3 Ways to Strengthen Your Marketing Leadership

These days, marketers don’t just want a chair at the table—they want to lead the meeting. But no matter how smart and fast your marketing team is, it’s only one piece in a larger puzzle that runs your company.

Whether you’re part of an in-house team or a member of an agency brought on to assist, it’s your job as a marketer to ensure the rest of the business understands that marketing influences all areas of a company. Sales, services, development—they all need marketing to amplify or clarify their message.

For these reasons and more, we are now seeing the path to CEO begin in marketing. But before you can lead, you have to gain the respect of the company.

While your marketing metrics might seem obvious to you, no one cares what an MQL or SQL is. If you aren’t making it a priority to change the way your company perceives your marketing initiatives, you’re undermining your own success.1  Your entire company should be invested in the success of the overall marketing strategy. To accomplish this, they have to understand what you’re doing and how it impacts both the individual and the company as a whole.

That’s easier said than done, but here are three critical ways to change your company’s perception of marketing.

1. Be a Leader

Every company has annual, quarterly, and even monthly revenue goals that are agreed upon by the executive team at the beginning of your fiscal year. But is the rest of the company aware of these benchmarks?

When you spend all your time on content, email campaigns, webinars, and events, it can be easy to get tunnel vision. It’s important to ensure that you’re keeping the company focus where it belongs. Marketing can take center stage in making these goals visible.

Internally, marketing the progress of teams and tying them back to company vision is an area of marketing that’s been largely forgotten. The most successful teams don’t allow this to happen. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, you’ll get mired down in routine and lose sight of the “why.” This causes even the best organizations to lose their way. Let marketing be the beacon it’s meant to be, steering the giant ship to port.

2. Connect to the Individual

Allow everyone to understand how their role contributes to company goals.

You already know that your efforts create business interest, leads, and revenue. But depending on their background, the department managers and the company executives might not understand exactly how marketing drives the bottom line.

When you finish a webinar that results in an impressive lift in a pipeline, share that internally. Champion the sales associates who use your content most effectively, and demonstrate your content to show others in the department your value, too. Not everyone cares about infographics, email open rates, and marketing tech. Everyone cares about revenue. Showing the company how you’re making a difference on the bottom line is the ultimate way to get them on your side.

Beyond the one-to-one results of some marketing campaigns, the number one shortcoming of marketing departments is their failure to produce accurate attribution reporting. Marketing is an additive process and one that is mainly rooted in influence. Recognize this, and educate the rest of your company around this crucial fact.

After you’ve pollinated the idea, be sure to enforce it with accurate and frequent reporting. If you are only able to produce simple “lead”-based reports, you’ll fall victim to the “eBook fallacy.” Everyone knows a prospect downloading an eBook doesn’t close deals. It certainly does help, though. Attribution reporting will allow you to show this influence rather than undermining your metrics by trying to take credit for revenue with nothing but a download to show for it. 

3. Dwell on the Past

Be a steward of results, and remind every one of successful initiatives. Marketing is often the victim of ignorance. Simply put, sometimes the organization doesn’t know what you’re doing.

Don’t sell yourself short. When you have a record number of qualified leads coming in as a result of a new campaign, send around a note to the company celebrating your success. When a piece of educational content goes viral on social media, let everyone know. Call out by name the other departments who helped you, whether it’s Customer Success bringing in great customer stories or Accounting who helped you meet your budget goals on a big event. Put your successful campaigns up for an industry award, and name people outside the marketing department. Then, put the plaque you get for winning right above the coffee maker.

By championing the success of the company as a whole, the marketing team changes the perception, gets more allies within the business, and encourages more excitement towards future campaigns.

Marketers and the companies they represent have a symbiotic relationship: You need each other. By explaining your approach, stepping outside your comfort zone, and crediting others with some of your successes, marketing can go from weird artsy kid to class president in no time.

There’s no time like the present to make the changes outlined above. Marketing is still shedding the stigma that has plagued it for too long. The modern-day marketer is an ambassador of the brand, the poster child for duality. Analytical and yet creative, today’s marketers can’t be ashamed to highlight how rare it is to see their rare skill set in one, highly effective executive. If the path to CEO is the CMO title, the vigor with which marketers perpetuate their brand must also be applied to advertising their results internally.

