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3 Traits the Strongest Online Entrepreneurs All Share

Here are 3 traits the strongest online entrepreneurs all share that you should be imitating

If you want to be a competitive digital marketer, one of the best ways to do that is to mimic the practices of people who are already successful. After all, the tactics that have helped them build their brand should work for you, too.

Here are 3 traits the strongest online entrepreneurs all share that you should be imitating. 

1. They are amazing and innovative digital marketers who study hard and execute

The most successful online entrepreneurs know how to reach people in their target market. They can craft ad copy titles that beg to be clicked. They know just the right subject line to put in their emails so that recipients can't resist the urge to open them.

They may not know everything there is to know about search engine optimization (SEO), but they've forged alliances with the best SEO teams so that their content ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

How did they get to that point? They learned. They immersed themselves in marketing articles and books.

Marketing isn't something you learn by accident. If you want to know how to sell, learn from the best in the business. Pick up some great books on marketing and apply the principles that you read about to your own marketing efforts.

Great marketers also define their target market and segment it. They'll craft a marketing message that's custom-made to people in various segments within their target market as well as to people who are at various stages of the sales funnel.

They always use analytics to determine if their most recent campaigns have been successful. If not, they dump those campaigns and put more resources into the ones that are generating revenue.

2. They make sure to provide more value and quality online than anyone else

If you want to develop a following online, follow the example of great marketers and start offering freebies. Give so much value away for free, that people cannot ignore you.

The exact nature of the freebies that you will offer depends on your business model. One of the best ways to gain an audience, position yourself as an authority in your space, and appear selfless is to offer free information in the form of content marketing.

Your business website should have a blog. Use that blog to share information that people in your target market will find useful. If you're a great writer, you can write the articles yourself. However, if you're not very good at writing, it's best to leave the task to somebody else.

Remember, though, that content marketing efforts should appeal to people in your target market. If you're selling a skin care product, you'll want to post articles that will interest people who are in the market for a car (for example: "What are the Best Anti-Aging Ingredients for You" or "What are Skin Brighteners and Why You'll Love Them").

When you offer free information in the form of content marketing, you're doing something for people in your target market. That helps build good will and brand name recognition. Most importantly, though, it brings people to your website where you can eventually close a sale or add the person as a lead in your email list.

Finally, keep in mind that content marketing does not only apply to text. This can be videos, images, events, TV, radio, podcasts, etc. Any type of content that your demographic is interested in.

3. They are great planners, can delegate and focus on what moves the needle the most (80/20 rule)

Overall, great online entrepreneurs need to have outstanding business acumen and there are few key things that go along with that.

First, they're great planners. They don't craft marketing campaigns on-the-fly. Instead, they meet with stakeholders, build a consensus that's backed up by empirical evidence, and craft a marketing plan. That plan will define the overall marketing strategy and define activities that will help reach specific goals. 

Second, great marketers delegate. Simply put, there is too much involved in digital marketing for one person to "do it all." A successful online business includes design, development, copy, online advertising, email list building, email distribution, social media marketing, and search engine optimization.

Those are all disciplines that are best left to trained professionals. It's asking too much to expect one entrepreneur to wear all those hats. They need to be able to find the right people, for the right cost, who can do the job well and delegate.

Finally, great online entrepreneurs focus on most of their effort on what works (80/20 rule). They don't assume that a particular campaign or marketing message is going to work. Instead, they run a couple of different options, evaluate the outcome, and stick with the option that yields the best results. 

Once they have the numbers, they double down on what is the most effective in order to maximize that channel. 

 Source : http://bit.ly/1QBDvbE

The 5 Most Damaging Marketing Mistakes New Entrepreneurs Make

The term “mistakes” has a negative connotation: You've made a decision or implemented something that didn’t go as planned; now you have to deal with the repercussions.

Yet most mistakes, even ones that in the moment seem massive, end up being only temporary setbacks. In fact, they usually end up as positive assets because they teach valuable lessons about how to improve your business or approach.

Unfortunately, not all mistakes are this innocuous. Some, in the marketing realm, actually do long-term harm to your campaign. And, as described below, most of these mistakes are especially damaging because they aren’t obvious. Fixing a blog post with a spelling or accuracy issue is one thing. But when you exhibit a fundamental misunderstanding of best marketing practices, it’s much harder to smooth over the effects.

