Advance confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Growing a business single-handed, a collection of articles and hopefully inspiration.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Developing Products


It can be incredibly difficult to tun a good idea into a great company.
A few days ago in an article titled Good Ideas/Bad Ideas I wrote about innovation and senior housing.  This is the second half of this two part series based on an interview I did with John Reinhart, the CEO of InnovateLTC.If you are working in and care about having better products, services and ideas for seniors, InnovateLTC is an organization you need to pay attention to.
The Million Dollar Problem
As I outlined in the prior article, even when a group of entrepreneurs have a good idea it can be extremely difficult to actually get that product or service into the marketplace.   The problems include:
  • Not having enough capital to go to market
  • The product or service needing some additional polishing.
  • Not having access to buyers
  • Buyers not seeing the same value as do the inventors
  • Not packaging the “thing” properly which could mean the specific features; how it is being used; telling the story right; or creating the right business/pricing model.
InnovateLTC
If you have a good idea and can tell a compelling story, it is relatively easy to find people to invest in your new venture.  Most start-ups get their money, from incubators, angel funds or venture capital firms.   These organizations do some level of due diligence and provide funds and often some level of expertise in getting the idea ready to go to market.
The investors have an expectation that a very small percentage of these ventures will be big successes, a few more will be modestly successful and the majority of them will never make it.  It is a system that has given us some great products and services.  Here is the question: What if an organization existed that could take those modestly successful ventures and even some of the “never make it” ventures and turn them into home runs?
InnovateLTC could best be described as a business accelerator.  Here is what that means: They have the resources needed to work with products, services or concepts that are essentially ready to go to market and help create a final salable product that will serve seniors and senior living communities. Perhaps even more importantly they have ready access to senior housing and senior service companies who understand innovation; who are excited about innovation and who are willing to spend money on innovation.
 In a very real sense InnovateLTC gives these companies the ability to go from a tiny sales force (often the CEO and/or one other person) and a part-time or no time marketing department, to having in effect a seasoned marketing and sales team.   They can mean the difference between failure or mediocre success, to great success.
 In return for what they do, InnovateLTC receives a modest percentage of the company and of the revenues they are able to generate for the company.

The Rest of the Story
  • If you have the next great senior product and are thinking this is for you, InnovateLTC would love to hear from you.  That being said, they are cautious and do significant “due diligence” to make sure the idea is viable and the team compatible.
  • If you are interested in seeing the latest and greatest ideas that InnovateLTC is looking at, come and join them for the second annual LTCLINKTank Innovation Competition in Chicago on July 22.  Admission is open to anyone and is free.  You can register HERE
  • Keep your eye on InnovateLTC for some the newest freshest ideas for senior and senior housing.

What other individuals or companies should we be paying attention to?

Thursday, June 13, 2013

SEO Google optimization Course

y Len Smith
Let me show you how to make your website into a money magnet by learning the basics of search engine optimization.
Yes, I'm a freelancer working from home, yet I really do get more than 1,000 visitors every day - day in, day out. That's auditable.
And it's not the mythical ‘hits’ that some people boast about. These are real live humans.
Around a third of a million a year! That's why I now have to farm work out.
IF YOU ARE A WEB DESIGNER, APPLICATION DEVELOPER, FREELANCER, THIS COULDN'T BE MORE APPROPRIATE. YOU ARE SELLING TO EXACTLY THE SAME AUDIENCE I SELL TO.
And I did all the search engine optimization myself. I don’t pretend to be an SEO
guru. In fact, I hate technology but I realized some time ago that your
rankings in Google searches are too valuable to entrust to others. And
there's no need to spend a fortune with SEO companies when you can achieve
astounding results yourself without any technical expertise. After all, no-one
knows your business like you do, and no one can be as highly motivated.
In this search engine optimization training course, there's no sales hype. I just lift the kimono and show you exactly what I did to my own site – and
you can do exactly the same to your site – just ‘copy and paste’. And, yes, it does take into account the latest changes that Google has made to its ranking algorithm.
A jargon-free zone
We start very gently, taking a bite at a time. In the entire course there are just
six hard-core jargon words (I couldn’t avoid those). These are search engine optimization basics, so they are easy to understand. The rest is pure layman’s
language. Each video introduces a new concept and is followed by a downloadable
pdf, so you have a hard copy and can add notes of your own.
Fireside chats
This is not a sterile ‘off the shelf, take it or leave it’ course. In my other
course ‘How to Become a Copywriter’, I introduced the idea of fireside chats.
When students raise a query that would be useful to others, I add a video
‘chat’ covering the topic. That way, the course always stays up to date and,
over time, really tunes into student needs, rather than what I may think those
needs are.
Oh – and I am very accessible. Any queries, or anything not clear, just email me.
I am here to help.