 Source: http://bit.ly/ideasnews

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6 Ways Startups Waste Money on Marketing

Marketing will be where the majority of startups spend most of their budgets. The average B2B marketer spends 42 percent of their budgets on marketing. Yet there are so many startups that don’t always get the results they want simply because most of their dollars are being wasted. If you are failing due to ineffective tactics and tools, this guide is going to show you some of the most common mistakes you may already be making, and how to turn things around.

Building a Following on Social Media

Your marketing budget should be spent partly on social media. But so many startups are convinced that building a following is going to lead to success. The problem with this is that social media reach is no longer what’s best for business. Facebook has seen organic reach crippled. Investing all this time into building a following is nearly pointless because what you’ll quickly discover is that you can have 100 likes on Facebook yet still make more money through advertising than someone with a thousand likes.

When only a fraction of your following will ever see your posts, building a following on social media is an entirely fruitless pursuit, so save your money.

Building a following remains important, but it should come through purchases of your products not through ‘like’ building campaigns.

Giving Up Too Soon

Startup owners believe that their product is so great that it’s sure to gain traction within a matter of days. Many small businesses begin with a twinkle in their eye and then realize they are not going to have an easy time.

Rather than persevering, they give up too soon. Many small business owners begin with high expectations and then when these aren’t met they believe it’s a problem with their business. You have unrealistic expectations if you demand that your business becomes a success within two years.

Not Understanding Your Audience

You can target any niche in the world with advanced marketing and advertising tools these days. To make the most of this you have to actually understand your audience, though. It’s necessary to have the image of your perfect customer, along with their likes/dislikes, and where they hang out.

If you are unable to understand your target audience, your targeting is always going to be slightly off. Conduct customer research before you start to waste your marketing dollars.

You Have No Idea How You Attracted Your Loyal Customers

The most loyal customers in your brand will be the ones who purchase every new product or service without question. These are the people you can rely on. At the same time, you need to know how you got them in the first place. It’s important for you to have a good idea for how you found your most loyal customers, so you can continue to replicate these tactics.

With most startups, the top fifth of your customers may account for up to 70 percent of your overall revenue, and this won’t change much as you grow.

Wagering Everything on One Marketing Campaign

Marketing is a game of trial and error whether you’re a small business or a large business. There are lots of things you can try and part of your growth period is to test out all these different tactics. But it’s difficult to do this when you’re wagering your entire marketing budget on a single campaign.

Don’t give yourself one shot to make your startup work. There’s a time and a place for this, but it’s not now. The best way to handle marketing as a startup is to start with extremely small scale tests.

Scaling up your marketing efforts should be done with extreme caution and only when you are sure that you are actually getting results. If it doesn’t work at a small level, it’s certainly not going to work at a higher spending level.

Not Tracking Your Results Well Enough

And then there are times where you are simply not tracking your results well enough. This tends to happen when startups gain a little bit of success in the beginning. They become so caught up in their success that they forget to track their results and compare them against the past.

Only by keeping track of your marketing results can you keep an accurate record of what works and what doesn’t. Without accurate measurements, you are going to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1VjevgT

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20 People Who Only Achieved Success After Age 40

As we look at actors, businessmen, and other geniuses who found success at a young age, we sometimes cannot help but wonder what we have been doing with our life. But not everyone hits their peak in their 20s to 30s. Here are 20 famous people who achieved success after the age of 40, and what they did to get where they became.

1. Samuel Jackson

The famous movie star was 46 when he played his role as Jules Winnfield inPulp Fiction. Before then, Jackson had struggled with drug addiction for two years until he got his first major role in Jungle Fever in 1991.

2. Martha Stewart

Stewart worked in catering for years, but her role as “America’s housewife” did not materialize until she started writing cookbooks and other pieces on domestic living in her 40s.

3. Ronald Reagan

Reagan obviously had a successful acting career, but he first came onto the political stage when he delivered his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech during the 1964 election at the age of 53. He leveraged his past acting talents to become one of the most respected presidents of the 20th century.

4. Henry Ford

In his youth, Ford worked as an engineer under Thomas Edison, where he worked on ways to improve the then new automobile. It was not until he was 40 that he founded the Ford Motor company, where he introduced the Model T five years later.

5. Abraham Lincoln

At the age of 40, Lincoln left the House of Representatives and went back to practicing law, his young political career seemingly over. He jumped onto the just-founded Republican Party seven years later, and then was elected President of the United States four years after that.

6. Reid Hoffman

Not every social media website was founded by some young tech genius. Reid Hoffman founded SocialNet.com in 1997, a precursor of sorts to Facebook. But he founded LinkedIn in 2002 at age 35, and then worked for years to make it the professional social networking site. When Hoffman took LinkedIn public 8 years later, he became a billionaire.

7. Lee Ermey

Ermey’s infamous performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket was his first major acting role at the age of 43. Ermey was originally supposed to be an advisor, but was cast as Hartman by impressing Stanley Kubrick with his knowledge of life as a Marine.

8. Ray Kroc

Kroc worked various jobs including a pianist and a traveling salesman for a milkshake maker. Then at the age of 52, he met the McDonalds brothers and proposed that their restaurant could expand across the United States. By the time he died in 1984, McDonald’s had become well, McDonald’s.

9. Richard Adams

While he worked as a British civil servant, Adams told his two daughters a story about a rabbit, who insisted that he write it down. After writing it down two years later, he published Watership Down, which instantly became a children’s literary classic.

10. Jack Cover

Cover worked for NASA and IBM, and eventually used his scientific knowledge to create a weapon which could stop individuals without killing them. Today, police agencies across the world use his Taser to subdue criminals nonviolently.

11. Momofuku Ando

As Japan recovered from the end of World War II, Ando sought a way to provide quick and cheap noodles to his impoverished countrymen. At the age of 48, Ando developed the instant ramen which sustains college students everywhere.

12. Alan Rickman

Rickman quit a successful graphic design business in his mid-20s to go into acting, but spent years working in theater until he was asked to play the role of Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

13. Sam Walton

Walton ran several stores, and failed many times in the process. But he learned from those failures and used the lessons to open the first Wal-Mart at 44 and become one of the richest men in the world. The store’s philosophy was simple, buy in bulk and sell them cheap. Today his stores sell everything from groceries to electric skateboards, and everything in between.

14. Miguel de Cervantes

Widely credited as the first Western novelist for his work Don Quioxte,Cervantes did not publish his first book until 38 and his most famous work at 58. Before then, he served in the Spanish Navy and struggled for years to find work which could support him as he wrote.

15. Julia Child

The woman who brought French cuisine to American televisions did not eat French food until she was 36, working for the OSS in post-war France. But after being absolutely stunned by French food, she studied the cuisine fanatically until she had enough knowledge to host The French Chef at 51.

16. “Colonel” Harland Sanders

Sanders worked a variety of odd jobs throughout his life, and watched his first attempt at a fried chicken restaurant fail at the ripe old age of 65. But Sanders used his Social Security checks to begin franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken, which became the success it is today.

17. Tim and Nina Zagat

These two certainly enjoyed success throughout their life as a pair of corporate lawyers. But after making a list of local restaurants they liked or did not like, they expanded the list into a full-time business. Today, the Zagat list covers over 70 cities.

18. Charles Darwin

Darwin went on his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle at just 21, but his work as a naturalist was held back by health issues. It was not until he was 50 that he finally published On the Origin of Species.

19. Peter Mark Roget

Peter Mark Roget had an interest in lists and orderly language throughout his life. When he retired from his scientific and mechanical work in 1840 at the age of 61, he began preparing to work on a book which would organize words by their definitions. The first thesaurus was published in 1852.

20. “Grandma” Moses

Anna Moses loved to embroider, but when her fingers started to fail at the age of 78, she took up painting. Today, she is remembered as one of America’s great folk artists, who painted scene after scene of American rural life.

  Source : http://bit.ly/1RsdFYf

5 Online Marketing Strategies That Work on Any Budget

The following marketing strategies can theoretically work on any budget--as long as you're willing to put in the time.

When you're trying to get a startup off the ground or keep your small business running, every dollar counts. You're working with a limited pool of revenue, a restricted number of resources, and pressing expenses that demand your immediate attention--so it's no wonder why marketing often gets neglected.

Unfortunately, marketing is a necessary expenditure if you want your business to grow. Otherwise, you might remain strapped with those limited revenue streams indefinitely, and all your scrimping and saving will turn into a self-perpetuating cycle. Is it impossible to break out without spending an exorbitant amount of money?

Of course not. This is the digital age. The following marketing strategies can theoretically work on any budget--as long as you're willing to put in the time:

1. Content Marketing. Content marketing can refer to a number of different interrelated tactics, but they all boil down to one idea: earning more traffic for your site by producing high-profile, valuable pieces of content. For example, you might publish a whitepaper or eBook that attracts people to learn more about your brand, or distribute an infographic that leads users back to your site. If you have a computer, a website, and an Internet connection, you have practically everything you need to get started with the basics of content marketing. Write about what you know--write something original, with specific and detailed information, that's valuable for your target audience. Do this regularly, at least a few times per week, and syndicate your material to increase the visibility of your work. In time, you'll build an audience and you'll be able to invest in better content (posting more frequently, posting new mediums, etc.). Content marketing offers a ridiculously high ROI over the long term, but you can get started for almost nothing.

2. Social Media Marketing. Don't be fooled into thinking that social media marketing is quick or easy. It's not a get rich quick scheme, nor does anything on it happen automatically. There are several fundamentals you have to pay attention to, and even maintaining best practices, it's easy to lose traction or visibility. Still, it costs nothing to establish your brand on most major social media platforms, and you can distribute all your content for free. If you engage with individuals, spark conversations, and syndicate truly valuable content, you'll naturally attract more followers, who can spread the word about your brand and convert to paying customers given the right opportunity. In combination with a solid content marketing campaign, this is even more effective.

3. SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) has developed an almost mystical reputation; professional SEO experts are seen as practitioners of magic, who can make a site rise to the top of Google search results by executing their secret tactics. The reality is much less fanciful. SEO is actually pretty simple if you break it down to its bare components. You'll have to dig into code for onsite optimization, but it's nothing a few online tutorials can't walk you through. Beyond that, content marketing and social media marketing can help you build your domain authority (in coordination with a link building campaign), and they're both nearly free as well. Granted, you won't be able to compete on a national level without the help of an agency or an in-house expert, but you can get started with the basics after a few hours of independent research.

4. Email Marketing. It's free to create a basic MailChimp account, and not very expensive if you want to buy some extra credits. You can also start building a list based on your current or prospective customer base (and I don't recommend buying one). From there, one email a week, backed with good content and special deals, can help you earn more traffic and conversions, and not just a few--email marketing can net you an ROI of 4,300 percent or more. It takes time and effort--but not much money upfront.

5. Influencer Marketing. What if you could get someone else to market your company for you, for free? Sounds sweet, right? The truth is, you can accomplish this with a little bit of research and a decent value proposition. Influencer marketing is the process of identifying high-authority individuals in a given industry (for example, a thought leader in your industry with a massive social following), and getting them to meaningfully engage with your brand. That could mean sharing your content, hosting guest posts, or even engaging in an interview with you. How can you accomplish this without bribery? Simple: you ask. Make it worth their while, stay respectful of their time, and be genuine--eventually, you'll have no problem recruiting influencers to your cause.

These aren't the only marketing strategies that can be executed for next to nothing, so don't limit yourself. Do your research, diversify your strategies, and keep progressing toward your ultimate goals. The beauty of these strategies is that they can work on a passable level with a minimum investment, but if you invest more money, the payoffs start increasing proportionally. You can start off with almost no investment, and by the time you start earning enough revenue to double down on these strategies, you'll be experienced enough to know how to maximize your ROI.

But in order to get to this point, you have to get started--and the sooner the better. Stop using a limited budget as an excuse not to market your business, and start building the momentum you need to succeed.

 Source : http://bit.ly/1KZ8Ok8

3 Tips for Using Pinterest to Drive Sales

Pinterest has become a powerful marketing platform. While social has long considered an awareness raising activity, marketers are more committed this year to making a clearer connection from those endeavors to increased sales. This is one area in which Pinterest shines, driving both traffic and commerce online.

The biggest challenge for businesses on Pinterest is making sure their Pins are seen, and seen by the right audience. The solution to this challenge, says Lux, is understanding the Pinterest audience and whether or not your product is a good fit.

With 100 million active users, Pinterest is not nearly as big as some of the other big networks. However, the biggest demographic on Pinterest are women aged 25 to 34; most likely Millennial moms interested in fashion, DIY, cooking, home decor and shopping. Pinterest users also differ from those on other networks in one very specific way: They prefer to follow brands than notable celebrities and influencers.

Lux had these recommendations for how to drive traffic, and ultimately sales, from your Pinterest marketing efforts:

• Choose your target wisely. Pinterest has robust analytics that can be used even before you spend any money on promoted Pins, said Lux. Experiment with Pins, then use Pinterest analytics to find out what’s working, then choose keywords based on what your audience is most interested in.
  

• Use optimized, high-quality images. In this age of visual media, image quality is extremely important. In addition to professional quality photos and graphics, Lux said there are tools like Canva that make editing easy. Include descriptive text and keywords to improve the likelihood of your Pins bubbling to the top of the search.
  

• Use Rich Pins. Lux noted that most have seen Rich Pins, where a complete recipe or article appears within the Pin. Product Pins, which are a type of Rich Pin, includes important product details like the name, price and availability lead to higher conversion.

For small-business owners on the fence, Lux noted that converting a personal account to a business account is very simple:

With just a little bit of code on your website, it can’t hurt to try and use the analytics at least, even if you’re not going to pay for Promoted Pins.

Readers: Are you using Pinterest for your business?

Source : http://bit.ly/1Kub3ff

Predictions for marketers and brand managers in 2016

The start of a year means a new slate of predictions.

Here are some key things we expect to see in 2016:

1. Networks and advertisers will realize engagement is key. Though some measurement organizations continue to opine about the value of measuring conversation on Twitter and Facebook and how that affects TV/advertisers, 2016 will mark the year when networks and advertisers wise up to the fact that most people don’t talk on social media.

So, if you’re measuring talk, you’re missing the big picture. Focus will turn to measurement of “engagement” more broadly defined to analyze and measure the signals that all users of social media actually do, not just the hyperactive users who represent the majority of content on everyone’s feeds. In our view, conversation is just a subset of engagement.

2. Companies will resist processing too much information. The first use cases of social media data in respect to driving business decisions was a game of cherry-picking metrics and flipping a coin to get meaningful business results. Over the years, we’ve championed looking at the complete picture of metrics as the only way to get meaningful business results.

Though many people in the industry now agree, looking at 2,000+ social media and digital metrics also has its set of challenges. Brand managers who analyze and make use of the right curated and derived metrics will provide the advantage of coming to most business decisions more quickly, digging into lower-level metrics only when they need more specific analysis.

3. Chat platforms will embrace their value.  Younger social media users are shifting their attention to chat platforms (WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Viber, Kik, etc.). There is a great and exciting opportunity to hyper-target audiences; however, you must do it correctly.

Chat platforms will look to build the right native ad products and, more important, the right measurement to gauge engagement. Brands’ stories must align with how the platforms work, not be repurposed or syndicated from other platforms.

4. New measurement tool will excite and confuse. The entire TV/advertising industry is waiting with bated breath for Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement—the magic solution to cure the ills of declining TV viewership. (It’s not declining, but rather moving to new platforms: tablets, mobile, computers, OTT devices, etc.).

We know it’s launching in 2016 and will, no doubt, have glitches that everyone will complain about. Hopefully there will be compassion out there for this massively complex undertaking.

This year will therefore be a big year of education and testing in this world:

• Education—because everyone has to learn exactly what this is measuring, all the vocabulary and all the features.

• Testing—because these data have never been available to the marketplace, so packaging and pricing will be all over the place.

5. Network advertising will go old school. Harkening back to the days of sponsored programs, networks will expand advertising inventory for integrated experiences and other non-30-second pod advertising opportunities. This year’s Pepsi/Empire collaboration will be unleashed in many different forms by major networks and advertisers to cut through the clutter, avoid time-shifting behavior and make a meaningful impact.

6. TV programs will evolve into brands living in a post-viewership world. Though we’ve been saying it for years—and someone (Philippe Dauman in Viacom’s earnings announcements) finally said the same thing—the notion of selling 30-second pods is not the way of the future.

With the realization finally sinking in that consumers can interact with shows (beyond watching 30- or 60-minute episodes) every day across social media platforms, expect that network execs will make moves as simple as selling native posts on network-owned feeds, releasing sponsored mobile games inspired by the shows, or creating real-world sponsored events with talent and non-episodic content.

7. The “audience targeting/programmatic” honeymoon may wear off. The ad world will continue to focus on hyper-targeting and addressability of everything—linear and nonlinear, across different screens and devices. The question is whether all the time and financial investment going into these technologies will reap premium ad pricing to sustain the continued investment and evolution. Industry pros might be asking for it, but that doesn’t mean they’ll put their money where their mouths are.

On that front, brand managers will be forced to reconcile which initiatives drive conversion and which ones drive brand. Driving conversion clearly drives the bottom line; this will lead to more questioning of the role of brand marketing that’s not tied to conversion and the weight it receives in advertisers’ marketing strategies.

8. The industry will up its game so consumers don’t want to block ads. Ad blocking is a hot topic, but the conversation will shift from, “How do technologies stop it or enact it?” to, more critically, “How does the industry change the ways in which ads are conceived and put in front of consumers so that consumers don’t want to block them in the first place?”

9. Election year will usher in a new era of social media analytics. Social media data will be finally be used in meaningful ways to project contest results, including the race for the White House. Though we are not sure we’ll see something as sophisticated as Nate Silver’s 538, these data signals are definitely heading in that direction.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PGGdw1

How To Know If You Have What It Takes to Own a Business

Starting a business comes with its share of challenges. Knowing whether you can overcome those challenges is often the difference between a successful business or closed business.

Unfortunately, any business owner will tell you that it takes more than just a passion to get you to the top. Because 96% of businesses fail within 10 years, it's important to really think about not only what it takes for a business to succeed in your industry, but also what it takes out of a business owner.

So how do you know where you fall? Do you have what it takes to own a business, should you wait a few years, or is it not the right path for you at all?

Are you willing to take risks? Do you have a cap on those risks?

This will be the number one question on every list you read. When you own your own business, you have to be comfortable taking risks, mainly financial risks. Quitting your job and having to put all of your life savings into a space or hiring employees is a common practice all new entrepreneurs go through, and for some the risk is just a little bit too much. 

They try to be smart by saving a certain amount of money and only going so far. While this is a smart move, you can't think that way if you own your own business. You have to be able to plan (and essentially see the future), and give it everything you've got at any point in time.

Can you stick with what you start?

Some people are more free spirits and like to be moving around all the time. Entrepreneurs oftentimes have to have this similar attitude, however, which makes this one tricky. You may seem like you're the right fit to own your own business until this consideration trips up your plans. You have to be able to really stick with what you start, and for some this just isn't in their nature. Be honest with yourself and think about your past projects and how you did sticking with them until the end.

Can you make decisions and feel confident about them?

Plain and simple, you have to be a good decision maker. This one is fairly obvious, but it's incredibly important. When you own your own business, it's ultimately all up to you. You may have people there to help you, but you have to be able to make decisions and feel confident about them. The Wall Street Journal outlined several great decisions you'll have to make right off the bat:

·         Do you want to work from home or lease office space?

·         When are you going to start hiring employees, and what will their jobs be?

·         Do you pursue high-end clients or sell to the masses?

·         Do you want to incorporate? Do you want to advertise?

·         Are you going to borrow money from family and friends? Are you comfortable using your entire savings for the business?

Obviously these are basic questions, but if you're unable to really feel confident about these then it's important to realize the decision-making will only get harder. One wrong decision could cost you a lot of time and money, so you have to be prepared for that fact as well.

Are prepared to commit fully to your business?

Owning your own business will take up the majority of your time if you want to be successful. This means less time going out with friends (and less money to do-so), and even less time with your family (a deal-breaker for many). If you're not ready to commit fully, this may not be the right time. Again, it's all about decisions.

How much can you juggle at once? Are you willing to take on multiple responsibilities?

On that same note, a big reason owning a business will take up all of your time is the fact that you have to take on many responsibilities. At first, you may be your entire company, which means you're the IT pro, the marketing expert, the sales guru, and the boss. Even when you do start to grow your business, as the owner you still need to be familiar with all departments and have at least some expertise in all areas. 

This is also something that is hard to learn on the job, so I highly recommend getting some practice and seeing how you do juggling different things first if possible.

Do you enjoy working with and being around other people?

Another obvious one that has to be mentioned--you have to be good with people. Even if your business doesn't involve a ton of face-to-face customer interaction, you're the owner of the company. You have to manage employees and you have to work with everyone. This is something else that it's tough to learn on the job, so really be honest with yourself about where you stand on the issue currently.

Take a quiz.

When all else fails, there are also several quizzes out there to help generate an answer for you. However, I highly recommend really thinking about some of the points above and coming up with your own conclusion before jumping into a quiz. After all, you need to be able to make decisions on your own, right? Start with this one. You can then listen to others (the quizzes) and take advice and see how you do.

Your Turn

If through it all you still feel confident and ready, go for it. If you don't feel like you're ready right now, that also doesn't mean that you won't be ready in the future. 

As long as you take the time to consider some of the tips above, you should be able to come up with a pretty good idea of if business ownership is right for you. It's not right for everyone and that's OK--the sooner you can weed out ideas that do and don't work the sooner you'll be able to find the right fit for you, and that's really all that matters in the end.

Source : http://bit.ly/1WRrbsU