5 Obvious Truths About Successful Entrepreneurs

Every entrepreneur hopes to be successful. Some entertain the remote possibility of becoming very rich. But most entrepreneurs do not achieve the kind of material wealth that Bill Gates enjoys. You may wonder -- what are the secrets to their success?

I have been fortunate to start several software companies myself and now lead the team at Aha! -- I always want to keep learning. So, I read as much as I can about innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as the stories of successful entrepreneurs. 

Of course, their upbringing, influences, and personalities are all very different, as well as the companies they lead. But I have noticed a few important qualities that any entrepreneur should emulate if they want to be successful.

Here are five obvious approaches that you should definitely follow:

Work with the best

Having a great idea for a business is not enough. You need the complementary talents of others to help you reach your goals. As Marc Andreesen once said, "Everyone wants a Sheryl, the high-powered business person with deep capabilities in sales, marketing and operations," referring to Sheryl Sandberg, who Mark Zuckerberg hired as the Facebook Chief Operating Officer. 

Takeaway: Surround yourself with great people who will round out your team and challenge you to bring your best. 

Tackle tough problems

Elon Musk could have easily developed a line of gasoline-powered cars and been successful. But he believed that electric-powered cars mattered for the health of our environment, and sought to make them affordable with his latest model. He is also tackling a second problem -- how to keep those cars powered -- and is rolling out a network of charging stations across the world. 

Takeaway: If you are looking for an opportunity, consider taking on a difficult problem that most others are afraid to tackle.

Pursue your passions

Many successful entrepreneurs first focused their energy on what made them happiest and it paid off. Self-taught software developer Larry Ellison started Oracle so he would have a working environment that he enjoyed. Likewise, Bill Gates spent countless hours programming as a kid, launching his first business at age 15 along with school friend Paul Allen (his partner in founding Microsoft.)

Takeaway: You cannot go wrong if you are pursuing what you love.

Live generously

Many wealthy entrepreneurs have realized they can put their money to good use and change lives for generations. Bill and Melinda Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, and many others have signed the Giving Pledge to donate half of their wealth to charity. Sheryl Sandberg started the Lean In Foundation to empower young women and is also working to stop hunger in the Bay area.

Takeaway: No matter how much you have, being generous will help you live a life of purpose.

Know when to innovate

Being first matters. Case in point: In the 90s, Jeff Bezos heard the Internet was growing by 2,400 percent annually and recognized the great opportunity there. Inspired by the digital catalogs of book distributors, he created a book distribution channel that completely upended the publishing industry (and Amazon panned out for other kinds of merchandise as well.) 

Takeaway: Always stay curious, keeping your eyes open for game-changing ideas. 

There is no foolproof recipe for achieving success, and there is no getting around the hard work and perseverance required. But you can learn great lessons from wildly successful and wealthy entrepreneurs and develop the qualities that will position you for success. 

 Source: http://bit.ly/24mpmZ3

9 ways marketers can stick to their strategies

Consistency is important when you’re trying to implement a long-term marketing plan, so resist the temptation to abandon a strategy if it doesn't work immediately.

Give it time to work. These nine steps can help you make the most of your well-crafted plan:

1. Every day, be renewed by your vision. Your mind can be your greatest asset or your most tiring obstacle.

Begin your day by renewing your mind with the clarifying power of your vision. When W. Clement Stone and Earl Nightingale both said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” they knew these were far more than simple words on a page. There simply is no substitute for the power of belief.

When you believe, obstacles that would throw your entire day into chaos suddenly become bleeps that you just intuitively know how to solve without expending valuable time or energy. Don’t laugh this off as touchy-feely. This is one of the most inexpensive and profitable investments you’ll ever make in yourself. Just do it.

2. Focus on your niche. Become the expert in all things involving your niche. Don’t limit your knowledge to the services you offer.

The more you know about your niche’s priorities and challenges, the more valuable a resource you can become to them. Become familiar with other professionals who can assist your niche with challenges outside your expertise.

