosity at the heart of your marketing. If you do this consistently, then every product launch will be viewed by your customers with excitement, as they will associate you and your business with incredible value.

Strategy 9: Quality Traffic Over Quantity

As I alluded to earlier, online marketing is not just a numbers game anymore. You don’t want to focus your efforts in trying to drive thousands of visitors to your website if those visitors close their browser as soon as they glance at your homepage.

Make sure your growth strategy is focused on quality over quality. Particularly when it comes to the traffic you drive to your website. You are better off having 100 high quality visitors to your website who are aligned to your brand and ready to buy, than 1000 low quality visitors who have no interest in what you are selling. High quality visitors translate into higher conversions:

• Let’s say website A achieves 200 visits to their site every day, but each of these visits is from targeted, high quality traffic. They are currently converting visitors into sales at a conversion rate of 4%. So they are achieving 8 sales a day.
• Now let’s look at an example from website B. They get low quality traffic, so much of it comes from visitors who are not aligned to their business and are not interested in what they have to sell. They receive 1000 visitors a day but only achieve a conversion rate of 0.2%. So they are only making 2 sales a day.
• Would you rather put your time and effort into driving 100 quality visitors to your site or 1000 low quality visitors?

Here’s what you can do:

• Have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is before you begin to look at traffic. Understand what type of person they are, where they hang out online, and how they use social media.
• Monitor your conversion rates. This is simply the percentage of visitors who come to your website and convert (i.e. buy from you). If your conversion rate is low, work on improving this before you begin to work on increasing traffic numbers.
• Focus your traffic building efforts on areas where you know your customers exist. If your target customer frequents Facebook, then focus your promotional efforts there. If they are more likely to be found on LinkedIn, then that is where you should be promoting. Don’t try and promote to every traffic source without giving some thought as to whether it’s going to bring you anything in return.

It’s never too late

Don’t be stuck in the negative mindset that you are late to the party. The internet is continuously evolving, customers are buying more today than they ever have before, and there really is plenty of opportunity for a startup with the willingness to try and the originality to stand out.

Launching in 2015 is about understanding what customers expect from online businesses, and how you can use marketing strategies in an intelligent way (and avoid dead-end tactics that will cause you nothing but frustration).

***

Let me hand it over to you, the reader, now. Drop a comment below to let me know what you think of these strategies. Are there any you disagree with? Do you have your own predictions about what is going to work for a new business this year? I’d love to hear from you.

The post 9 Game-Changing Startup Strategies You Can’t Afford to Ignore in 2015 appeared first on StartupBros.

This is a guest post from the founder of 48hourslogo.com, Chris. He’s awesome. And generous with his startup experience.

***

I graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Electrical Engineering and got a job as an application engineer in Silicon Valley.

48hourslogo was one of several side projects I initiated. Luckily, it turned out to be the one with the most potential and allowed me to quit my engineering job and fully focus all of my attention on my own startup.

I have always enjoyed reading StartupBros and thought that sharing my own startup story may provide some interesting insights for some of you. I’ll show you how I came up with the idea, how I had the site built, how I got customers and designers, and some ways we’ve grown the company. I think you’ll enjoy it!

Why 48hourslogo?

Like most people launching logo contests for their first time, I was amazed by the selection of logo concepts presented to me when I started a logo contest back in 2010. I liked it so much that I decided to drop my earlier business idea and start a logo contest website of my own.

The idea behind 48hourslogo is quite simple: Instead of paying an average of $400 to have 30 or 40 designers competing on your logo project, customers can spend a third of that and have 10 or 20 designers competing.  This is plenty for bootstrapping founders.

I like things done fast. So instead of having a contest running for 1 or 2 weeks, how about just 48 hours?

Lucky for me, this domain name was still available and that’s when 48hourslogo.com was born.

Getting Started

Starting a new business on your own is hard. The key is to break up your project into smaller steps that you can focus on one at a time. So for 48hourslogo.com, I broke it down to the following 3 steps:

Step 1: Website Development

Despite my engineering background, I did not know how to code a website. So I had to find a developer for my project.

Initially I was quite optimistic after browsing through different freelancing sites and seeing the kind development tasks that were posted and the eagerness of the many developers active on these sites. But after I launched my own project and started communicating with several freelance developers, I realized that it would not be as easy as I had originally anticipated.

Because I was working with an offshore developer, effective communication was the biggest challenge. I quickly learned that instead of explaining everything I needed in a Word document, it was much easier to ask him to just copy the existing functionalities from my competitor’s website and process further adjustments I wanted myself.

After 2 months of countless emails and about 3,000 dollars in total development costs, I ended up with a very basic but functioning website.

Above you can see the first version of 48hourslogo when we launched in early 2010. It only had the most basic features and the UI and layout design were significantly inspired by our competitors.

Some of the lessons I learned were:

A. Know your basic HTML

Unless you have a technical cofounder who will take care of the web development, you will most likely be working with Freelancers you found on the web. Knowing basic HTML will allow you to make small fixes yourself and communicate effectively with your developers.