This has got to be the definitive course on SEO - exactly what entrepreneurs and startups have been crying out for
If you have seen me on TV's The Secret Millionaire, you will know I built my own startup from scratch to make it into a multi-million dollar business around the globe. You will also know that I dedicate a lot of my time helping entrepreneurs and startup businesses to get off the ground.
I have known Len for a number of years and he has given SEO workshops on my behalf for lots of new businesses. Always ecstatically received. Those workshops became the basis of this course.
I can personally recommend it. Invest now and grab that competitive advantage.
Dawn Gibbins, MBE, MBA, philanthropist, entrepreneur
Dawn's accolades include Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year, voted the most influential person in UK manufacturing and an MBE for services to industry.
She has also been made a ‘Pioneer to the Life of our Nation’ by Her Majesty The Queen in 2004 and recently been titled ‘Legend of Industry’ .

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

How People Read on the Web

How People Read on the Web

Great Marketing Advice

The Best Marketing Advice You're Forgetting to Follow





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We've asked a coterie of marketing experts to join Entrepreneur's Team Digital to provide answers to your common questions about building an online presence. Got a question? Ask it in our comment section below or on Twitter using the hashtag #TeamDigital. Each week, we'll spotlight a different topic, and twice a month we'll host Google Hangouts where Team Digital members will chat about best strategies for managing an online reputation, marketing through social media and using mobile techniques to attract customers.
In this week's column, our Team Digital answers: What's one marketing tip that even savvy businesses overlook?
Jason Falls
Remember to listen. Proactive listening is by far the most underused online marketing tactic. Too many companies have lulled themselves into believing that social-media monitoring is just waiting for someone to say something bad or ask a customer-service question. But strong social listening involves proactively listening for marketing and sales opportunities, stepping in front of demand, not just following it. Search for people mentioning the need for what you do, not just your brand name, and step in front of consumers looking to purchase.

Jason Falls, CafePress
Joanna Lord
Build out your company story and team pages. These days, consumers want to connect and support not just a product, but the company and mission behind it. Too often companies throw together "About Us" sections that are sterile and less than compelling. Businesses need to spend time and resources putting up pictures that reflect their team and culture, and shaping the "why" behind the company for everyone to consume in a beautiful way.

Joanna Lord, BigDoor
Adam Kleinberg
Invest in phenomenal content. Brands tend to put all their focus on the "top of the funnel" where brand awareness happens—and the "bottom of the funnel" where people respond directly to offers and promotions. You'll often see brands put a ton of the effort into designing a beautiful homepage and optimizing conversions, but then half-ass it when it comes to the content in between. The thing is, the middle of the funnel is wheresellinghappens. Your content can inspire, inform, persuade and motivate—but only if it's good. Make it extraordinary.

Adam Kleinberg, Traction
Lewis Howes
Arrange for face time. Relationships are more powerful offline.There are countless online marketing strategies but business comes down to relationships and there's no better way to strengthen a relationship by taking it offline as often as possible. Use LinkedIn or Facebook to get a new connection? Great! Call them, meet them in person and get to know them on a personal level. It will do wonders for your business.

Lewis Howes, LewisHowes.com
Rick Mulready
Measure your online marketing efforts.Too many businesses spin their wheels with their social-media efforts and have no idea whether what they're doing is impacting their revenue and growing their business. Start by determining your objective and a timeframe for which you want to achieve it. Next, what social platforms could you use that align with your objective and target audience? Put metrics in place that allow you to know whether you're getting closer to your goal. Then, in what ways can you measure those metrics? It doesn't have to be complicated, but always have a way to measure the success of what you're doing.

Rick Mulready, RickMulready.com
DJ Waldow
Don't forget to be human! I think as marketers we sometimes forget that (most) of our content is being read by other other humans. If you want your message to stand out, ditch the Franken-speak and talk to your audience the way that other humans speak. Add some humor. Keep it light. Don't take yourself too seriously.

DJ Waldow, Founder & CEO of Waldow Social
Jayson DeMers
Guest blog as part of your content strategy.Online marketing is about producing amazing content that benefits your target audience. These days, most companies understand the importance of this, but they fail to take their content strategy off their own website domain. Guest blogging builds your brand awareness, authority and credibility, driving high-quality traffic to your website that persists over time (i.e., doesn't stop when you turn off the budget). Furthermore, it builds inbound links to your website, which boosts your organic search rankings, further building equity in your online marketing initiative that'll stand the test of time.

