10 things that make you an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur!

Wherever you go, you’ll find at least one person who claims to be an entrepreneur and who has a belief to change the world. Thanks to the ‘Startup India’ program of Narendra Modi, that number is increasing immensely. Here are 10 things that make an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur.

1. Million Dollar Idea

Whenever you attend any startup event or meetup, you’ll find at least ten people who have the secret million dollar idea, which they cannot disclose. (And which BTW already exists in the market.)

2. Funding is a must

Before working on a business model of the idea, they plan about the funding they’ll be needing. “Pillowkart raised 1 million dollars, Tomezo is about to raise second round of investments”, all they talk about is funding.

3. In(waste) time in events

Admit it, there are some people, who you will find in every damn event happening in your city. Forget your city, they can travel to anywhere in the world, just to attend events on entrepreneurship.

Attending events is not a bad thing. But you’ve got to be selective about events. As most of the events are the waste of time.

4. Read a lot of books

Ok. Reading is a good thing. But more than reading, Adarsh Indian entrepreneur likes to brag about it on social media. They have all books on entrepreneurship in their cupboards (most of which are never touched after getting featured on Facebook).

Reading books is a good thing. But you’ve got to be selective in choosing the books as well. There are plenty of books on entrepreneurship which contradict views of each others. Which in the end will confuse you more than giving you knowledge. Be choosy when it comes to reading.

5. Steve Jobs, the god!

Enough said. If entrepreneurship is the religion, Steve Jobs is the god.

6. Startup sirf 3 cheezo se chalta hai. Idea, idea, idea.

If you believe the above-written sentence, you’re an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur.

You’ve heard about Google and Facebook, but have you heard about Archie or SixDegrees.com? Well, Archie was world’s first search engine and SixDegrees.com was world’s first social networking website. It’s not always about the idea. It’s mostly about the execution.

Facebook has adopted (stolen) almost all major features from competitors and combined it. For example, hashtags & follow from Twitter, check-in and place reviews from Foursquare, photo tagging from Orkut and so on. But still, Facebook is the king of social network.

7. I’m my own boss.

If you chose entrepreneurship just to become your own boss, you’re no different than the girl who works at “I don’t need to work. I’m mah dad’s princess.” And of course, you are an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur.

8. You know everything.

You’re no less than Annu aunty. You know everything about other’s startups. Fund-raising, sales, pitching to VCs, b-plans, innovation, etc., you know everything. You are the Google of startups. You can join and contribute to every single debate on entrepreneurship. The only thing you don’t know about is your own startup.

9. Failure is the key to success.

If you believe this, you’re an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur. Failure is never the key to success. What you learn from failure is the key to success. Some entrepreneurs brag about their failures like a boss. And some aims to fail, just to sound cool.

Failure is not something you should be proud of unless you learnt something from it. Failure is not cool. Unless you’re an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur, failure will only break you.

10. Getting featured on YourStory

Forget the rest. This is the main aim of an Adarsh Indian entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs getting featured on YourStory is similar to actors getting featured on Filmfare.

Real entrepreneurs don’t waste their time attending events and talking about others. They mind their own business. Literally. Do you agree with me? Add your views in comments.

Source:  http://bit.ly/1Wo5HFV

5 Digital-Marketing Tactics to Ditch in 2016

Keeping abreast with what works in digital marketing can be a constant catch-up game. Fickle consumers jump from channel to channel. Google updates its search algorithm. Keeping up with Facebook’s monthly changes requires constant education. Because of all of this change, it can be hard to keep on top of which digital tactics still work -- and which are no longer relevant.

Read on to understand which digital-marketing tactics you should consider ditching in 2016.

1. Having a desktop-only accessible website

The mobile website living separately from the desktop website no longer flies with Google. The dominant search engine has made it very clear that a traditional website that doesn’t adjust to the user’s screen size won’t be as visible as one that does.

Google knows its users access their search engine while on the go and wants to serve its users in the best way possible. To make itself look better, it must reward the websites most accommodating to how customers search the web today -- in the car, the Starbucks line and even in the corporate meeting.

Websites must be fluid not only for the user, but for the business owner’s convenience as well. Having a mobile website built on a separate platform runs the risk that information from site to site will be inconsistent. Contradictions erode consumer trust. Handling social media and directory updates creates enough extra work. Having to upload new information to additional sites become cost and time ineffective. The bottom line is that the traditional desktop designed website will lose rankings and visibility.