So, if you’re a new entrepreneur, or unsure if your marketing campaign is going well, take a moment to make sure you aren’t making these five truly damaging mistakes:

1. Ignoring the brand

Trying to market your business without a brand is like throwing a house party without specifying the address. Your brand serves as a foundation of identity for new and old customers alike. It should underline and inform all messaging you put out, from the content of your website to the images on your Facebook banner.

When people see your brand, or notice your logo, or pick up on your style of speaking and area of expertise, they’ll form an opinion of certain traits of your business. Without that connection, your material is floating in space with no association. Plus, the more connections you build, the more familiar your customers will become with your brand, and the more likely they’ll be to buy from you. Without that presence or consistency, you won’t be able to build relationships -- and you might not even get credit for your work.

2. Marketing to everyone

You have to choose whom you want to market to, but too many entrepreneurs make the simple choice: market to everybody. After all, “everybody” is the largest possible audience, so it offers the largest possible return, right? Wrong. Even if you could somehow use one selection of platforms to get a specific message to everyone in the world, that message would be too generic for the entire population to value or remember.

Instead, to stand out, you have to be unique, and if you want to make an impression, you have to be relevant. Being both unique and relevant requires you to create specifically crafted messaging for one segment of the population at a time.

3. Making assumptions about an audience 

All that being said, there are some marketers who understand they must create messaging for specific audience segments but still don't do it effectively. In large part, this is because they’ve made broad assumptions about their target audience, rather than relying on data and research to support their ideas.

For example, they might assume that middle-aged men interested in their product would want a stoic, professional voice and bare-bones, straightforward information, when in reality, this audience would prefer a more casual tone, with humor. As a general rule, you should question every assumption you make. Are you making your marketing decisions because of the way you think things work, or because of the way thingsactually work? Data is your only path to the truth.

4. Investing too much (or not enough)

Successful investment in a marketing campaign demands a careful balance. Investing too much money at the start of your campaign, before you’ve gotten to know your target audience intimately, can create excess waste. You don’t know what platforms work best because you haven’t had the opportunity to test them, and you’re essentially gambling on what you think might work in your favor.

On the other hand, investing too little will leave you with few results, and barely enough data to form any meaningful conclusions.

5. Failing to experiment

Marketing isn’t a point-and-shoot game, no matter how much we sometimes want it to be. It’s a game of setting and resetting expectations, getting asymptotically closer to a “perfect” strategy, without ever quite getting there. The only way to get better is by experimenting -- trying new things and being bold with your strategies, to see which ones work and which ones fail.

If you aren’t actively experimenting, you can’t possibly improve, and that means you’ll remain stagnant in your long-term progress. Never rule out a strategy unless you have data proving it to be ineffective; and never turn down an opportunity to learn more about your brand and customers.

In sum, these mistakes aren’t just the most damaging for new entrepreneurs -- they’re also some of the most common. I’ve spoken and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs who have banked their entire strategies on some of these ideas. And, the good news is that if you catch these mistakes early enough,

If, at this moment, you can identify yourself making them, you’ve already won half the battle. 

Source : http://entm.ag/1Sh696u

7 Tips to Create a Simple and Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media and marketing are two terms that are increasingly viewed as one and the same. In truth, while there is a certain segment of the user community that maintains their social media profiles purely for social reasons, an increasing majority of users also see social media as useful advertising tool. If you are in the latter category, you can use these tips to craft a simple and effective social media marketing strategy for your business. Best of all, you will pay nothing (or next to nothing) for creating a very effective advertising strategy!

Tip #1: Choose Your Social Media Platforms With Care

Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter regularly cull and deactivate accounts that have not been used within a period of time. This is done to keep their content relevant and fresh and also to keep their use statistics accurate. In the same way, you should choose which social media platforms you engage with carefully. Your business will not be helped – and may be harmed – by keeping a social media account open that you do not actually use.

If you have limited time to spend on social media, choose just one or a few platforms to engage with. Facebook and Twitter still command the largest user databases, but Instagram, Pinterest and other image-oriented platforms are rapidly gaining ground. The key is to choose the very best social media platforms for your products and services.

Tip #2: Seek to Create a Lively Online Community

Rather than viewing your followers and fans as wallets, you will have greater success in social media marketing when viewing them as your community. Interacting with them on a personal as well as professional level (where appropriate) can do more to increase brand awareness and loyalty than any number of special offers and discounts – although those are very helpful too!

Here, the more you can do to make your content humorous, memorable, relevant and timely, the more success you will have in building an online audience that sticks to you like glue. Also, do your best to promote your fans’ content as well – retweeting, re-posting, liking and connecting with them about what matters to them most.