Jayson DeMers, AudienceBloom
John Jantsch
Use data to drive decisions. So much of what online marketers do still today is make campaign and product decisions based on gut or outdated notions when it's never been easier to let markets, splits test and conversion funnels make the most profitable decisions for you.

John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing
Karen Leland
Offer a free information product, that has value in your customer's mind.One of the major online marketing mistakes that people make is not cultivating an opt-in email list. One way to create an engaged group of fans and followers is to offer a free download of an ebook, podcast or other short-and-sweet information product, in exchange for the visitor's first name and email, with signup to your list. The key is to offer a product that speaks to a major question, pain or concern your audience has.

Karen Leland, Sterling Marketing Group
Ilise Benun
Craft a powerful title for Your LinkedIn profile. That tiny one-liner under your name is the most important element in your LinkedIn profile. Why? Because unless someone clicks on your full profile, your name and title are the only things visible on LinkedIn lists, such as the list of "People Also Viewed" and “People You May Know,” as well as when you accept someone’s invite to connect. So your title had better do a good job of communicating your positioning and brand. Plus, professionals are using LinkedIn as a search engine when they need services, so your title must stand out by saying what you do and for whom, as it does for this designer: “Helping Law Firms & Financial Services Companies Elevate Their Brand & Bottom Line” (instead of the more generic, and much more common, “Graphic Designer”).

Ilise Benun, Marketing-Mentor.com
Eric Siu
Stop arguing and test.Often times, you'll find people who engage in arguments about whose idea is superior to the other. A heated debate will ensue and might even lead to people resenting each other. More often than not, this is due to too much 'gut feeling' and to please the ego more than anything. Instead of arguing over which idea is better, take the time to test your theories. You'll be wrong most of the time, but when you're right, you're moving the needle on your business. And when you have the data to back up your theory, no one can argue with you. Test, test, test. Then test more.

Eric Siu, EricOSiu.com
Peter Shankman
Don't use generic emails. How often do you use a "do-not-reply@whatever.com" email? Unfortunately, you're losing clients by the truckload. Want to try something new? Put an actual address to the email -- of an actual employee. Let that employee know he might get slammed when the email goes out, and offer help. But then, reply to every person who replies. The sales and engagement will increase by mind-blowing factors. Customers want to feel like you know them -- like they can talk to you. Give them the ability to.

Peter Shankman, Shankman|Honig
Brian Honigman
Target your marketing to different audiences. Many companies blast their customers with ads and messages that aren't relevant to them, which makes their efforts useless.It's important to segment your audience on each channel whether it's email, Facebook or banner ads to understand what message your business should send to what group. If the content your business is sending to your audience matches their interests or buying habits, the more likely it will be engaging and result in a purchase of your product or service.

Brian Honigman, Marc Ecko Enterprises
Brian Solis
Guide the digital experience and contextual click path from a stimulus all the way through a desired outcome. Customers discover brands across a variety of screens whether it's via TV, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc. Most brands, however, consider a limited journey from discovery to either Google Search or ultimately to the company's web site. Consider each screen to guide a natural, frictionless journey through a variety of scenarios. Create a series of likely outcomes that take advantage of the screen and make it efficient and engaging to travel from point A to point B,C or D.
Brian Solis, Altimeter Group
Jim Joseph
Remember that there's a person on the other side, who has a life full of commitments, stresses, activities and deadlines.They are not thinking about your brand 24/7, despite the fact that we'd love them to. So we have to insert ourselves into the conversation and add value to their lives...their complete lives not just the part that affects the brand. Jim Joseph, Cohn & Wolfe