When you’re tempted to work with clients outside your niche, make sure the time and payoff will be worth it and won’t draw you away from your commitment.

3. Stay close to your ideal client. Networking, surveys, online community forums, trade magazines and associations are all great ways to keep sharp about the things that matter to your ideal client.

Stay on top of the news and ask yourself how your client’s needs will be affected by changes in the business and world environment.

4. Keep your eyes on your competition. If your clients stop think­ing that you offer a competitive advantage in addressing their needs, you lose and the competition wins. Enough said. Don’t be the last to know what your competition is doing.

5. Make sure you’re positioned to win. If you’re doing the first four steps, you’ll know when it’s time to change your tune, tweak your message and speak a new language that’s more in tune with what your ideal client needs.

Ask yourself, “Is my unique selling proposition still unique? Does anyone do it better? What one thing can I do to serve my clients better?” That’s how you stay unique.

6. Take action every day. Stick close to your plan. Follow your schedule. Complete the actions you say you'll complete in your daily sched­ule.

At the end of the week, give yourself a grade for effort. Then give yourself another one for accomplishment. If you’re getting A’s for effort and C’s for accomplishment, trouble­shoot.

7. Focus on one marketing project at a time. One of the greatest mistakes people make in setting goals is trying to work on too many things at one time. There's tremendous power in giving focused attention to just one idea, one project, or one objective at a time.

8. Ask yourself good questions. As you think about your goals, instead of wishing for them to come true, ask yourself how and what you can do to make them come true.

The subconscious mind will respond to your questions far more effectively than just making statements or wishes.

9. Congratulate yourself. You’re halfway home. You’ve done something that less than 3 percent of the population has done—set goals and create a plan for achieving them.

Every study on the subject tells us you’re far more likely than most to succeed with your plans if you'll only do one thing: Take action.

Be that external force. Plan your work—then work your plan—and you’ll have an unstoppable money making system that can grow your business beyond even your most amazing vision.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PTjFLG

5 Marketing and Branding Tips to Scale Your Online Business

Scaling an online business isn’t rocket science -- it’s actually much easier than many people believe. When you combine a winning product or service and a solid foundation to build on, the sky’s the limit. 

Use these five simple marketing and branding tips to help you scale your online business and experience increased growth.

1. Make it ridiculously easy for your customers to buy your product or service.

It’s amazing how many businesses make prospects jump through multiple hoops in order to make a purchase -- my own marketing agency was guilty of this as well, until recently. While our main offering is custom-tailored online-marketing consulting, we also offer several à la carte services.

The problem was that, previously, a prospect had to contact us via phone or our website to order one of these stand-alone services. When we did a little digging, we found that the majority of these inquiries didn’t require any selling -- people simply wanted to make a purchase.

So, we made a switch, making it easy for prospects to purchase these à la carte services directly from our website. And the results have been great so far: Sales are up since we eliminated that previous hoop that a prospect once had to jump through. 

Experiment with eliminating steps and making changes that create a ridiculously easy path to purchase. 

2. Track every conversion metric humanly possible. 

You have to know your numbers -- if you don’t know, down to the penny, how much it costs you to generate leads and sales, you will crash and burn.

Cost-per-lead (CPL): You need to know how much it costs to generate every form of lead, from email submits to phone calls. A blended CPL won’t work -- you need to be as specific as possible. If you are able to generate email leads for $1 each and phone leads are costing you $8 each, but converting at the same rate, wouldn’t it be wise to push all of your effort into producing more email leads? 

Cost-per-sale (CPS): All of your data works together. For example, your conversion rates and cost-per-lead are going to help you determine what each sale is costing you. Business 101 tells us that if the CPS, plus cost of goods sold, is lower than the sales price, it's profitable. But you need to dive a bit deeper. Where are you pulling the lowest CPS from? Can you open up the faucet to generate more sales from that avenue? 

You need to also know what your different landing pages are converting at and where your top-performing lead sources are. You are never going to find a winning combination that you can “set and forget” -- constant monitoring and optimizing are required.

3. Seek out media exposure to highlight your expertise.

Getting yourself and your brand out there is crucial if you want to scale. There are plenty of opportunities to score free media exposure if you are willing to put in a little work. 

If you aren’t already registered with Help a Reporter Out, or HARO for short, do that now. With more than 35,000 journalists seeking insights from experts, there is a very good chance you will come across several exposure opportunities if you put in the effort. Consistency is key if you want to find success using this strategy.

HARO sends out three emails daily, full of opportunities. Many people read through them for a few days and then give up if an opportunity doesn’t fall into their lap. Don't let this be you.

Instead, stick it out and put some effort into your responses -- journalists receive hundreds of replies to each request, so you are going to need to stand out. Make sure you avoid making these stupid press outreach mistakes.

4. Set up email automation sequences to nurture, promote and convert 24/7.

Every type of business can use email automation. Restaurants can build a list that automatically sends out ecoupons for specials and discounts on notoriously slow days to drive foot traffic. Ecommerce stores can create segmented lists and send special offers to customers based on their previous purchase habits.

Information products can capture an email address and automatically market to that prospect, sending enticing information and discounts, until that prospect pulls out his or her credit card and converts.

Just like every other form of online marketing, email automation requires extensive split testing and constant optimization, but when you fine-tune your efforts, email automation creates a system that promotes, nurtures and converts sales 24/7 -- even while you sleep.

5. Maintain consistent social media branding and cross promote.

Social media is such a powerful branding tool, and it’s important that you think about the big picture when establishing social accounts for your business. Using the same handle on every platform makes it easy for your customers to connect with you across all of the channels they are active on.

It will benefit you greatly if you use a handle that’s easy to remember and available on all of the networks you will be actively promoting on. For example, I use the same handle for my personal brand on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

You should also be cross-promoting your social media accounts in an effort to get your audience connected on as many platforms as possible. Someone following your brand on Twitter might not be connected on Facebook, which could be his or her preferred social network. A simple “Make sure to connect with us on Facebook” tweet could get people to like your Facebook page and then engage with a future Facebook post, leading to that hoped-for conversion.

Source : http://entm.ag/1OKErKB

Why Your Business Needs Social Media Marketing

Your company finally has its website, Facebook, and even a Twitter account set up. You are getting some traffic, you have a small following, and you've thrown up a few status updates and links.

Maybe your website or social media handles even show up in a Google search once in awhile. Check "Social Media Marketing" off that list of things to do. Mission accomplished. Wrong! Or maybe you still think that your business can't benefit from social media marketing at all? Wrong again!

It really doesn't matter if you are a sole proprietor or a CMO at a Fortune 500 global corporation. Your business can significantly benefit from social media marketing regardless of its size or business model. Why does social media marketing matter so much? 

Well I'll tell you why! Here are just a few simplified reasons why your business will grow and improve with SMM:

1) Increase Website Traffic, SEO, Referrals, & Revenue Generation

This is pretty obvious. Your social media platforms promote your website links and the content you produce. You get more traffic to your site, your search engine rank improves (and in turn more organic traffic is generated), you get more referrals from readers / viewers / subscribers / followers / customers / clients / colleagues, and you make more money! Depending on your business model, your income may be generated from product / service sales, advertising revenue, sponsorships, contracts, partnerships, subscriptions, investors, donations, or other means. Simply put, increased quality and quantity of traffic derived from social media = more money. This can be true for all companies whether you sell muffins, clean houses, manage portfolios, or market the latest cloud computing software.

2) Interaction, Branding, and Exposure with Customers, Prospects, or Industries

Your business can always benefit from interacting with your customers, clients, readers, viewers, peers, prospects, or industry heavy hitters. Many people and organizations believe this to be the most important aspect of social media marketing. So establish a positive dialogue that will lead to signing a new client. Successfully promote a current client's business. Provide exceptional customer service by answering a question or addressing a concern. Tell the world about your latest campaign, product, or service. Let the customer tell you what they view as your strengths and weaknesses, or how you can improve your business. The possibilities are endless and you'll be missing opportunities if you don't have a strong social media marketing strategy in place. If you don't properly manage or expand your company's community and network, you are leaving money on the table.

3) Increased Perception of Being Connected, Tech Savvy, and Legitimate

A lot of people think this is more of a subjective or less important aspect of social media marketing. I think it's an incredibly important one if you consider basic human psychology. While business professionals can usually distinguish between quality and quantity of social media statistics, the average person may not. So who cares if your company doesn't have many followers, friends, subscribers, views, tweets, likes, posts etc? Turns out a lot of people DO care. If you are a billion dollar corporation and you have 200 Twitter followers, that obviously doesn't look very good. It looks especially poor when your competitors have 200,000 or maybe 2,000,000 followers.

Why does your company have 6 tweets when you do business on 6 continents?

 Perhaps your business is nonexistent on critical social media platforms or your employees aren't representing your company online. 

Or maybe there is little or no activity on any of your social media accounts. This can make your company seem out of touch, which can be especially damaging if your target market includes younger or more technologically proficient customers and industries. It certainly won't help you relate to millenials if you are a B2C company and have them as one of your main "buyer personas". I've seen technology, media, marketing, and online retail companies with minimal social media marketing presence! It's not pretty. 

People and companies do look at numbers and make judgments based on them, fair or not. Having a minimal or nonexistent social media presence makes your company look bad and your competitors look better by comparison. You will lose revenue and market share if you don't successfully compete on all relevant social media platforms.

4) Return On Investment (ROI)

Social Media Marketing can have an excellent Return On Investment (ROI) compared with traditional forms of marketing such as mailers, radio ads, television ads, magazine / newspaper ads, billboards, etc. 

You could easily spend hundreds or thousands (or significantly more depending on your business) of dollars on any of these traditional marketing methods. 

If you are a sole proprietor or small business owner, that price tag can be a risky or completely impossible option. 

Even a global corporation may be looking to tighten their marketing budget or get more value for their dollar (for example: Procter & Gamble this year opted for a frugal Twitter campaign as opposed to a multi-million dollar Superbowl ad). Social media marketing can be that viable affordable alternative, or a significant component, of your marketing strategy. 

Not only will your social media platforms save you money in the short term, these platforms and SEO-boosting power remain in place to pay dividends months and even years with minimal maintenance.

And because it's digital, you can usually modify your social media marketing platforms or strategy as needed .

It is necessary these days to be able to adapt and make changes within a matter of days, hours, or even minutes. You could be spending a fortune on traditional advertising or marketing consultants when social media marketing could get the job done for a fraction of the price.

5) Analytics 

This is an enormous benefit that you receive from implementing social media marketing into your business strategy. You usually get minimal data in response to traditional marketing campaigns. 

Sometimes you aren't sure whether your business is benefiting from one traditional method or another. With social media marketing, you can get incredibly detailed, immediate, and convenient statistical reports on nearly every aspect of your SMM campaigns. 

You'll get key measurables such as impressions, clicks, comments, likes, shares, subscriptions, referring links, sales, time on site, detailed demographics, and much more. Analyze this data and modify your social media posts and ads accordingly to achieve even greater results. 

You don't get that with a newspaper ad or television commercial. You can get these detailed SMM analytics from Google Analytics, CRM platforms, individual social media platforms directly, or other web services. 

6) Integration

Finally, you can seamlessly integrate social media marketing into your overall marketing and business strategy. 

Your social media marketing complements and/or links to your email marketing, website, direct mailers, telephone, print ads, and radio / television ads. You may notice these days that half of the ads out there already have links to the company's social media URL or solicit readers / listeners / viewers to follow them on social media. 

Every email marketing campaign and website should be fully integrated with its SMM if it isn't already. And everything radio and television is already integrated or being integrated with online media. Magazines, newspapers, and newsletters are all online now as well. Complement your overall business marketing, sales, and customer service with social media savvy. 

Of course there are dozens of other important reasons why social media marketing is important for your business success. I will continue posting more specific SMM articles so I can share my thoughts and experiences with specific social media platforms, paid advertising options, specific industries, and various business models. 

Source : http://bit.ly/1Jup3Wc

5 Marketing and Branding Tips to Scale Your Online Business

Scaling an online business isn’t rocket science -- it’s actually much easier than many people believe. When you combine a winning product or service and a solid foundation to build on, the sky’s the limit. 

Use these five simple marketing and branding tips to help you scale your online business and experience increased growth.

1. Make it ridiculously easy for your customers to buy your product or service.

It’s amazing how many businesses make prospects jump through multiple hoops in order to make a purchase -- my own marketing agency was guilty of this as well, until recently. While our main offering is custom-tailored online-marketing consulting, we also offer several à la carte services.

The problem was that, previously, a prospect had to contact us via phone or our website to order one of these stand-alone services. When we did a little digging, we found that the majority of these inquiries didn’t require any selling -- people simply wanted to make a purchase.

So, we made a switch, making it easy for prospects to purchase these à la carte services directly from our website. And the results have been great so far: Sales are up since we eliminated that previous hoop that a prospect once had to jump through. 

Experiment with eliminating steps and making changes that create a ridiculously easy path to purchase. 

2. Track every conversion metric humanly possible. 

You have to know your numbers -- if you don’t know, down to the penny, how much it costs you to generate leads and sales, you will crash and burn.

Cost-per-lead (CPL): You need to know how much it costs to generate every form of lead, from email submits to phone calls. A blended CPL won’t work -- you need to be as specific as possible. If you are able to generate email leads for $1 each and phone leads are costing you $8 each, but converting at the same rate, wouldn’t it be wise to push all of your effort into producing more email leads? 

Cost-per-sale (CPS): All of your data works together. For example, your conversion rates and cost-per-lead are going to help you determine what each sale is costing you. Business 101 tells us that if the CPS, plus cost of goods sold, is lower than the sales price, it's profitable. But you need to dive a bit deeper. Where are you pulling the lowest CPS from? Can you open up the faucet to generate more sales from that avenue? 

You need to also know what your different landing pages are converting at and where your top-performing lead sources are. You are never going to find a winning combination that you can “set and forget” -- constant monitoring and optimizing are required.

3. Seek out media exposure to highlight your expertise.

Getting yourself and your brand out there is crucial if you want to scale. There are plenty of opportunities to score free media exposure if you are willing to put in a little work. 

If you aren’t already registered with Help a Reporter Out, or HARO for short, do that now. With more than 35,000 journalists seeking insights from experts, there is a very good chance you will come across several exposure opportunities if you put in the effort. Consistency is key if you want to find success using this strategy.

HARO sends out three emails daily, full of opportunities. Many people read through them for a few days and then give up if an opportunity doesn’t fall into their lap. Don't let this be you.

Instead, stick it out and put some effort into your responses -- journalists receive hundreds of replies to each request, so you are going to need to stand out. Make sure you avoid making these stupid press outreach mistakes.

4. Set up email automation sequences to nurture, promote and convert 24/7.

Every type of business can use email automation. Restaurants can build a list that automatically sends out ecoupons for specials and discounts on notoriously slow days to drive foot traffic. Ecommerce stores can create segmented lists and send special offers to customers based on their previous purchase habits.

Information products can capture an email address and automatically market to that prospect, sending enticing information and discounts, until that prospect pulls out his or her credit card and converts.

Just like every other form of online marketing, email automation requires extensive split testing and constant optimization, but when you fine-tune your efforts, email automation creates a system that promotes, nurtures and converts sales 24/7 -- even while you sleep.

5. Maintain consistent social media branding and cross promote.

Social media is such a powerful branding tool, and it’s important that you think about the big picture when establishing social accounts for your business. Using the same handle on every platform makes it easy for your customers to connect with you across all of the channels they are active on.

It will benefit you greatly if you use a handle that’s easy to remember and available on all of the networks you will be actively promoting on. For example, I use the same handle for my personal brand on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

You should also be cross-promoting your social media accounts in an effort to get your audience connected on as many platforms as possible. Someone following your brand on Twitter might not be connected on Facebook, which could be his or her preferred social network. A simple “Make sure to connect with us on Facebook” tweet could get people to like your Facebook page and then engage with a future Facebook post, leading to that hoped-for conversion.

Source : http://entm.ag/1OKErKB

5 predictions for the Internet of Things in 2016

The Internet of Things revolution is set to dramatically alter many industrial sectors during 2016 

The promise of software sitting inside a wider variety of devices is set to open up valuable new revenue streams for the Internet of Things (IoT) in 2016.

Device manufacturers are set to aggressively adopt new business models associated with monetising the embedded or external software powering their intelligent devices, as the rhetoric becomes reality and the true value of connectivity comes to fruition. 

Here our five predictions for how the IoT landscape will shape up next year.

1. Intelligent device manufacturers will increasingly realise the need to become software-centric companies to garner profits

Increasingly, the value of physical devices will be defined by the embedded software inside them or the control software that helps to manage the physical goods.

Manufacturers will have to start thinking and acting more like software companies, leveraging the software applications they build into their products as a driver to reduce manufacturing costs, increase product innovation, and capture new revenue streams. 

Taking a software-centric approach means manufacturers will start re-designing products from fixed-function, disconnected devices to flexible, seamlessly connected systems.

2. Manufacturers will start realising the financial gains from the IoT

While the innovations and customer references now possible with smart and internet-connected devices serve as the fuel for industrial revolution, there must be an accelerant to ignite that fuel.  In a business context that accelerant is the lure of money. 

In last-generation devices, device makers were fairly limited in terms of monetisation options. Today, and more so in the future, device makers will continue to aggressively adopt new business models associated with monetising the embedded and external software that’s increasingly powering their intelligent and internet-connected devices.

This includes leveraging software licensing and entitlement management – a mainstay in the traditional software industry. 

3. ‘Everything as a service’ – IoT will transform objects into services

As IoT manufacturers seek ways to deepen their relationships with customers, a key goal will to become more strategic and provide ongoing solutions tailored to evolving customer needs. Services will be a critical element to selling solutions. 

For instance, medical device makers will be able to use big-data to provide better diagnostics based on segmenting national, socio-economic or ethnic characteristics of an overall population pool. 

Or auto manufacturers will be able to equip their cars with every feature and upgrade available – and simply turn on or off the feature via software and licensing based on what the customer has purchased. 

In these scenarios, the device maker can make a strategic decision about whether or not to monetise a feature or to provide it at no cost.

4. IoT hacking will make more headlines, increasing pressure on device makers to focus on security and remediation

Recently, much attention has been paid to potential security threats facing smart internet-connected devices – from refrigerators to vehicles. As incidents of these device hacks continue to mount, device makers will need to make security more bulletproof – both to prevent hacking and to quickly remediate the problem if hacking does occur. 

Device makers will need to adopt measures such as tamper resistant licensing code, investing the time to reverse engineer-embedded software on the device, monitor and track patch levels to be aware of exposure, and send software and firmware patches to entitled customers using only secure download URLs that expire.

>See also: What does an 'Internet of Things' enterprise really look like?

5. Rise in IoT devices will fuel third industrial revolution

The first industrial revolution ushered in a global transformation as the means of production transitioned from human labour to machine driven automation. The second industrial revolution accelerated change through the growth of the railways, iron and steel production, manufacturing automation, the use of steam power, oil, electricity, and electrical communications.

With the introduction of embedded software and app-driven hardware into manufactured devices, and the ability, through software licensing, to monetise those device functions and features, devices have become intelligent solutions and capable of generating completely new types of revenue streams. 

Connecting those intelligent devices to the internet is accelerating the third industrial revolution by enabling services, solutions and big data offerings around every day industrial and consumer goods.

Source : http://bit.ly/1QjqGWP