How to Survive Your First Year of Entrepreneurship

The first year of entrepreneurship is the crucial one. It’s where your company will either grow at an incredible rate or immediately stagnate. It’s true that most entrepreneurs give up in the first year,according to a number of studies. This is not difficult to understand why because it’s notoriously difficult to thrive in one of the most competitive areas of business.

But this doesn’t have to convince you that this is a bad idea. You can start your own business and you can succeed. This guide is going to show you how you can go about surviving your first year of entrepreneurship.

Have a Goal

The only way you are going to make your strategy succeed is through having an actual goal. A common mistake is that people have no real idea what they want to accomplish or why they are doing this. It leads to them doing something without any meaning or purpose in mind.

If you can’t articulate your goal, you are never going to make it through the hard times. A good goal is something that you believe in and that you are doing for the greater good. Yes, you can make money and get rich, but a good goal embraces something more than that.

The Right Work Ethic

It’s easy as an entrepreneur to take the slightest hint of success and turn it into something that it isn’t. For example, it’s easy to see an increase in sales and then to relax and soak it all in. There’s nothing wrong with reflecting sometimes, but if you are compromising your work ethic in order to do this it’s a mistake.

The best entrepreneurs are passionate people with a big work ethic. They are so passionate that they never stop working. If they have to work 18-hour days, they relish it because they believe in what they are doing and they are passionate about what they are doing.

Remember, entrepreneurship is primarily about hard work.

Be Willing to Delegate

It’s easy to try to take on all the responsibility alone. This may work for a time, but it’s quickly going to lead to burnout. The chances are you are also not going to do the job as well as you could have. Be willing to delegate different tasks to people with more expertise than you.

It may require an outlay to begin with, but you are going to make your money back because the job will be done right.

Love Risk

Entrepreneurs can never afford to be conservative. The nature of the business means that they have to go further than others in order to achieve success. In other words, they have to bring something to the table that has never been seen before. And with that comes risk.

The problem with a lot of entrepreneurs is that they come from conservative backgrounds. They may have worked in a large company where taking unnecessary risks was actively discouraged. As an entrepreneur, you can’t afford not to take risks because otherwise you are never going to discover something new.

You can never guarantee that it will come off well, but the point is you are trying new things. You are always going to miss the shots you never take, as the saying goes.

But how do you take risks without putting your whole business in jeopardy?

This is quite simply because the idea is to not take these risks. The daring acts that many businesspeople take may look crazy from an outsider’s point of view, but in reality, they are incredibly calculated. They have weighed up the pros and cons and they know that they have a reasonable chance of success.

Be Content with Living Cheap and Uncomfortable

The life of an entrepreneur is rarely glamorous. There are many entrepreneurs who have been homeless while running their businesses. They have worked minimum wage jobs and they know the meaning of hard work. There are no shortcuts to success and very few people are lucky enough to come up with a great product that goes viral.

Many entrepreneurs simply can’t stomach the idea of living lean and living with a constant jittery feeling that they are going to fail. Comfort is not something you are going to experience often in this line of work.

The End Goal: a Happier You

But you’ll be happy to know that it all pays off in the end. Many entrepreneurs report being happier than they have ever been, despite the stress and discomfort that comes with being an entrepreneur.

Is the life of an entrepreneur for you?

 Source: http://bit.ly/20Bg2P1

Top Trends in Marketing for This Year

At the start of every year, many inbound marketers like to take a glimpse into what the future holds. It’s exciting to see what new software, hardware, and strategies are at the forefront, and make predictions about what will become the next best thing … and what will fizzle out.

The marketing trends for this year will not disappoint, so here’s a look at what to expect and how to plan for what’s ahead.

Video and images are essential.

Much like the last two years, imagery will continue to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert sales. However, some marketers are still getting on board to use video and images, so you’ll be competing with many more companies for customer attention. Plus, Google is now incorporating in-SERP video ads, giving your content much more exposure.

Virtual reality and 3D are the next major shift.

Video and images will continue to be essential–even more so as developers launch products enabling virtual reality and 3D technology for marketing. While the market will generally focus on gaming, there are opportunities marketers must seize. Integration with social media and video channels will lead to more direct messaging for users.

Make sure you’re optimized for mobile.

Users of portable devices will become even more reliant on mobile usage as compared to desktops, so your pages must be developed accordingly. Use responsive design techniques or create a separate app for users to ensure smooth, glitch-free navigation.

Marketers must embrace the omnichannel approach.

Marketing has always been about reaching your potential customers in the places they’re hanging out. In 2016, they’ll be all over and expect you to be there with them. An integrated approach to the customer experience is important–one that blends interactions for a seamless encounter, instead of a series of connections through your website, social media, and app separately.

This is especially important for businesses with a brick-and-mortar location in addition to online marketplace. If there’s a disconnect between the two experiences, there will be a disruption in your messaging.

Social media is a channel, not a strategy.

For years, marketers have used social media as a strategy for reaching customers. However, these platforms aren’t an approach on their own; rather, your social media profile is a part of your comprehensive marketing strategy–it’s a channel for messaging, not a separate tactic. Think of it as a microphone that supplements and amplifies your content.

Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) will dominate.

Wearable technology means your customers are never without their smart device; the IoT is turning everyday objects into network connections. These solutions gained some traction in 2015 and you can expect them to boom in the coming months. The landscape of local marketing will see the most impact as the lines between online and traditional marketing become blurred.

The 2016 Outlook

If there’s one common theme tying together all of these sales and marketing trends, it’s that marketers must focus on the customer experience in their efforts. Your content must meet the desires of demanding customers, delivering relevance and context through the channels they want. They have high expectations and limited patience, so your strategies must meet their needs and expectations to get a leg up over the competition.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PIPq7o

8 Tips You Should Know If You Want To Start Your Business Successfully

As Scott Belsky said, “It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” It’s really not that the success of an idea depends on its uniqueness and potential foremost. Rather, it depends on how you bring the idea into action.