B. Keep it simple

Building a website with any kind of custom functionality is going to be much more complicated than you think. Every button, link, or text input will require detailed design and consideration. So it is important to think of every little detail and simplify as much as possible before passing your requirements to your freelancer developer. Most likely he will get it wrong so your job is to make it so simple that it is almost impossible to understand it incorrectly.

C. Leverage as much as possible

Instead of starting from scratch, it is probably a good idea to copy from your competitors or other websites that offer similar functionalities. This offers 2 advantages.

1. You get a chance to study your competitor’s website in much greater detail and discover many small tricks you didn’t realize before.
2. Having your developer copying an existing product is much easier for him than trying to understand your unique specs of which there is no live demo.

Step 2: Recruiting Designers

Clearly I had a chicken and egg problem. Designers need clients and clients need designers. I had neither.

Before inviting designers to join 48hourslogo, I would need available contests they could participate in immediately after they signed up. To accomplish this, I did 2 things simultaneously:

A. Launching artificial logo contests

I created some artificial contests but with real prizes. I personally acted as the contest holder, selecting the contest winner for each contest based on what I thought was the best design and I awarded the prize accordingly. I did this for several weeks and awarded several thousand dollars until I was able to realize enough actual clients entering real orders.

B. Inviting designers to signup

I joined a number of graphic design forums, blogs, and discussion groups, and sent personalized invitation emails that were well received. Soon, I had more than 30 active designers working on actual client orders submitted to 48hourslogo.

Step 3: Acquiring Customers

This is probably the most straightforward part because all I did was set up a Google Adwords account and started bidding on my relevant keywords. There are many ways to market your business and attract potential customers.

Google Adwords is a good measuring stick to see where you stand among your competitors. If you can break even or even make a profit by acquiring customers via Google ads, you got a real business.

Some tips for running Google search ads:

A. Write descriptive ads

Remember that you are only charged when people click on your Ads. Do not write ads that promise someone the world. Instead, write descriptive ads, including your prices, to only attract your target customers.

B. Use exact keyword matches

Include your keyword combinations in square brackets. That means you ad will only appear if a potential customer types in your exact preconfigured search terms. For example, “logo design” and “logo design tutorials” represents 2 different types of potential customers.

C. Set maximum bids for your keywords

The average per-click cost for my main keyword “logo design” is about $3. Initially I used Google’s automatic bid, but was surprised to discover that the automatic bids went as high as $12 per click. Your ads do not have to be in the first place to receive visitors. 2^nd and 3^rd place is just as good and costs significantly less per click.

My initial Google search ad campaign was quite disappointing.

My profit on each new customer excluding my AdWords expenses was $25, but I was spending around $45 to acquire a new customer via my AdWords campaign, thereby effectively losing $20 on every new customer via my AdWords campaign. But losing $20 on every new customer was still better than setting up artificial contests where I had to give out $80 for each prize.

The most promising sign that I received at that time was that most of the customers which were using 48hourslog were quite happy with the level of service and the quality of design they received. I was confident I would be able to slowly turn things around.

How to Turn a Profit

So I had a money-losing business, but at least things were up and running.

The first thing I did was hiring a local developer in my city because communicating remotely was simply too much of a pain. After that, I added several features to really improve my conversion rate and turn 48hourslogo into a profitable business.

Redesigning the Home Page

We already had real customers getting quality logo designs via our site every day.

In order to give visitors a realistic sense of what to expect, I redesigned my homepage to highlight all recently finished contests on the front page.

This allowed customers to easily see the contest prize offered and the quality and quantity of designs received. After the redesign, our conversion rate went up a notch.

Lowering the Entry Barrier

Even though our $99 minimum prize already offered the most affordable logo contest on the web, we decided to introduce the $29 initial payment option.

For customers who were still not 100% convinced, we facilitated the option to start a contest with just a $29 listing fee, and to pay the rest AFTER seeing the design concepts submitted by our designers.

If they did not like what they saw, they could simply walk away and only lose their initial $29.

By lowering our initial cost to only $29, even skeptical customers were willing to at least give us a try.

Focusing on the Product

Our success depends on our ability to create a process that balances the needs of both our designers as our logo clients. So we spend most of our energy polishing our product. For example:

Blind contests

We made our contests blind during the initial design concept stage, meaning that the designers entering a contest could not see one another’s submissions, to maximize the design creativity of participating designers.

Relist & designer invites

If contest holders were not happy with the initial set of design concepts, we added an option to re-list the contest and invite new designers. We attached a $5 tip with each designer invite to really incentivize designer participation. This worked out really well for both the logo designers and contest holders.

Moderators & designer qualifications

To protect our clients from copycat designs, each winning logo is reviewed by our moderators to ensure its uniqueness and originality. We also implemented a new designer acceptance test to ensure our new designers possess the basic graphic skills needed to produce a professional logo.

In Summary

Starting a business is harder than you initially think, but interestingly enough, it gets easier as you set a plan and work on it step by step. When I first started 48hourslogo, I knew neither graphic design nor web development. But building a startup is all about taking action.