Tip #3: Share Happy Customer Stories

You can use your social media platforms to share customer testimonials. Many customers would be just delighted to see their face and name and a short quote online! You could provide a form on your website and regular reminders over email and on your social media platforms for how to submit a testimonial that might get featured.

Tip #4: Use the Inexpensive and Effective Social Media Advertising Options

Google Adwords, Facebook ads and other inexpensive, highly targeted advertising programs are tailor-made for even those with the most limited advertising and marketing budgets. So long as you know who you are trying to reach and where they are (in terms of location as well as which social media platforms they prefer) you can use these programs to your benefit. You can target very specifically to demographics including age, gender, area of the country, interests, status and more.

Tip #5: Connect with Other Influencers on Your Chosen Social Media Platforms

If you notice that such-and-so has a huge following, this indicates a person of influence within your social media sphere. Not only can you friend or fan these folks, but you can actively seek them out and begin to build a relationship with them. One great way to bring yourself to their attention is to continually re-post or re-tweet their content.

Another great way to build a relationship is to extend an offer to cross-promote – you promote their brand to your audience and they promote your brand to their audience. You may also want to host a Google Hangout or Twitter Chat together to bring your audiences together and expand your reach jointly. The more you befriend other industry influencers the faster your own audience grows.

 

Tip #6: Steer Clear of Self-Promotion

This definitely seems counter-intuitive at first – after all, isn’t promotion the whole reason you are spending all this time on social media in the first place? Yes and no. You do want to be able to promote what you have to offer, but you want to do it in such a way that your community online doesn’t quite realize they have been promoted to until they are already purchasing what you offer.

In all of this, it is vital to understand that you are your own best representative for your brand. Social media marketing is all about relationships. It is not about products and services. People buy from people, not companies, so your community will be buying from you, not from your company or your brand. The more people get to know you and what you stand for, the more they learn about your company and what it stands for as well.

Tip #7: Position Yourself as a Reliable Source for Breaking News

Sharing current content, trending content, newsworthy content, will mark you as a vital news source as well as a place to buy products or services. This will keep your community tuned in to your social media profiles for other reasons than just because they need a product or service your company offers.

Did NASA discover another planet? Post about that! Did you just donate to help disaster relief victims? Retweet the donation link. Did your cute dog (or any cute dog) just win a noteworthy competition? For sure share that! Keep on top of the current news and events feeds and you may soon find you are being shared and re-posted and re-tweeted as well, with the effect of improving your brand awareness by default.

Conclusion

Armed with these seven simple tips, you can take your company’s social media presence from bland and boring to vibrant and engaging, increasing customer loyalty, sales and brand awareness without doing anything more than just being yourself!

Source : http://bit.ly/1SfSAEd

5 Rules for Stand-Out Marketing Campaigns

Seven years ago, in the midst of an economic recession, Boston’s Yale Appliance + Lighting was losing money. “I’d read somewhere that people will buy some things anyway during a recession -- and one of those things was refrigerators,” recalls CEO Steve Sheinkopf. “So we pumped more money into radio and newspaper advertising, thinking it would help. It didn’t -- it hurt.”

Sheinkopf, who had taken over the store founded by his grandfather, refocused with what was (at the time) a radical approach. He doubled down on a digital marketing strategy that included social media, blogging, reputation management and email components.

The focus on a content-based inbound marketing program allowed Sheinkopf to bring his advertising budget to near zero. (Last year, he says, he spent nothing aside from seasonal Google AdWords buys around Black Friday and a tax-free holiday weekend.)

Today Yale Appliance is profitable and growing, with 140 employees. Top-line revenue is expected to hit $80 million this year, and in June the company opened a state-of-the-art showroom in Framingham, Mass. -- only its second store after 92 years in business.

So how did Sheinkopf use digital marketing to turn around his grandfather’s company? There’s no magic or special gift involved. “Obviously I’m not a genius; otherwise, I wouldn’t be in the appliance business,” he laughs.

What he does have: commitment. A content-based marketing strategy requires it. Here’s how you can get similar results.

1. Actively manage your online reputation.

When you’re a small, regional business, you compete with companies that can easily outspend you in advertising. In Sheinkopf’s case, that includes big-time players: Sears, Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowe’s.

But digital content can give small, scrappy companies a bigger footprint -- if they’re willing to work it. “Google is democratic,” Sheinkopf notes. What’s more, online review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List can give a small business direct insight into its brand reputation. “Businesses may despise Yelp, but [it’s] a window on how you operate and are perceived,” he says.

So encourage social reviews, thank people who say nice things, and view negative reviews as an opportunity to fix what’s broken. “It’s painful to see a negative comment or review,” Sheinkopf admits. But take a long-term view: Use the criticism as a chance to both resolve an immediate issue for one customer and to improve a process or system for the good of future customers.

2. Know what your customers want.

In 2007, when Sheinkopf started blogging, he got some traction through organic search results. But things really ignited when he dug deeper into digital marketing basics. He credits Marcus Sheridan at thesaleslion.com with teaching him how to write a metatag, a headline and a call to action that can convert prospects into customers.

Sheinkopf also studied customer reactions to figure out what kind of posts would be most useful. It turned out that trend pieces and specific comparisons of, say, a Thermador to a Viking cooktop, got the most traffic. Recommendation posts like “The 5 best counter depth refrigerators” also did well.

Creating customer-centric content takes time. But it’s a valuable exercise, for two reasons: It helps you understand what motivates customers, and it requires you to learn everything about your stock, inside and out.

Online content has become Yale’s biggest driver of new business, Sheinkopf says. Page views were at 18,000 visitors per month in 2011; this past August, the site had 448,000 visitors. What’s more, those who visit the blog and download buyer’s guides convert into buyers at a much higher rate. That’s why Sheinkopf personally reviews all the content his blog publishes.

I told him I was surprised that the CEO manages the company blog, and he laughed: “There’s no better business-development effort. So why wouldn’t I?”

3. Make customers smarter.

Yale Appliance has more than 20 guides covering everything from how to buy under-cabinet lighting to what to look for in a dishwasher. Many of those started as internal, vendor- agnostic training resources for new employees. “We already had a 10-page guide on an induction oven,” Sheinkopf says. It wasn’t a far leap to turn it into a buying guide for customers.

Yale uses marketing-automation vendor HubSpot to nurture customers through the buying process. Anyone who downloads a guide to buying a sub-zero fridge opts-in to a series of emails designed to deliver more information about the appliances. Those emails have a high engagement rate: 35 percent, vs. 5 to 10 percent for other emails Yale sends (mainly newsletters and daily promotions).

“We focus on making our customer smarter,” Sheinkopf says. “People want to be informed; they don’t want to be sold to anymore—if they ever did.”

4. Invest in staff and other resources that touch customers.

Customer happiness is rooted in happy employees. So Yale hires carefully, finding employees with the right cultural fit and making sure they are happy and well taken care of -- through profit sharing and generous benefit packages, as well as top-notch training programs.

Yale has also spent time and effort identifying and investing in improvements to customer experience, including better phone and computer systems.

5. Quit procrastinating.

Sheinkopf embraced content marketing long before a lot of other businesses caught on. So is his success linked to a first-mover advantage? “Good, original information is still good, original information,” he points out. “Good content is still good content.”

In other words, any small business can -- and shouldtake advantage of these digital strategies. “I’m not an outlier,” Sheinkopf adds. “There are still millions of industries and countless opportunities in underserved markets. You just have to refuse to do business like everyone else.”

Source : http://entm.ag/1Y7i4oW

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How to Make Time for Your Creative Work

3 tips to help you focus on what matters most.

One of the best episodes of the original Twilight Zone series is “Time Enough at Last.” Burgess Meredith plays Henry Bemis, a man who is obsessed with reading. One day at his job as a bank teller, he goes to the bank vault to read during lunch. Suddenly there is a violent explosion that knocks him out. He later wakes up to find that an atomic bomb has destroyed the world. Being in the bank vault saved his life, and he is the only person left on earth.

He wanders the ruined city in despair and comes to the town library, where he finds all the books still intact. He suddenly realizes that he has all the time in the world to read, and no one to bother him. In one of the greatest plot twists in television, he reaches down for the first book and drops his glasses, shattering the lenses.

Henry Bemis had all the time in the world, but lost the one tool he needed to make use of it.

You and I have the opposite problem. We have all the creative tools we could ever want but not enough time. But when we begin to implement the three strategies I’ll share here, we can begin to recapture more time to do the creative work we love

1. Eliminate distractions from technology

When you try to make good use of your time, you will face of multitude of distractions that threaten to derail your progress. It’s important to eliminate as many of these as possible so you can focus while you are working.

When you’re working on a computer, some of the biggest sources of distraction are notifications from social media, email, and other apps. You can shut these off in your settings. Very few of these messages need an instant response. (Plus, if you always respond to social media notifications instantly, it gives the impression that you don’t do anything except play around on social media.)

I will often turn my phone on silent and place it face down on my desk so I literally don’t see or hear anything. Sometimes you have to take drastic measures!

If you do a lot of your work on computer and have trouble staying focused, use the Stay Focused extension (available for Chrome), which blocks access to websites for specified periods of time.

2. Take advantage of “spare” moments.

If you take a look at how you spend the minutes in your days, you will probably find that you have lots of “spare” moments. Spare moments are small chunks of time between other events. Five minutes here, or ten or fifteen minutes there, can be very useful if we use them purposefully.

Here are some examples of spare moments:

• Waiting at your doctor’s office.
• Waiting to pick up your child from school.
• Waiting for someone to arrive at lunch.
• Waiting for your spouse to finish shopping.
• Waiting in line at the grocery store.
• These spare moments can be a potential gold mine for being productive and working on your art. Although you may not be at your computer, in the recording studio, or at your easel, you can definitely take advantage of these moments.
• Here are a few ways
• Read a great book. You should always have a book with you, whether it’s a print, audio, or e-book. I’m also a big advocate of speed reading. Check out this video for several great tips.
• Listen to a podcast that will enhance your creative life. (Here’s a great list of ten podcasts for creative people.)
• Think about topics, outlines, or other content ideas for blog posts or podcasts.

3. Limit your entertainment

I don’t want to give the impression that I believe you should be working all the time. I enjoy movies, video games, surfing the web, and lots of other diversions. (I still love to break out my original Nintendo system and play Super Mario Bros. once in a while. What can I say? I’m a child of the 80’s.)

I do believe, however, that you should limit how much time you spend on entertainment. It’s easy to lose a couple of hours watching viral videos on Youtube or playing games on your phone. Set a limit on how much time you will spend doing things that don’t give you a return of some kind.

You need to give your mind a break from work. However, don’t give it too much of a break. These three tips will help you be more productive and spend more time doing creative works that makes a difference.

Source : http://bit.ly/1JOo782

The Real Unicorns Are Female Angel Investors

Despite the attention over the past year, the lack of diversity in tech — both in race and gender — has not markedly changed. Only 3 percent of tech CEOs are women, and just 15 percent of startups have at least one female founder.

Most agree that something needs to be done, but much of the attention is misplaced into a caricature. You see the issue raised on SNL and the other late-night shows — and then there is the hyperbole that penetrates into pop culture (see HBO’s Silicon Valley).

To be fair, programs have popped up to teach women how to code, while others drive awareness of the developer career path for adolescent teen girls. Even some VCs have developed funds for women or minority-owned startups — Golden Seeds and 500 Startups among them.

What’s missing in these solutions? The role of women as angel investors — not just founders or developers.

Women make up just 4 percent of venture capital partners. And though the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research said there are more than 50,000 female angel investors, my experience from raising $1.2 million in seed funding in Chicago suggests otherwise. I sought a female angel — but could not find her. I asked all of the contacts I met for a recommendation. They all said, “I’ll think about it,” but never got back to me. I do have one female investor, who I am thankful for, but even she backed us alongside her husband.

To get more women in tech today, we need women investors.

Women investors are important because they signal to women You belong here. In a study co-authored by MIT economist Esther Duflo, she saw that an increased presence and visibility of female politicians in local government raises the academic performance and career aspirations of young women in India. “[MM1] We think this is due to a role-model effect: Seeing women in charge persuaded parents and teens that women can run things, and increased their ambitions,” said Duflo, a co-founder of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

To get more women in tech today, we need women investors — and we need them early in the process. That means female angel investors.

Progress is being made. Over the past decade, women have begun taking more leadership roles in business. As a result, women are excelling financially. The number of wealthy women in the U.S. is growing twice as fast as the number of wealthy men. And by the next generation (or perhaps sooner), more families will be supported by woman than men.

But more wealth will not automatically translate to more angel investors. Women tend to be more conservative investors that may even lack confidence, a critical element in becoming an angel.

We haven’t yet tapped into that next wave of female angels.

That’s why groups like 37 Angels andBroadway Angels — groups of women angel investors who fund early stage startups regardless of the founder’s gender — are critical. 37 Angels, for example, requires its members to be active investors, making at least one $25,000 investment each year from the 35 to 50 companies it finalizes as candidates each year.

But as great as those networks are, they don’t do much to drive awareness of angel investing and teach women to make the leap from investing in stocks and mutual funds to investing in early stage startups. The Pipeline Fellowship is one group that is trying to make a difference with a six-month angel investing bootcamp. And in four years, Pipeline boasts more than 100 graduates — it’s a start, but not nearly enough to make a dent in the deficit of women angel investors.

We haven’t yet tapped into that next wave of female angels — the ones currently succeeding in Corporate America. If that happened, we would see more female founders.

Source : http://tcrn.ch/1FbJpRW

Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook working on a 'Dislike' button

Facebook  finally going to make a "Dislike" button.

The format of the button is still unclear, but the company has been working on the concept for a while and expects to roll it out soon.

"We have an idea that we're going to be ready to test soon, and depending on how that does, we'll roll it out more broadly," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a townhall Q&A at Facebook's headquarters on Tuesday.

He said making something so "simple" is surprisingly complicated, but after years of people asking for the option to "dislike" a Facebook post, the company is finally ready.

Facebook had hesitated to launch a dislike button. But it has come to realize that people want "the ability to express empathy" on posts about unpleasant news.

"If you're sharing something that is sad, whether it's something in current events, like the refugee crisis, or if a family member passed away, then it may not feel comfortable to 'like' that post," Zuckerberg explained.

"But your friends want to be able to express that they understand and relate to you, so I do think it's important to give people more options than just 'like' as a quick way to emote and share what they're feeling on a post," he added.

Facebook has been cautious in how it launched the new sentiment option because it was concerned about how it would be used.

"We didn't want to just build a dislike button because we don't want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people's posts," he said

.Mark Zuckerberg answers questions from an audience member during a live Q&A at Facebook's headquarters.

Zuckerberg, who was recently named the most powerful person in business and media by Vanity Fair, has been holding town halls like these regularly. He says it's an opportunity for him to updateFacebook (FB, Tech30) users on how the company is working to make new services.

Later this month, Zuckerberg will host another townhall-style Q&A with a guest -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The two will discuss "how communities can work together to address social and economic challenges."

Source : http://cnnmon.ie/1Kq2rnN

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz says tech companies are destroying employees' lives.

Unsustainable expectations ... Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Photo: Getty Images

The tech industry threatens to cannibalise itself, forcing its talented and young workforce to pursue work over life with the inevitable end result being compromised results and miserable employees.

That's not the rant of a Silicon Valley outsider jumping on the anti-Amazon bandwagon launched by a recent New York Times expose of the Seattle's company's grinding business practices.

It is with deep sadness that I observe the current culture of intensity in the tech industry. 

Rather, it's the regretful lament of Dustin Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook and current CEO of workplace collaboration start-up Asana.

Sean Parker (right) with Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz in the early days of Facebook. Photo: Jim Wilson / The New York Times

"It is with deep sadness that I observe the current culture of intensity in the tech industry," Moskovitz wrote in a Medium.com essay on Thursday titled Work Hard, Live Well. Its sub-headline: "Amazon isn't the only company burning out their employees with unsustainable expectations. Let's break the cycle."

Moskovitz, 31, is ranked by Forbes as the 59th richest person in the US with a personal net worth of $US8.9 billion.

"My intellectual conclusion is that these companies are both destroying the personal lives of their employees and getting nothing in return," he writes, citing the example of a recent Asana candidate who described a rival company's practice of offering company dinners late so workers would stay on into the night. "I wish I had lived my life differently," he laments.

"This kind of attitude not only hurts young workers who are willing to 'step up' to the expectation, but facilitates ageism and sexism by indirectly discriminating against people who cannot maintain that kind of schedule."

Moskovitz cites research conducted by automotive pioneer Henry Ford, which concludes that fewer hours actually increased employee output. "The research is clear: beyond 40 to 50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative," he writes.

So why are some tech companies driving their workers furiously? "It must be some combination of one, not knowing the research, two, believing the research is somehow flawed or doesn't apply to them (they're wrong), or three, understanding that many people see these cultural artifacts as a signal about the intensity and passion of the team."

The essay opens with a confessional tone, with Moskovitz posting a photo of his somewhat chubby 2006 self and noting that it was "a great year for Facebook, one of the worst years for me as a human". He describes drinking more soft drinks than water, and often going without sleep or food.

"You might think, but if you had prioritised those things, wouldn't your contributions have been reduced? Would Facebook have been less successful? Actually, I believe I would have been more effective: a better leader and a more focused employee.

"I would have had fewer panic attacks, and acute health problems - like throwing out my back regularly in my early 20s. I would have picked fewer petty fights with my peers in the organisation, because I would have been generally more centred and self-reflective. ... AND I would have been happier."

Source : http://bit.ly/1i32sD6