Despite Google’s clear messages that websites must be mobile-friendly, many small and medium-sized businesses have not converted their websites to mobile-friendly design. To check if your website is mobile friendly, enter your url into Google’s “Mobile Friendly Test Tool.”Google will quickly tell you if and why your website does not render in an effective way on tablet or smartphone. Small fonts and links put too closely together are a few factors that make a website impossible to navigate and access on a small screen. Get your website mobile today to keep customers coming in.

2. Not updating your website.

Beyond mobile accessibility, Google also closely watches how often users click and convert on your website. While it was once speculated that Facebook channels would overtake websites, research tells us that consumers return again and again to a company’s website for in-depth information on the corporation, product and contact details.

Google takes this habit seriously and wants company websites to serve visitors’ needs. Again, like the mobility demand outlined above, Google is laser-focused on delivering quality answers from quality websites.

The place-holding or basic website that acts primarily as a two-dimensional, digital brochure doesn’t win higher rankings from the search engines. The site must be attractive, easy to navigate, timely and constantly updated with quality content.

A/B testing can help your site win better user engagement and sales or other conversions. More, Google interprets users quickly bouncing away from your website back to the search results as a signal the site offers content that’s irrelevant to the search query. To succeed in digital marketing, make sure your website fulfills a need and constantly addresses that need with timely, relevant content.

3. The spammy link

Google changed the determination of quality in 1999 when it decided that, rather than have an editorial team review websites and make subjective judgments, it would derive value of a website by the number of other websites linking to it. In other words, the digital thumbs up in the form of backlinks provided a more accurate reflection of a site’s usefulness.

Unfortunately, business owners and unethical search agencies sullied Google’s trust of backlinks as indicators of the authority of a website. These entities gamed Google’s system by creating backlinks from artificially created sites with poor-quality content and irrelevant information. Google’s strong staff of PhDs and computer engineers rectified this black- hat SEO with the Penguin update, which penalizes websites without authentic backlinks coming from relevant and reputable websites.

Today, Google rewards the quality, robust content that earns backlinks naturally. SEO companies have become big content generators. Keep in mind, too, that in addition to signals from other sites, Google’s staff of editors spot-check a website’s content to make sure it’s relevant to certain search queries. Companies without meaningful and helpful content, products and backlinks drop in the rankings quickly. After all, Google doesn’t want to deliver a poor product.

4. The superficial social channel

Social media marketing progressed so quickly, many companies were thrilled to get cover images and some content -- any content -- up over the past few years. They felt convinced having a presence on social media would prove their credibility.

Companies that overlook the opportunities social media provides to connect one on one with customers do so to their detriment. Studies show that social media has become one of the big three of customer support, alongside telephone and email.

But where those emailing a company expect a response within a day or so, a study conducted by Edison Research reveals that 42 percent of those contacting a company through social media expect a response within 60 minutes, and 24 percent expect a response within 30 minutes. Further, consumers expect the social-customer service team to work all night and through the weekend.

Long gone are the days when companies avoided social media for fear of negative comments. We’ve all learned negative comments happen whether we’re there to address them or not. Now, most marketers view criticism as an opportunity to educate customers and showcase a committed, responsive customer-service department.

5. Single display and Facebook ads

Typically just 2 percent or fewer website visitors convert on the first visit. Sales professionals have always known that it takes seven to nine contacts before the sale is closed. If the website is the digital salesperson, shouldn’t it have the opportunity to follow up on initial contacts?

Google and Facebook have made this possible through re-targeting -- which Google calls re-marketing. When a visitor lands on a website, a cookie or short piece of JavaScript is placed in their browser. After they leave your site, this cookie pings the re-targeting platform to put certain ads on the next pages the visitor goes to.

That’s why, when you spend some time on a hover-board site or when you next go to WebMD or Facebook or your favorite blog, you see an ad for the hover board. It follows you around the web. WebMD, Facebook and some blogs also have a relationship with the re-targeting platform that acts as a clearinghouse or middle man to deliver ads to appropriate publishing platforms. The WebMD page you see won’t be the same WebMD page a friend sees even if you use the same URL. Ads served to your friend will be different and based on her previous Internet activity.

When done right, re-targeting helps move the prospect down the sales funnel. It re-engages them after they leave your page. The era of a single display ad that shows up on one blog in the same place every time is coming to an end. Today’s technology enables advertisers to target one customer at a time and lure them down the attention, interest and desire path to action -- the sale.