I am a big fan of Will and Kyle’s blog because it offers a step by step actionable plan of starting a business. When you have a detailed plan, things get a lot easier.

Thank you for reading. We are giving away a free logo contest valued at $150. If you need a custom logo for your new business, just leave a comment below and we will randomly pick a winner by the end of the week.

And what if you are not the lucky winner? We also have a special promotion for startupbro readers where we will give your a free “Featured” contest upgrade. Just click on the following link to get started:

http://www.48hourslogo.com/startupbros

The post How I Started A Startup from Scratch and Turned a Profit in Less Than 6 Months appeared first on StartupBros.

It doesn’t always pay to be good.

There are huge stretches of human history where the only way to win has been to lie, cheat, and steal.

Luckily for those of us who suck at being bad, goodness is paying off.

Particularly honesty.

It doesn’t always feel this way. We see people getting ahead by doing bad every day. Sometimes it’s in the news. Sometimes it’s in the office.

So, honestly, honesty doesn’t win in every situation or domain. And not every type of honesty wins either.

Nobody wants to lie. It just seems to be the only option sometimes. Especially when we’re feeling weak or scared.

But honesty is quickly becoming the best option in the most interesting and profitable areas in life and the economy.

Early on, all my chips were on honesty. It wasn’t a choice. It was a struggle though.

Common wisdom says that you should be honest to be a good person despite the general understanding that getting ahead sometimes requires lies and thus giving up your good-person status.

This assumption that you have to lie to be successful is not just poison for society but also ineffective in the long-term.

The lifetime of a lie is shrinking and the compounding effect of honesty is increasing. We’ll get into the mechanics of this later.

My goal is to prove to you that honesty is the best policy. Not just for being a good human, but to get ahead in business and life.

The remainder of this post will be broken down as follows:

1. Honest Stories. I will tell you three personal stories to demonstrate how honesty plays out in relationships, networking, and business. These stories will help frame the rest of the post, especially the business story.
2. What Honesty Is & Isn’t. This section will help us understand and define honesty in a way that is useful and powerful. A lot of people are confused about what is honest and dishonest behavior and so fail to be functionally honest. (Hint: Having no filter isn’t honesty.)
3. Dangers of Honesty. We’ll look at some of the main ways people get scared off from being honest, and why most of the fear of these possible outcomes are unwarranted.
4. Benefits of Honesty. Some of the most important reasons to be honest.

Time to tell some truth…

Honest Stories

In Relationships

A long time ago I was in Vegas and drunk. I was drinking, but most of the intoxication was Vegas. There was also a girl.

I couldn’t man up and text her. She was older and a soap queen. People stopped her for autographs. Intimidating!

So a friend took the phone and did it for me. It was fun, lighthearted. The phone was passed to the next person, then again. Nobody crossed the line into rudeness. I thought the texts were absurd enough that she would know they were a joke.

She responded… positively.

We dated for a while. It was fun, lighthearted.

Then I told her about how our relationship started with a bunch of texts that weren’t from me.

She didn’t mind, “Yeah, I kind of thought that.”

We dated a couple more months. It was fun, lighthearted. No depth.

The relationship couldn’t overcome its initial lie.

For contrast, the first girl who saw me cry – maybe the most honest thing I could do – was the first girl I fell in love with.

In Networking

A couple years ago I lied about why I was late to a meeting at a coffee shop. I forget what I said, but I needed this person to like me. He was one of those people that opened doors.

I told my lie and went to go get coffee (dark, black). While in line for coffee, I began to get nauseous. I thought I was nervous at first, but it wasn’t that kind of twist in the stomach. Then I understood.

I walked out of line and straight to the man who I wanted to like me. Our first interaction was a lie, our second would be a confession. This was going to suck.

“I’m sorry, I lied. I was actually late because…”

He laughed a little and told me to go get my coffee. The next month, he had me working with an Oscar winner. The month after that, he told me that my confession made him trust me fully.

In Business

In the last week, honesty has been worth probably more than $100,000 to StartupBros.

Let me explain how honesty has compounded to make this happen. We’ll start with the 3^rd level and work our way to the 1^st level. To help understand, imagine a snowball rolling down a hill. The outer layer is the 3^rd level of honesty, and the core is the 1^st level of honesty.

We’ll start with the 3^rd Level of Honesty.

We are working with a select group of business partners to help expand and sell our flagship coaching program (The Importing Empire Jumpstart Group). These are powerful people who are constantly being sent requests.

The only reason they listen to me?

“You sound honest,” every one of them is surprised as they say it.

I’ve heard this in nearly every phone call. Like it’s this strange thing to be honest. Sometimes the trust is so deep they agree to partner without even looking at the program. (This is the 3^rd level of honesty in action.)

Most want to see what they’re going to be promoting, though.

I show them the inside of the program, even allowing them to explore the inside themselves. This isn’t common practice, but transparency is important to us.

Literally every single person who had doubts about our program before seeing it has come back to us ecstatic.

“You guys are ACTUALLY making this happen for people. This isn’t crap with a bunch of marketing around it.”

