It may sound silly, but when you look at the success rate of startup businesses you will realize that these fears are mostly justified. All company owners know they want to market and want to take their product or service to the masses, they just aren’t sure how best to do it. Luckily for them, the basic principles of marketing a new venture are easy and can be effectively done by anyone.

Build the Foundation First

Before looking to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website it is necessary that you build the website itself correctly; throwing up a pre-made Wordpress template will get you nowhere fast. The website’s goals must be defined, followed by proper organization of the content and user experience.

If your primary goal is to have your users sign-up or register you must concisely convey information that shows the visitor why your product or service is useful to them with clear calls to action that direct the user to a simple signup form. If your focus is on ecommerce, making it easier for the user to see, add, and purchase your items becomes the utmost priority while a blog or otherwise content-driven website would best benefit from optimized typography and readability. Your venture is unique and your website experience should reflect such.

Do Your Basic Keyword Research and Implement It

By implementing the most effective on-page SEO, search engines are able to properly list your website in their results pages and drive visitors interested in your market to you. Your first step is to read Google’s on-page SEO guide – this teaches the basics of SEO and allows you to comfortably implement a SEO strategy.

Using Google’s Keyword Research Tool, you can look up relevant keywords to your venture’s product, service, and industry. By analyzing interchangeable terms (e.g. “USB drives”, “flash drives”, and “thumb drives”), geographic keyword phrases (e.g. “USB Drives in Denver”) and the number of search queries the terms have had, you can define a series of appropriate keywords and phrases you wish to target. Then, by employing this research you can create keyword themed pages using the Title, Meta Description, Header Tags and Body Text to make those pages relevant for a term in the search engines; however, always remember that users come first and SEO second.

Learn Google Analytics

When running any online marketing campaigns it is essential to track what kind of traffic and conversions you are getting as a result. Take the time (or if you don’t have time, find someone) to properly setup Google Analytics for both your website and your marketing campaigns, then make use of UTM tags to track the ROI. Being able to say, “X campaign is working for us, but Y isn’t” is the single most valuable tool you can have when marketing; this keeps your costs down and your conversion rates up.

Start Engaging

With your website and analytics properly setup, you’re officially ready to start driving traffic. Many ventures’ first thought is, “Let’s do social media! We can brand ourselves and go viral! We’ll be huge!” but this is the wrong approach. In most cases, you do want to implement social media into your marketing campaign, but make sure you understand the following before starting:

• You do not control your brand, your customers do.
• Social media is about engagement, not the number of followers you have.
• “Branding” is not a quantitative measurement – measure actual ROI.

Furthermore, carefully select which social media avenues are most appropriate for your venture and focus on those. Some ventures will benefit from using anything and everything in the social sphere while maintaining a quality presence in them all, but most cant. The last thing you want is an empty presence where people are asking you questions but you are not there to respond.

Find Consumers with Twitter

Due to its versatility, Twitter is a wonderful medium for nearly anyone to begin their social media endeavors. After creating an account, you can utilize Twitter Search to search for the terms related to your venture and look for people using your competitors’ products. Send these people personalized messages informing them of your product or responding to their complaints about another product and how yours may be a better alternative. It sounds a bit cut-throat, but the click-through rates will prove that it is a viable technique (remember, measure with Google Analytics!).

Approach the Blogosphere

Find authors that have done write-ups on your competitors or round-ups of some of the best tools/services in your market and then approach them with your venture. Let them know that they may want to include you in their next round-up article or do a feature; you can even sweeten the deal by offering a promotion for their website’s visitors – make it valuable for them to mention you.

Let the Press Know

Services such as PR Web and PR NewsWire are wonderful, inexpensive ways to broadcast your press releases to thousands of quality news sites. If you aren’t comfortable with writing an effective press release, it may be best to hire someone since this is your big potential step into the limelight. Even if your release doesn’t get picked up by many journalists, a few quality articles that mention your product or service could be all it takes to start a fast-growing word-of-mouth campaign.

Endnote

As you can see in the aforementioned methods, you can effectively market your new venture without spending a great deal of time or money and it requires little to no expertise in marketing. The tools are widely available on the web for getting your marketing campaign off the ground; it’s simply a matter of using them properly. I hope this article has helped you and most of all, good luck!

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Delegation is the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person usually from a superior to a subordinate. If done correctly, it can free up time for the superior to focus on more important tasks whilst knowing the less important yet still necessary tasks are being taken care of.