Each digital-marketing tactic a business chooses must depend on the size of the business, its unique selling proposition, its audience demographics and its ideal buyer’s journey. No digital-marketing technique is a one-size-fits-all solution, but we’re confident that if you avoid these tactics and mistakes, your digital marketing efforts will be improved in 2016.

Source : http://entm.ag/1K1PzRc

10 TIPS FOR SETTING UP YOUR OWN BUSINESS

It can be hard to take the leap and start out on your own. Whether you’re in finance, catering, or shoe design, many women get stuck before they start because they get bogged down in the small details and complications and fail to focus on the bigger picture. If you need a push, check out these 10 tips for setting up your own business successfully:

1. Visualize success – Visualize what your future looks like and set manageable targets and goals that you can actually reach. Try to picture your products on shelves or yourself in your office. Think about the color of your chair and the feeling of accomplishment. When you have a strong view in mind you can obtain anything.
2. Know your environment – Make sure that you research as thoroughly as possible the kind of environment that your business will be operating in. Implement a PEST analysis (political, economic, social, technological) to see how a change in legislation, inflation, public opinion, or new technology could affect you. Conduct aSWOT analysis as well, to assess your potential business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Make sure you study your customers and competition and know who you’re selling to and who you’ll be competing against.
3. Know your promotional channels – With so many marketing and promotional channels at your disposal these days, you need to establish the right ones for you. Although some of them are free, you might find that they don’t work for you. Once you know your target market and the kinds of things they like, it will be easier to select your promotional channels to appeal to them.
4. Plan to reduce counterfeit losses – Fraudulent and damaged bills can cause your business a huge loss over time, so make sure that you increase efficiency and accuracy by buying a currency counter. Any business that has a POS system and receives cash should definitely have this in place.
5. Learn to delegate – It’s hard but it’s important. Learning to delegate will make getting your business off the ground far easier and make it more efficient when you’re up and running.
6. Keep track of your finances – Make sure that you know what you will need to spend and how much you calculate earning. Hire an accountant to ensure compliance with taxation requirements. And pay attention when counting money to avoid costly mistakes.
7. Keep looking for new clients – Once you establish a potential customer base, don’t stop there. Keep thinking of new markets and people to sell your product or service to. Plan for long term growth.
8. Think about your business’s safety – If you can’t afford an extensive security system and you know you’ll be dealing with cash, make sure you purchase a secure cash box to keep your hard-earned money safe.
9. Test and analyze –Test and analyze any measure or change that you implement to make sure that your customers are responding well to your products.
10. Set Limits for yourself – Finally, remember that you need to have a life too and set limits for yourself so that your business doesn’t take over. Try to turn the computer off at the same time each day and make sure you designate times for family or friends.

Source : http://bit.ly/1jYjVNB

10 Things Every Online Business Owner Should Know For 2016

Tick… tick… tick… 2015 is winding down faster every day. Very soon, we will be welcoming 2016 and it’s now that time of the year when businesses start to revise their strategy and map out a way to conquer the New Year. 2015 was a great year for online businesses, with a total of $349.1 billion projected in total U.S. ecommerce sales (for perspective, that’s more than the entire GPD of Denmark in 2014).

If you want to succeed in online business in 2016, here are 10 factors you absolutely must take note of:

Prepare a Mobile Strategy

Mobile is quickly becoming one of the biggest forces we’ve seen since the internet, and its importance keeps growing on a daily basis. Research shows tha tmobile is expected to influence ecommerce sales to the tune of $76.79 billion in 2015, and that a quarter of all US retail sales, or a whopping $1 trillion+ in ecommerce sales, are influenced by mobile in 2015 alone.

Whether it is in form of direct sales, or the influence it has on potential customers’ research before doing business with you, mobile strategy can no longer be pushed back in 2016; it is getting to a stage where you either have a mobile strategy or see your sales slowly evaporate.

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of being mobile-optimized in 2015, Google updated it’s algorithm to start penalizing sites that are not mobile friendly;research shows that a massive 46.6% of non-mobile friendly pages were affected by the update.

Start Blogging

If you did not blog in 2015, you’re already way behind; research shows that a massive 77 percent of internet users read blogs and that small businesses that blog generate 126% more leads and have 97% more inbound links than businesses that do not blog.

It’s important to note that blogging does not just mean having a blog installed; you actually have to keep your blog updated. My next point addresses this.