By being honest with our clients and creating the best possible program for them, we are now able to proudly show it to others who might promote it for us. When they look inside the program, they see extensive curriculum, useful resources, guest experts, people talking through their problems, and people sharing the successes they’ve had because of the program.

This is the 2^nd level of honesty in action. If we weren’t doing our absolute best by our clients, then our transparency would actually work against us.

Now, we wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to honestly create that level of a coaching program if people didn’t want us coaching them in the first place.

We’re now at the core level of honesty. This is the 1^st level, the place where you jump off the cliff and hope people catch you.

Early on at StartupBros we decided to do something different from what others were doing. We decided that we would give away everything. We thought if we provided an overwhelming amount of value for free, we’d eventually win in the end.

This abundance mindset allows us to be more generous with information than most. That’s why you get “how-to” information here that other people charge a ton of money for.

Will wrote about everything he’d do if he were to start an importing business from scratch. It was the first time anyone gave away details like that for free.

This generosity got us the number one Google search result for “importing from China” and similar search terms. People started flowing in, taking in all the information… and demanding to pay.

And so the Importing Empire Jumpstart Group was born.

To launch that program, Will put together a webinar packed with information. It, like the blog post, has everything someone needs in order to get going with building an importing company.

If you’ve ever been to a webinar, you know that the presenter usually spends an hour or two pretending to educate you while actually just teasing you in hopes that you’ll be frustrated enough to buy the damn thing. We hate that.

People responded like crazy. Every time we hold the webinar people tell us it’s the best one they’ve been to. They’re overwhelmed by the value provided. Some people come to every single one.

It feels good to provide that kind of value, but it really feels good when generosity pays. An extremely high percentage of people who see the free live webinar join us for our paid program. And, like you saw above, we make sure they don’t regret the decision.

This is the 1^st level of honesty in action. Being honest before you know it will work. Doing the right thing even though you’re not sure it will put you ahead.

If we weren’t honest before people became our clients we may sold them on making a million dollars in their first month or something ridiculous. They may have joined but immediately demanded refunds. If we weren’t honest with our clients, they wouldn’t have any success. If they didn’t have any success then they wouldn’t want to stay with us, they’d spread negative things about us, and we wouldn’t have anything promising to show potential business partners.

These stories only touch on a couple aspects of the power of honesty. The rest of this post will be dedicated to the nuts and bolts.

What Honesty Is & Isn’t

Picasso realized that, “Art is the lie that enables us to tell the truth.”

A lot of people fall into bad business practices because they have a warped sense of what honesty is. For many people, it’s dishonest to make a profit at all.

It’s important that you have a solid understanding of what honesty is and what it is not in order to confidently build your business.

Honesty isn’t pretending you don’t have a great product to sell. It is selling the dream—as long as you can deliver.

Let’s take a closer look.

What Honesty Is Not

First we’ll focus on

1. Divulging everything.

Honesty has nothing to do with telling everything to everybody.

When two football teams go on the field, they don’t know what the other person will do. They’ve entered the field with an understanding that there will be secrets.

Apple isn’t going to tell you everything they’re testing out in their R&D department. No company would! The only reason to invest in R&D is to gain a technological advantage over your competitors. Microsoft doesn’t complain that this holding of secrets is dishonest.

In the same way, you don’t owe anyone else complete access to you. Not telling everything does not make you dishonest.

2. Withholding information to mislead. If you withhold information from a person when you’ve made them believe you haven’t withheld that information, you’re being dishonest.

Again, a football coach is withholding information from the other team. A lawyer will withhold information and try to lure the defendant into a trap with it. In a business negotiation, there is a certain type of information that everybody understands doesn’t go on the table.

These are instances of people misleading others while remaining honest. The other side doesn’t expect to be lead in the right direction.

3. Facts. This is what we mean when we talk about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Facts, on their own, aren’t honesty. Just because all the facts are right, doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth. You can organize data to say whatever you want. You can take words out of context.

Let’s say a CEO wants to boost his company’s valuation. He’ll have the PR department focus on spreading the word of a couple promising projects from the R&D department. Maybe using a couple experiments’ data to make some crazy claims about solar power and how this will be the only company truly able to harness its energy.

Meanwhile, the company really has no promising research, and it’s in the red. They’re desperate.

First, the price spikes dramatically due to the twisted facts. Second, the CEO sells a nice chunk of shares. Third, the company declares bankruptcy.

4. Cynicism/Pessimism. There was some study that claimed depressed people have a more clear understanding of how the world is. This could be true, but optimists are able believe in a more interesting future—and thus able to actually create change.

It feels more honest to be down on our own lives. To downplay what we’ve accomplished.

The hopeful person might be seen to have their heads in the sky. The pessimist, feet firmly planted.

Someone who says, “I think I can create this,” risks not being able to deliver. This opens them up to be seen as, among other things, a liar. Even if they didn’t guarantee anything, the audacity in wanting to create something sets them up to be called a liar.

5. Being perceived as honest. As we just saw, being honest and being perceived as being honest are two very different things. This is obvious to say, being able to actually tell the difference isn’t so easy.

6. Pretending you’re weak. There’s that famous line, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I’m fairly certain that, whatever we do in life, we’ll figure out a way to measure a good chunk of it. (Maybe not the love part though.) Still, we hold back.

Why do we hold back? One reason: we think it’s more honest.

Honesty is more about effort than achievement or getting it right. It’s more about trying than hitting the mark.

7. Certainty or Explaining yourself. Having an opinion on something that is not 100% certain is not dishonesty.

Trying really hard to do something means pushing into areas where you can’t make promises. You don’t understand the situation enough to explain anything with real certainty.

It’s not dishonest to not know something.

Nassim Taleb’s general principle of antifragility is this: “[I]t is much better to do something you cannot explain than explain something you cannot do.”

If you fail and can explain yourself, we still don’t know for sure that you honestly tried.

In one case, we nod our heads, feign a smile, and never give you another chance again. In the other, we trust you and give you another chance.

8. (A wrap-up.) An eight is an infinity sign on its side, right? There are infinite other ways in which we confuse honesty. I’ll leave these to you.

Two important things to notice about these points:

What Honesty Is

You’ll notice that there is more to say about what honesty isn’t than what it is. This is because honesty is fluid. If you are able to get rid of the common things it’s mistaken for, you’ll go a long way in understanding the thing itself.

1. Revealing rough edges. Honesty includes “this isn’t for you”. It helps give a full view of the thing. It filters some buyers out.

At the personal level, this means being okay with, “I may not be for you.”

2. Selling the dream. If you can deliver it, and then some. A $500 bottle of wine isn’t 10x better than a $50 by most measurements. The experience of enjoying a $500 bottle of wine might be.

Cristal feels like more of a celebration than Korbel. That feeling is the dream: the fantasy becomes reality.

There are studies that show good news can make people with certain sicknesses have a better chance at healing. Is a doctor more honest for being factual or for giving his patient the best chance possible?

I don’t know, but I’d take the story and let my family deal with the facts.

3. A posture. An honest posture means that people can trust you to have their best in mind. It’s honesty based in actions, not facts. Like we saw above, facts are often dishonest. There are people who tell stories that have nothing to do with the real world and yet, we wouldn’t call them liars.

Tim Kreider says this about his friend Skelly: “It would never have occurred to any of Skelly’s friends to call him a liar. Despite his incidental falsehoods, he was a fundamentally genuine person. As his fellow fabulist Blanche DeBois once protested, “I never lied in my heart.” He was authentic, decent, and kindhearted.”

4. Playing by the rules or not. We talked about football earlier: it’s honest to make secret plans, they’re part of the agreed-on rules. One of those agreed-on rules is using a ball, not a deflated one you sneak in, that’s dishonest.

(By the way, this is the most I’ve ever talked about sports in any context before. I have no idea what’s going on.)

There is always an agreed-on set of rules. Honesty is playing within them.

This doesn’t mean putting yourself at a disadvantage. Arnold Schwarzenegger has used psychological warfare to beat opponents in bodybuilding, politics, and business. He sent his political rival a metallic set of bull balls once, a symbolic way of saying, “Grow a pair.”

Schwarzenegger is open about these types of games, so he carries a certain type of authenticity. He is honest about his trickery.

Is this honesty? I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t feel dishonest.

David certainly wasn’t following the rules when he used a sling against Goliath. Nobody calls David dishonest though. He just did what he had to do.

5. Respect of your own experience. This is the counter to the dishonest cynicism we talked about above. If you’re honest with yourself, your life is just as interesting as any other.

We each spend all day fascinated with the problems and situations in our own lives. There is, by definition, nothing more interesting to us.

Yet we pretend that some celebrity or expert is the one truly living correctly. They get it. If only we could make our lives look a little more like theirs.

Your life is the most fascinating thing you’ll ever do.

When you’re building your business, you should admit to yourself that it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s the thing you are doing. Put all your interest into it.

Don’t humbly lie to those around you that it’s boring or that they wouldn’t be interested in it. This will destroy your business—who wants to invest in something the founder isn’t interested in? Who wants to buy something made by someone who doesn’t care?

Nobody.

If you’re being honest, you’re a little narcissistic. This isn’t bad. Nobody wants to take a picture of you as bad as you want to take a selfie. Nobody wants to build your business but you. You, you , you.

6. Tact. Honesty often comes in navigating tense situations to a better spot.

Sometimes that means keeping some information off the table.

Sometimes that means using a tone that isn’t emotionally “true.”

Tact is important.

5 Dangers of Honesty

It’s time to look at some of the dangers of being honest. These are the things that scare us into lies. After looking at what honest is and is not about, you should already see these in a less “dangerous” light.

1. People will reject you. I’m sure some will. Yet there is nobody in history who has been universally rejected for their opinion.

Not a single one. Hitler, Stalin, and Charles Manson all had terrible, despicable opinions about how to lead lives, yet they found plenty of people to agree with them.

Of course that’s not the rejection you fear. It’s being disowned from your religious family for being an atheist or marrying a person of another faith. It’s being rejected from your friends for liking the pop song.

It’s the fear of looking arrogant or delusional for wanting to start your own business.

All these things may happen, but “The truth will set you free.”

When you allow yourself to be honest you become a powerful magnet for people. We are starved for authenticity. We are waiting for someone to say out loud what we silently believe.

It’s more about “how” you have your belief than “what “ you believe. If you are obnoxious about your belief, then more people will be turned off. If you carry your belief and respect those of others, you’ll find more acceptance and more truth.

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but how it thinks.” – Christopher Hitchens

2. You’ll lose customers or clients. This is the same as the fear of rejection. Rarely are companies punished for honesty.

When a company says, “We screwed up, let us fix it,” we don’t blame them for the mistake.

When a company makes green claims through a thin façade of greenwashing, we all feel it. And it pushes us way.

3. People will take advantage. This is true. The world is full of people who are just waiting to take cheap shots, to take whatever they can when you’re not looking.

In relationships, this means creating a strong vulnerability. You have to leave yourself open for a punch or you can’t connect with anyone. It also means setting boundaries. You don’t need to let everyone see everything.

In business, it means being as generous as you can. For us, it’s giving away all of our premium content with a 30-day no questions asked money back guarantee. Some people come in and steal everything, some even take it all and start their own programs, but most don’t.

We leave ourselves vulnerable to be taken advantage of and some people do. But it still does us more good than harm.

4. You’ll show the world you’re weak, stupid, or whatever the hell. We think that if we’re honest, we’ll expose the worst parts of ourselves when, in reality, people can feel them already.

When a business tries to cover-up a mistake, they just look dishonest. It doesn’t matter if they’re trying to fix the situation.

At the end of the day, there is no covering it up. There is no lie that lasts a lifetime. If we don’t know exactly what it is, we see the shadow of it. Remember Tim Kreider’s friend Skelly? He has more to say:

“What someone’s lies about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone’s self-image, their vanity and insecurities, and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter.”

He goes on to discuss the “Soul Toupee”:

“The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves that we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.”

Of course, the things that we are most scared about revealing to the world are usually not a big deal at all to others. They pretend not to notice because they see how desperate we are to hide them. They’ve already accepted the thing we’re scared to show.

This is all a very long way of saying: You’re not tricking anybody.

The world isn’t hungry for perfection; it’s hungry for authenticity. For someone to trust—not worship.

Be professional, know your shit, do your best, and then be human.

5. It will make you vulnerable. Yes it will. This one only feels like a danger, though.

People buy from people who are vulnerable. People fall in love with people who are vulnerable. People trust people who are vulnerable. People want to help people who are vulnerable.

Because people know that invulnerability isn’t for humans.

The Benefits of Honesty

Here we are, time for the good stuff.

1. Honesty begets honesty. We all want people to be honest with us, there is no better way to achieve this than being honest with others.

“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” – Emerson

This does a couple things:

1. It short-circuits their paranoia and thus creates a more effective relationship.
2. It actually makes people more honest. We naturally want to meet the expectations of others. When we are honest and expect honesty, we are likely to get it.

2. Honesty compounds. Being dishonest in the short run can put you ahead, but it’s a one-off thing. You’ll burn bridges and be seen (at least by someone) as untrustworthy. If you try really hard, you can make this work for a long time. Eventually though, you’ll get tired of finding new people to screw over. You have to constantly fight and backstep and make things up.

Honesty builds on itself like a snowball rolling down a hill. Honesty builds momentum.

If you are honest to friends, they will continue to be your friend and want to build a closer relationship.

If you are honest to your customers, they will keep buying from you and recommend that others buy from you.

It can feel like dishonesty has the upper hand early on. In the long game, though, there’s no stopping the compounding of honesty.

3. “Speed of Trust.” There is a business book with that title. I haven’t read it, but I see the title every once in a while and remember how important trust is.

Nothing happens without trust. No relationships can be built or fun had. No sales or growth of any kind.

Trust is necessary. Trust in ourselves, in others, and in the world; therefore, the single best way to gain this trust is to be honest with ourselves, others, and the world.

4. It makes everything richer. Honesty makes life more interesting. You don’t spend time skirting subjects, so you get to the thing you actually want to be talking about.

Honesty is scary, so it forces you to push outside of your comfort zone.

Honesty is less constrained, so it exudes energy.

5. Honesty is more profitable. Ben Franklin said that honesty is the best policy, not the best moral decision. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger took that to heart early on at Berkshire.

They built a reputation not only for being competent but being honest. That meant that owners preferred them over other investors.

The legendary tech investor Paul Graham has said that the same rule applies in Silicon Valley: the good guys are winning. He says this is because of (1) transparency and (2) unpredictability:

“It’s obvious why transparency has that effect. When an investor maltreats a founder now, it gets out. Maybe not all the way to the press, but other founders hear about it, and that means that investor starts to lose deals. [2]

The effect of unpredictability is more subtle. It increases the work of being inconsistent. If you’re going to be two-faced, you have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away with being nasty to. In the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can’t tell. The random college kid you talk to today might in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley. If you can’t tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.