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226812#ixzz2W0jARfXz

Marketing Mean Market Machine

How to Turn Your Startup Into a Lean, Mean Marketing Machine





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How to Turn Your Startup Into a Lean, Mean Marketing Machine
Image credit: Shutterstock
Marketing your startup can get expensive and often the strategy you choose doesn't work as planned. How can you promote your products or services without spending a lot of money or time developing comprehensive marketing plans?
You've heard of the lean startup concept pioneered by entrepreneur Eric Ries and popularized over the years by professor Steve Blank. The lean startup approach, which favors experimentation over planning, offers a useful blueprint for developing a more efficient marketing strategy.
Here are three ways you can apply it to your business right now:
Test your marketing ideas in small batches.
Instead of investing months to plan and research, lean startup encourages businesses to develop untested assumptions and quickly test those assumptions in the marketplace -- a concept that can easily be applied to your marketing efforts.
When you invest a majority of your marketing budget into developing strategies and tactics, you make a gamble that they will actually succeed. This is a sucker's bet because most marketing strategies fail.
Instead of developing big plans and investing the vast majority of your marketing budget in one or two initiatives, break your budget into smaller pieces and test a variety of ideas.
For example, do not commit to six-month marketing campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Instead, dedicate a small budget to run two-week experiments. Pick a variety of images and develop four or five different ads. Within two weeks, look at the results to measure which ads send the most traffic to your site and which ads result in better conversions. Compare the traffic and conversions from Facebook and Twitter relative to the money you're spending. Is one network sending more customers? Do certain ads have higher click-through and conversion rates? Which ads perform best on both networks?

If your experiments fail, don't worry -- this is normal. At my company, 99 percent of the marketing tactics we try fail. Find several other channels -- pay-per click search-engine advertising or sponsoring a newsletter targeting potential customers, for example -- and run new two-week experiments.
You don't even have to run actual experiments on Facebook or Twitter. You can put together four or five ads and launch a survey on the crowdsourcing internet marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk. Offer 500 people 10 cents each to answer a small number of questions about the ads. Refine the ads based on the answers and re-run the survey with a different batch of 500 people. By spending $100 before you run the ads, you'll be able to improve them and focus your marketing message.
Experimenting with different options will give you a better sense of how your prospective customers respond to your marketing so that you can focus your energy and budget on those channels and tactics that work best.
Leverage your customers' feedback.
Marketing is typically one-way communication, but it doesn't have to be. Just as lean startup encourages businesses to listen to customer feedback in order to modify initial assumptions, businesses can easily find ways to leverage feedback from customers as they test marketing ideas.
After your two-week experiments on Twitter and Facebook end, for example, you'll have a group of customers who purchased your products or services that you can survey. Why were your messages effective to those customers? What made them click your ads and complete a purchase?
Ask your customers and try to offer incentives to encourage people to respond. At my company, for example, we often raffle a few $50 gift cards to survey participants. Call customers and conduct brief phone interviews, ask them on Twitter or Facebook, or develop a short online survey. Did they like the images in your ads? Did they respond to the content? Did they like the landing pages or did other factors lead them to make a purchase? What would have helped them purchase sooner?
Be prepared to change gears quickly.
Once you've gathered this information, you can move into the third lean-startup stage, agile development: the process of improving your product or service in incremental ways in response to what you're hearing from customers.
If customers tell you certain images get them more interested in your products and services than others, find more of those images and re-test your assumptions. By doing this, you can adjust, refocus and find those marketing channels and messages that work best for your brand.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226889#ixzz2W0hr79PK

Meme Man

How to Harness the Power of Internet Memes for Your Business (Infographic)

How to Harness the Power of Internet Memes for Your Business (Infographic)
funnycatwallpapers.com
Grumpy Cat, Bah Humbug














Grumpy Cat has a movie deal, the "I Can Has Cheezburger" franchise is worth millions, and Big Bird became the star of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Internet memes have the power to capture the fleeting attention of millions, so finding a way to tap into that power to market your business could give you a huge boost.
But what goes into creating a viral hit? The environment, the topic and the timing all have to be right, says Damon Brown, entrepreneur and co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Memes (Alpha, 2010). Brown studies pop culture and the power of memes.
"There isn't an exact formula to go viral. You do the best that you can and see how it goes," he says.
Related: Grumpy Cat and the Thriving Cat Meme Marketplace
While you can't predict what will become the next Grumpy Cat, there are a few things that entrepreneurs can do to tap into the power of memes to promote their business or product:
1. Pay attention to pop culture. 
If you want to understand "the modern zeitgeist" and what people are thinking, you have to follow pop culture, Brown says. "Memes are little pockets of pop culture that show what we are thinking at that moment," he says. "How can you create a meme or be part of a meme if you don't know what the modern thinking is?"
2. Work quickly.
When you find something in the news or in pop culture that is appropriate for your business, timing is everything. For example, within hours of the Mars Rover landing last August Oreo released an ad showing a cookie with what looked like tracks from the Mars Rover it the orange-colored cream.
How to Harness the Power of Internet Memes for Your Business (Infographic)
3. Be prepared.
It's not about seeing what's trending right now and trying to create something around it, Brown says. Rather, he advises to be proactive and look for elements of your product or business that are meme-worthy. Brown says you should ask yourself, "Is there a meme in here? Is there something that can carry on?"
For example if you make all-natural soap, Brown says, and Youtube video of a baby eating soap goes viral, use that opportunity to latch on to the video's success.
Related: What You Can Learn About Social Media from Big Bird
The infographic below from Seattle-based online backup service, Mozy, breaks down different types of memes and the elements of a viral hit, as well as the history of how memes started.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226955#ixzz2W0bKMwXG

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

5 Tips for Creating Effective B2B Marketing Videos


by contributor on June 3, 2013 in Content Marketing
127 Share62 Today’s blog post comes courtesy of Phil Donaldson, Director of Marketing at PropelGrowth, a B2B financial services marketing firm in Princeton, NJ. He provides marketing strategy and tactics that drive content marketing programs for companies seeking to provide value to their customers. Phil is also a composer and musician who will use any opportunity he can to create music.
Video presents another unique challenge in content marketing, and B2B marketers are discussing and blogging on the topic with increasing fervor. In fact, a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs cites video as a leading marketing tactic used by B2B marketers. Because it saves time for buyers — especially busy senior executives — video has become a significant “go-to” content asset. As buyers become decreasingly trusting in sales content, capturing the voice of the customer helps support value add relationships.
With more tech buyers conducting research over mobile devices, video is easier to consume than, say, a white paper. According to a Forbes study, viewers retain 50% more information from watching video. Now, that’s efficiency!
YouTube garners around 4 billion views daily. For tech marketers, video has become a “must have.” With such growth and attention for video, you can believe that competition for audience attention will be high. Here are five tips to help you leverage video to gain attention, get customers to the next step of the buying journey, and shorten sales cycles
1.     Know Your Buyer, Identify Their Need
Your company’s “best of breed” claim or long track record of [place boastful claim here] is not what buyers are looking for. It’s about their need to solve a business problem; not your need to brag. Try interviewing customers to find out why they purchased your solution. Get with Sales and find out what they’re hearing from prospects and customers. Meet your audience where they are with valuable content that enlightens and entertains. This may seem like a “well, duh!” issue, but you’d be surprised at how many people are talking about themselves.
2.     Be Aware of the Buying Stage Your Video is Targeting
Are you looking to target the top or the bottom of the funnel? Do you seek to build awareness or facilitate the evaluation process? If you’re looking to be strategic in your marketing, each video needs to be informed by where in the buying process your target buyer happens to be. For instance, IT buyers prefer product demos at the evaluation stage. So, providing brief demos of specific capabilities can be very helpful. While you’ll want to educate from a higher level at the research stage, you don’t want to miss a golden opportunity for later-stage buyers.
3.     Place the Video in a Continuum of Content
Many marketers create single standalone content assets and expect them to do all the heavy lifting in generating leads. This does not work. IT tech buyers tend to engage with 5 content assets before speaking with a salesperson. Your marketing message or story needs to live and build across various content elements. Your buyers will need access to a continuum of content to help them understand their needs and make a buying decision. C-level executives prefer video that is presented with supporting content. A short video embedded in a landing page as an intermediate step to an article or white paper can an effective way to drive conversions.
4.     Make It a Tool to Be Shared
Video is a powerful educational and storytelling tool. It helps to create advocates within a target organization. Senior level executives frequently share video with their teams. Likewise, it’s a great tool for customer advocates to use to share content with their managers. Because it’s so easy to share and so quick to watch, video has the potential to deliver your message to people in the prospect organization that your salespeople can’t access.
5.     Add Graphic Links to Your Video in Email Content
Adding a thumbnail graphic in an email which links to an online video helps to increase click through rates by 96% over non-video email. Sending emails with embedded video links can help drive conversions. The emails are also easy for the recipient to forward, making it even more likely that the video will gain access to others in the buyer committee.
Video can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right team with a solid marketing strategy and a bit of creativity. When we look back at a future B2B content marketing timeline, no doubt that this point in time will show a tick labeled, “The Age Of Video” (the video version will have lots of echo added when it’s read). What will be your company’s contribution?
For more information on how to captivate buyers with video, check out the white paper, “Promotional Video for Customer-centric Marketing.”

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Mobile App Builders

Moritz Ostwald Dear LI community,

Thanks a lot for all your emails, calls, and applications you sent to us.
After reviewing more than 120 applications, we have now closed our first round and came up with our TOP10 which we have invited for the second round and detailed discussions.

Please accept our apologizes, that due to the unexpected high amount of requests we will not answer all your emails separately.
If you haven't received an invitation from us yet, we will not consider you for this project now. However, for future projects we might get back to you and to the emails you sent to us.

Thanks again and all the best,
Moritz

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