Blog Frequently

Exactly how often should you blog in 2016? For a long time it’s been difficult to establish the right blogging frequency, but not anymore; the kind folks at Hubspot went ahead to survey 13,500+ of their users and came to the conclusion that more is better. Essentially, the Hubspot research established the following:

• Companies that published 16+ blog posts monthly got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 blog posts monthly.
• Companies that published 16+ blog posts monthly got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that published less than 4 blog posts monthly.

It’s been established, and from a credible source, that publishing 16 or more articles monthly on your blog is the sweet spot. Now, develop a content schedule and start blogging!

Document Your Content Marketing Strategy

Everybody keeps raving about content strategy, but research shows that a good number of companies utilizing content marketing aren’t recording any gains due to their content marketing use. Does this mean that content marketing doesn’t work? No, but the answer lies in something more subtle; a documented strategy.

Research by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs found that the success of your content marketing can be determined by the type of documentation you have; the CMI and MarketingProfs study found that 60 percent of companies that document their strategy get results from content marketing, compared to a minuscule 7 percent of companies without a strategy. In other words, having no content marketing strategy increases your chances of failure by 94 percent while having a documented strategy increases your chances of success by 60 percent.

Upgrade Your Website Speed

According to Aliesha from Umbrellar, “47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds”.

Take that! A whopping 47 percentof potential customers expect your website to load within 2 seconds, and as high as 40 percent of people will reconsider doing business with you if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. While that might seem surprising, don’t be too surprised because our attention spans keep getting shorter, and recent research from Microsoft shows that our attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish.

If your website is slow in 2016, you’ll lose a lot of business. Fix things by getting a good web host; for comparison, this article on Hosting Facts reviews dozens of web hosts by their average page load time and their data can serve as a benchmark when deciding on what web host to use.

Position Your Content Front and Center

After a recent leak of their “Quality Guidelines” document (a document handed to “Quality Raters” to help Google evaluate search results, the outcome of which eventually influences Google’s algorithm changes), Google decided to publicly release the document. One of the key factors Google uses to rank content is how prominent the content is on the site that hosts the content; essentially, content that is front and center at the top of your page will get ranked more than content that is hidden behind a scroll or ads.

By positioning your content front and center, you can actually guarantee that you’ll get more results from your content marketing efforts.

Speed Will Increasingly Drive Online Sales

We’ve examined the importance of website speed earlier, but it’s important to also examine the importance of product delivery speed; research projected same-day delivery revenue to increase to more than $620 million in 2015, a 6X increase from 2014, and available data shows that this will only keep increasing.

As our attention span keeps decreasing, and new technology keeps serving our short attention spans, we expect to get things faster; if possible, we want it “now and here”. Some of the biggest ecommerce giants, like Amazon, are cashing in on this by emphasizing same-day and faster delivery.

Focus on delivering your customer’s orders faster and you’ll be able to capture a lot more sales.

Indentify and Capitalize on Big Shopping Days

Black Friday, Super Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc, are big days that can result in a huge revenue boost from businesses that learn to capitalize on them. Data from Adobe’s Digital Index reveals that total online sales from Cyber Monday in 2015 rose to $3.07 billion, a 16 percent increase from the previous year; this beat expert forecast of a 12 percent increase in sales. This was dwarfed by a similar event in China, known as “Single’s Day”, in which a single company, Alibaba, generated a massive $14.3 billion in a single day in 2015.

Whether it is in China or in the U.S., available data points to the fact that big sales day are big sales day, and are often major revenue drivers for some of the world’s biggest companies. Grow your business by identifying these big sales days, preparing for and capitalizing on them.

The Customer is the King

With the advent of the internet, it is becoming increasingly clear that the customer owns the real power. Research shows that 78 percent of consumers have bailed on a transaction due to poor customer support, and that a typical business will only hear from 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers. In other words, if you suck at customer support it’ll cost you a lot of sales in 2016, and a very insignificant portion of your customers will reach out to complain.

Invest more resources and time into customer support and reap the rewards.

Embrace Personalized Marketing

Long done are the days when companies get away with being out of touch with the realities of their customers; whether it is with your email or marketing strategy, you can get more bangs for your bucks by developing a personalized marketing plan. Research shows that you can get up to a 208 percent increase in conversion rate from your emails by sending targeted emails over batch-and-blast emails. The same goes for every area of your marketing.

Focus on delivering a personalized experience for your users and watch your sales go through the roof.

Conclusion

How prepared are you for 2015? What strategies do you have for increasing your online sales? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source : http://bit.ly/1Y1ncOZ