In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can’t seem good without being good.”

6. It just makes life better. Unless you’re a psychopath, you can feel it. Honesty makes everything better. Dishonesty makes everything bad.

I’ve written nearly 5000 words about honesty now. I could keep typing. I’m like talking about simple things ad infinitum.

But maybe now it’s time to do some honesty. To tell some person that thing. To be honest about what you thought of that movie. To take a peak at your Soul Toupee.

The post Honesty IS the Best Policy in Business (Usually): How to Make Honesty Your Competitive Advantage, Drive Sales, Increase Profits, and Make Life Better in General appeared first on StartupBros.

[Kyle: This is a guest post from a Gina Smith. She’s going to show you maybe the most effective productivity hack out there: hire more hands.]

***

The words, “I can do that”, can be like nails on a chalkboard when they are spoken by a small business owner or entrepreneur.  One of the most common mistakes made when opening a business is trying to wear too many hats. 

As a small business consultant, I come across aspiring entrepreneurs in all types and stages of business.  Most have gone into business for themselves because they have a certain skill, talent or aspiration.  It always baffles me when a business owner has invested in an impressive office or workshop space and hired employees to produce and deliver their product and/or services but then chooses to handle their own marketing, information technology, tax filings, etc.  Really?  And, the kicker is in 99% of the cases, the business owner has no prior experience in any of these areas.

Have you ever heard of the saying, “it is better to do a few thing well than many things lousy?”  When a business owner is also the hiring, marketing, fulfillment, tax and IT manager, problems will inevitably arise.  While it may not be necessary to hire full time employees to handle certain functions, you can consider outsourcing these tasks to an experienced and reliable individual or company.

The word “outsource” sometimes carries a negative stigma due to its depiction in popular culture.  In reality, some of the most talented individuals can be acquired through outsourcing.  Hiring contract workers as opposed to full time employees has many benefits.  First, you only pay for time used.  Second, outsourced talent can take an objective look at your company from the outside and make recommendations that you, as an insider, may not have considered.  Third, the outsourced company, or individual, you hire is generally a specialist in their field.

In the past, primarily large corporations practiced outsourcing.  Today, small business owners have discovered its many benefits.  Let’s take a look at some popular jobs for small companies to outsource:

Information Technology (IT)

Overview

Hiring an outside company or professional to set-up and manage your IT needs can save you time and money.  There are many providers who specialize in providing outsourced IT services, from network and software installations to cloud back-up and cybersecurity.  Ask yourself these questions: 1) Do you have hours to troubleshoot a network issue on your own?   2) Do you have the experience to combat a virus or network security issue?  3) Can you afford to lose all of your company data?  If you answered “no” to any one of these, then you will likely benefit from hiring an IT consultant.

 Preparation

Whether you are a sole proprietor or a small corporation with employees, having a good IT firm or consultant is imperative.  Case in point – when I started my business in 2006, I used a single laptop. I became nervous because this single laptop was storing a lot of proprietary information for many clients.  I vetted and hired an IT consultant who set me up with a backup device and a small server. Boy, was I ever so thankful I did this when my laptop crashed a few months later. And, because I had the server, I was able to restore data to my new laptop in minutes.  The time and headaches this saved me was so worth the small investment I made in hiring an IT consultant!  I recommend every business have an IT evaluation by a qualified consultant at least once a year.

As you prepare to screen and hire an outside firm or consultant, you will want to have the following information on hand:

1. Your Internet service provider contact info
2. A list of the number and types of computers/devices needed (i.e. three desktops, four laptops, seven tablets, etc.)
3. Preferred platform (i.e. Mac, Windows 8, etc.)
4. The type of information you will need to backup on a regular basis (i.e. databases, photographs, e-mail, documents, etc.)
5. They type of software you will need and on which devices (i.e. Microsoft Office on all desktops and laptops, Photoshop on one desktop, etc.)
6. Any other industry-specific information that is important for your IT consultant to know.

Screening & Hiring

The first step is to research service providers.  You will ultimately need to determine whether you are more comfortable using a qualified consultant, or, hiring a firm.  I would highly recommend interviewing both types of providers so you can fully understand the potential of each.  The next step is interviewing.  This should be done face to face since you will likely be having a lot of “face” time with your IT provider.  You also need to prepare a list of questions prior to your meeting.  Some possible interview questions include:

1. How long have you been in business?
2. What types of warranty/maintenance agreements do you offer?
3. What security protocols do you take to ensure my network and data are protected?
4. Do you off cloud storage options?
5. What do you feel gives your business a competitive edge over others?
6. What other types of small businesses do you work with?
7. If I have a problem, what is the average response time?
8. Do you have any references?

Once you interview each candidate, it will be easier to narrow down your list. If you are not comfortable with any of the candidates, do not be afraid to start the process over. If you can narrow your selections down to three providers, that would be ideal.  Once this is complete, ask each one to provide you with proposals.  Once you have had time to review the proposals, take some time to ask any final questions you may have for each candidate.  The last step is conducting reference checks and accepting a proposal.

 Marketing/Public Relations

Overview

Hiring a professional or firm with a proven track record in marketing and public relations can prove to be very beneficial.  As trends continue to change and consumer confidence fluctuates, retaining professionals to handle all of your marketing from strategic plans and media buying to ad design, website development, public relations and social media can be essential to your success.

 Preparation

One of the biggest mistakes a start-up can make is not having a marketing plan ready to execute either before or shortly after opening.  You marketing plan is the engine that drives your business.  You may have a fancy office, upscale equipment and the best staff in the world, but if no one knows about your business, you will struggle to find customers.

You may choose to hire either an outside firm or consultant. In many cases, your provider does not have to be located in your local area, and most marketing services a small business needs can be handled remotely.   Before you conduct interviews with candidates, be sure to have the following information ready:

1. Business plan summary
2. Complete list of products and services
3. Company mission and vision
4. Long term and short term goals
5. Samples of any marketing collateral, ads, press releases you have used in the past (if applicable)
6. List of major competitors
7. Your company’s unique sustainable difference (what makes you and your products/services different from your competitors)
8. Any other industry-specific information that is important for your marketing consultant(s) to know.

Screening & Hiring

As is the case with all potential contractors, the first step is to research service providers and determine whether you are more comfortable using a qualified consultant, or, hiring a full-service firm. Marketing professionals are generally very busy and have many irons in the fire.  The better prepared you are for the meeting, the more confortable it will be for you both.  Some possible interview questions include:

1. How long have you been in business?
2. What other small businesses do you work with?
3. If I sign a contract with you (or your firm), is there a chance you will also represent any of my direct competitors while our contract is active?
4. May I see some samples of your work?
5. What do you feel gives your business a competitive edge over other providers?
6. Do you have any references?

Once you’ve conducted your interviews, follow the same process of narrowing down your list, requesting proposals, conducting reference checks and reviewing their portfolios to determine which candidate is best suited for you.

Fulfillment

While having the owner of the company check in on fulfillment from time to time is fine, it is not necessarily a good idea for he or she to actually manage the process.  Fulfillment can make or break the customer experience.  Outsourcing a company that specializes in this area can help ensure your product reaches the customer in excellent condition and when promised.

Preparation

You should be noticing a pattern beginning to develop with these processes.  For the most part, you will take the same preparation approach but tailor the questions toward the type of position you are outsourcing.  When it comes to fulfillment, finding a company with experience and an exemplary track record is essential.  Some items to have ready before interviewing a company include:

1. Exact items you want to ship
2. Areas/regions of the world/U.S you serve
3. Packing requirements
4. Expected turnaround time
5. Estimated quantity shipped per day

Screening & Hiring

Follow the same steps as recommended for IT and Marketing providers, but ask questions targeted more toward fulfillment.  Some you might consider include:

1. How long have you been in business?
2. What other types of small businesses do you work with?
3. What is your average customer satisfaction rate?
4. What do you feel gives your business a competitive edge over others?
5. How many people will be assigned to my job?
6. Will the people assigned to my job be working on it exclusively or will they have orders to fill for other companies?
7. Do you perform background checks on the employees you will assign to my job?
8. Do you have any references?

Once you’ve conducted your interviews, follow the same process as discussed earlier in this article to determine which company is best for you.

Tax Preparation

There are hundreds of tax law changes every year.  A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) makes it his or her job to keep up with tax law and ensure their clients are in compliance.  There are many qualified individuals and companies who specialize in small business tax preparation. Not only will a CPA prepare your taxes, but most will also represent you during an audit. It’s simply just not worth it for you, as a business owner, to take on this headache yourself.  We will go into some specifics, but feel free to also read this excellent article in Inc. from January 2011.  Although it may be a few years old, it is still one of the best ones for breaking down what to look for in a small business tax preparation firm.

Preparation

As you prepare to interview candidates, follow the same steps as outlined earlier and have these items ready for each candidate:

1. Type of business (i.e. sole proprietor, LLC, etc.)
2. Estimated annual income, payables and receivables
3. Bookkeeping software you currently use
4. Number of full time and part time employees

Screening & Hiring

Once again, the same screening and hiring steps apply. Some questions to consider asking candidates include:

1. How long have you been in business?
2. What other types of small businesses do you work with?
3. How often will you need me to provide you with reports?
4. Will you estimate, prepare and send payment for all taxes on my behalf?
5. Will you prepare my W-2s and 1099s?
6. What is your deadline for me to have everything to you each year to avoid having to file an extension?

Once you’ve conducted your interview, you are ready to follow the process to determine which company is right for you.

When you receive proposals from your candidates, examine them closely to ensure you are comparing “apples to apples”.  If there is a service listed that you do not understand, do not be afraid to ask for more detail. And, if one provider is recommending something another isn’t, question this as well.  Finally, keep in mind the cheapest may not always be the best.

Now What?

Pick one thing to outsource for a month. Then use the steps above. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

The post What You Need To (And How To) Outsource Today: Avoiding the “I Can Do That” Trap appeared first on StartupBros.