Effective delegation can be split up into a couple of steps and yields great results when practised well. Firstly, you need to decide who is appropriate to delegate to, if you have a span of control, it’ll be your direct subordinate(s). You should give them as much information as possible about the task, the deadline, what resources are available, any additional expectations etc. Secondly, arrange a mid-point meeting to check on progress, this allows you to ensure everything is on schedule and allows your subordinate(s) to raise any issues prior to the deadline.

The important thing to remember is don’t leave anything for assumption or misconception, be clear in every instruction and encourage questioning if your delegates are confused. In practising this simple method, you’ll give yourself more time to plan on moving your business forward as opposed to working on the production development, for example.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Autocracy is the style in which the leader makes all the decisions and closely monitors and controls staff. They give one-way communication in the form of orders and don’t entertain any initiative from subordinates. The advantage of which allows for quick decision-making as no consultation to inferior employees is made, the obvious disadvantage is that employees can soon feel powerless and unmotivated resulting in a lack of effort and commitment.

Perhaps one of the most well-known autocratic leaders was Howell Raines who was Executive Editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003. He was cited as a ‘hard-charging’ person and was known for focusing all of The New York Times’ resources on stories that he considered to be important rather than taking input from employees.

If you’re not a fan of commanding your employees around but still want to make the decisions, taking a paternalistic approach could be more appropriate. As a paternalistic leader, you’d take a fatherly role in ensuring your employee’s social requirements are met to make sure they’re happy. Employees are consulted about issues and feedback or opinions are welcomed however the final decision will lie with leader. The advantage of this style is that employees feel motivated that they’re being consulted but they could be disappointed with the final outcome should it misalign with the feedback they gave. Paternalistic leadership fills the gap between autocracy and democracy and can be extremely productive if practiced correctly.

A democratic style of leadership is perhaps the most common in this day and age and is used in large corporations all the way down to small startups. Its main attribute is giving your employees the power and encouragement to make their own decisions and therefore requires putting all of your trust in them. It involves two-way communication between the leader and employees and can often mean more time spent on decision-making but allows the employee to know they have a direct impact on the business they work for.

In choosing a leadership style, you could see your business thrive with success or fail with misfortune. It’s vital that you make the right choice in order to keep your employees happy along with making the right decisions for your business.

Thanks to Scrape TV for the image.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Getting noticed amongst the hundreds if not thousands of other startups can be hard work. There’s no clean-cut method but there are steps you can take to give yourself a fighting chance, without breaking the bank.

Thanks to great services such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s possible to expose your business to potentially hundreds of millions, for free. Twitter has become the foundation for startups to gain recognition and popularity, with the many success stories such as Etsy – who launched in 2005, joined Twitter in 2007 and now boasts over 1.2 million followers – it’s a proven method to get the word out.

If you’re going to promote by means of social media, make sure you’re proactive in doing so. There’s a plethora of business-like accounts on Twitter who regularly plug their services and products but don’t take the time to reply to feedback given by people. Monitor conversation about your brand, that way you can be in control and take advantage of the invaluable things being said about it.

There’s no right or wrong way to use your Twitter account but if it’s a business account, it goes without saying that you wouldn’t be sharing pictures of the rump steak you’re having for dinner. A good way of being noticed is to have special offers via Twitter if possible, a great example of this was LCN – a domain registrar like any other who had just joined Twitter, they had 10 weeks of offers to celebrate their 10^th birthday, word got out and they received almost 1000 new followers just from a simple promotional campaign.

So, social media is one thing but what about having your product/service featured in another blog?  Making contact with potential PR opportunities can be difficult but there are some things you can do to help your chances.

Capitalizing on PR Opportunities
Firstly, you need to look at your niche and look at the various blogs covering the same or similar topics. We’ll take running a new iPhone App Development company as an example, you wouldn’t go ahead and contact the big names such as TUAW and MacWorld etc. because chances are, their inboxes are filled with similar emails every day. It’d be more productive to contact smaller blogs to get covered, that way the likelihood of succeeding is increased.

Also, when emailing a blog requesting to be covered, try to avoid starting with ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, make the effort to find out the editor of the blog, or the appropriate name to address, you want to give the right impression from the outset. The whole idea of PR is to form meaningful relationships; if you’re going to generically address the contact then chances are your email could hit the trash before it’s been read.

So you’re actively promoting your service/product through social media and making customer relations along with seeking new PR opportunities, you’re pretty much set for an initial marketing burst, but that certainly isn’t the end of it. If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. You need to create a marketing plan with in-depth information about how you’re going to go about spreading the word, each time you start a new campaign make sure you monitor it so you can see the results and make necessary adjustments to any plans based on the success or lack of success of a certain method.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture