Start ups
Consumers Prefer Better Looking Websites
Ross | July 13th, 2011Successful businesses know that to develop long-term relationships with their customers, they must find ways to build trust. This is not as easy to do as it sounds. According to the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer study, U.S. consumer trust of companies dropped 8 points from 2010 to 2011. In fact, this trend seems to be [...]
Marketing 101: Branding your business in a competitive environment
Mike | July 11th, 2011Establishing a brand in a competitive environment can be challenging for any business, particularly small businesses and startups. Not every business represents a “new-to-the-world” idea, and not every company has the luxury of exclusive ownership of a market segment. There are literally thousands of examples this: a new entrant in a market establishes a brand [...]
America’s founding entrepreneurs: revolution at work
Mike | July 5th, 2011On this Independence Day, 2011 I have been thinking about the summer of ’76 and America’s Founding Fathers. Their importance to the world has been analyzed every way imaginable; thousands of books have been written about their efforts and accomplishments, and they are held up to generations as examples of great political and military leaders. [...]
Not Everyone Is The Right Customer
Ross | June 29th, 2011A few days ago, Christian Jung, a designer and consultant from Germany wrote an interesting post – Goodbye Basecamp, This Is The End Of A True Love. My Heart Is Broken, explaining why he would no longer use Basecamp, popular project management software created by 37signals. Christian decided that after six years, his needs changed [...]
The CLV three step: drive, convert, enrich.
Mike | June 27th, 2011In a post last week, Ross discussed the need to find a balance between driving traffic and conversion for web-based businesses. It’s a great video and a very valuable discussion of one critical issue of strategic emphasis that many web-based businesses grapple with. Ross’s overriding point was that a business should not choose between a [...]
Website Traffic or Conversions: Which Is More Important?
Ross | June 21st, 2011Most companies, especially small business and startups, obsess about the amount of traffic to their online sites. Site traffic is important – it brings attention, a certain degree of validation, and the opportunity to convert visitors into users or paying customers. But traffic alone isn’t enough and more importantly, we tend to overestimate its impact. A [...]
Lean Marketing 101: Giving good interview, or how to get a reporter to eat from your hand
Mike | June 20th, 2011In the world of startups and small business there are two basic kinds of company: those the media pays attention to, and all the rest. If your company has a compelling story, a unique product , or an interesting personality behind it you may be fortunate to leverage that advantage and convince a reporter to [...]
Entrepreneurship at its most basic
Mike | June 13th, 2011Greg Hartle is re-learning the hard way what it means to be an entrepreneur. A successful small businessman with a decade of experience, he set out this past winter to visit all 50 states, to interview 501 entrepreneurs from across the country and, at the same time,to reinvent his life from scratch. On January 5th, [...]
Don’t Delegate Until You’ve Done It
Ross | June 8th, 2011Many startups fail because their leaders focus on doing things right, instead of doing the right things. They hire employees who can effectively execute tactics (do things right) but who have difficulty figuring out what needs to be done (doing the right things). But how can you decide the right things that need to be [...]
6 great athlete-entrepreneurs and what they accomplished
Mike | June 6th, 2011We all have a great deal to learn as entrepreneurs and we look in many directions for inspiration. Perhaps the most common place we look is to sports and to athletes. We constantly use sports metaphors to describe our challenges, approaches, and successes; how many times have you recently used an expression like “score!” or [...]