You may have heard, as an entrepreneurship enthusiast, people calling an idea a “billion dollar idea”. However, ideas in themselves are of negligible worth. It’s hard to sell just an idea for even a few thousand dollars, unless you’re an expert salesperson.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to undermine the value of an idea at all. In fact, a concrete idea is the first and foremost thing that you need when starting your business. However, there are plenty of other variables which determine whether you transform an idea into a successful enterprise or not.

Here are some tips to help you if you want to get your business of to a successful start.

1. Identify strengths and weaknesses

A common fallacy among young, enthusiastic entrepreneurs is the invulnerability regarding their idea. It is convenient to believe that your idea is impeccable. This however is not always the case. No matter how brilliant an idea is, it will have shortcomings.

A proper analysis of strengths and weaknesses of your idea will help you understand its actual value. It can help you identify risks and difficulties in implementing your ideas. Furthermore, it can reveal opportunities that you are unaware of.

Once you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your plan, you can decide how much time and money you will need to put into the endeavor.

2. Create a business model

Your idea is not going to earn money by itself. You need to find the best ways to milk money from your idea. You will need a proper business model for that.

A proper business model will help you figure out elements such as who your customers are, which demographic your idea appeals to, what marketing approach you should take, what are the company’s capital and resource requirements, and how does the company plan to manage its operations as it grows.

A business model helps you to set clear financial goals and develop a proper implementation strategy to achieve those goals.

3. Take feedback from experts

One of the biggest mistakes young entrepreneurs make is that they don’t care to take any suggestion from experts. They feel their idea is solid and see no need for any feedback.

However, with years of experience under their belts, experts can understand the multiple aspects of your enterprise in a much more dynamic and realistic manner.

Taking feedback from experts will help you to take a better approach towards implementation of your project and will also introduce you to difficulties or problems you might not have considered previously.

4. Form an alliance

If you think you alone can successfully grow a huge enterprise, you are wrong. If it’s a small scale enterprise, you could do it on your own. But even in that case, teamwork helps a lot.

You need to find a group of likeminded individuals with compatible skills who add to the value of the group. It’s best to go for people with different skill sets.

It’s always better to form a group that includes a developer, manager, designer, marketer and business analyst than one consisting of all developers.

5. Know your competitors

You might think that your idea is one-off and never thought of before. But there is a high chance somebody else has already thought of it in one way or another.

Whether the idea is a novel one or quite common, you will always have competitors, both new and those with years of presence in the industry.

You should give plenty of thought towards contending with the competitors, existing and potential ones alike. And, outsmarting the rivals should be more than displaying more captivating ads or glossier banners on your building. Here are some great ideas on where to put those vinyl banners. The main focus should be on providing better customer experience than your rivals.

6. Earn your team’s support

Just increasing the number of heads in your team doesn’t achieve anything for the success of your enterprise. You need to build a solid team.

You need to build a cohesive team where individuals add up to each other. For that, the most important thing is to build a sense of trust and belief within the team.

You need to earn the support of your team. You need to instill belief in them that your enterprise is going to succeed. You might even need to make compromises in doing so.

7. Focus to boost skills within your team

For the continuous growth of your business, the team members also need to grow constantly. That requires continuous increment of individual skills.

Even when the business is not really succeeding, you need to find ways to aid in the boost of individual skills of team members. The members should constantly upgrade themselves for the betterment of business as well.

It might be hard to do so in the beginning, but you should set aside some amount for training of the members, their recreation and also challenge them at every step.

8. Expand your idea 

Ideas often arise from that sudden spark, when you feel you have come up with something big. At that point, you could even explain your idea in a sentence. But ideas continuously grow. You might start with something elementary but, after lots of brainstorming and planning, you add more aspects to your idea.

With the growth of your business, you should continuously work on reforming your idea. You should regularly refine it, adjust requirements and try to continually assure that it is relevant.

Source : http://bit.ly/1NQuhHt

Play with social media !

LinkedIn just fixed one of its most annoying problems

"Finaly LinkedIn  fixed one of its most annoying problems"

 I'm a big LinkedIn user, but for a long time there's one feature that caused me angst because it worked so poorly:

Messaging.

The one-to-one communication tool on LinkedIn was completely broken.

I felt like I was constantly losing track of messages because the Inbox section of the site and app didn't allow me to read entire threads at once.

For a long time, you couldn't even tell from the Inbox whether or not you had responded to someone's message (the site recently added a "responded" tag, but you still only see the last received message when you click a thread). I often didn't get notifications for new messages.

The entire experience felt clunky and led to me leaving my email address in almost every note so that I could move the conversation to a more reliable platform.

But, rejoice, because LinkedIn has finally fixed messaging!

The company is rolling out an "easier and more lightweight" way to have conversations, the company writes.

"The wait is over," product manager Mark Hull writes, acknowledging that users had long been asking for new messaging capabilities. Communicating on LinkedIn will now look a lot more like it does on texting or Facebook Messenger; you can even use stickers and GIFs or attach photos or documents.

LinkedIn says that it has improved its push notifications for messages too, so no more accidentally waiting half a week to respond to an important professional connection.

Here's a peek at what the new experience will look like.

For the first time, you can also create group messages, in case you want to start a dialog with several colleagues at once.

Now that it's finally left the tired old method behind, the company says it plans to keep improving the messaging platform.

"We're excited about concepts like intelligent messaging assistants that can help suggest people you should message or provide you with relevant information about that person before you start a conversation," Hull writes. "Or the possibilities with voice and video to make conversations more compelling."

Source : http://bit.ly/1N3hQek