video

Amp up Your Revenue Now – with Video

by Paul Joseph January 27, 2012 Featured

Think you need to be a big time player to deploy e-commerce video on your business’ website? Think again. Adding e-commerce video online is no longer the domain of top retailers. Shrinking costs and increasing benefits of using video is moving many smaller businesses to give the flexible and entertaining platform a shot. In fact, 73 percent of online retailers in 2011used video on product pages, a 55 percent increase from 2010, according to research firm eMarketer. However, uploading a hackneyed, homemade project onto your website isn’t likely to improve your ROI, and might even scare away a few potential customers, however with a little effort you can deploy and clearly measure success with four basic metrics – conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate,  site traffic, and view-through rate – and even adjust your efforts accordingly. Measuring conversion rates Measuring conversion rates should be top priority for any online entrepreneur. A smartly placed – and produced – video on a product page is a proven way to increase the chances that shoppers end their visit with a purchase. According to online retailer Zappos, product page videos have increased their online conversions up to 30 percent. If you’re preparing to begin the video process, you should spend time testing to determine what works and what doesn’t. Consider measuring conversion rate data through A/B testing. First create a product page that includes a video 50 percent of the time the page is served and one that has no video the other 50 percent of the time. Comparing the conversion rate for customers who viewed a video with conversion rates for those that did not have that option will provide you’re answer. This type of test could also be used to compare the success different videos. If you’re feeling very testy: Take the analysis one step further by comparing the conversion rate of shoppers who watched at least a portion of the video to the conversion rate for shoppers who did not watch any portion of the video. No carts left behind A recent report from eMarketer shows adding video lowered the number of abandoned shopping carts, reduced return rates, and resulted in higher sales. Shopping cart abandonment is widely thought to be due to customer uncertainty: If you’re not Amazon or Zappos, users might hesitant when it comes time to post their credit card information – they either don’t trust the merchant; or suddenly are unsure of the product’s value; or worse don’t understand the product. The addition of a well-thought out product video can go a long way in shaping shoppers’ opinions and proving that your business is legit. History Tests: Much like measuring conversions, you can gauge the affects product videos have on shopping cart abandonment by comparing historical data, using A/B tests, and monitoring differences in abandonment rates for shoppers who watched compared to those who didn’t watch a video. View-through rate Visitors who view product videos are  85 percent more likely to purchase than visitors who do not, according to a study from Internet Retailer . Clearly demonstrating that  product pages with video have higher conversion rates than product pages without video . Once you’ve put video on your site, don’t underestimate the importance of measuring performance in terms of view-through rate (VTR), which VTR is the number of videos watched divided by the number of impressions (times a page loaded with a video). Optimize for VTR and you’ll increase your conversion rates. Monitoring metrics: If you monitor the VTR metrics, it will help determine the effectiveness of your video placement. These metrics will also signal the effectiveness of your calls to action, as well as other elements that ideally will keep viewers watching. Pump up it up! According to a recent study conducted by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, 42 percent of marketers said bringing traffic to their sites is the main goal of employing an online marketing plan. Search engines are designed to provide the most relevant content among a seemingly endless stream of interconnected pages on the Web. By adding a video element to an e-commerce site you will improve SEO performance for the keywords associated with the video, as well as content around the video. In order to monitor the video’s success, observe traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing after adding a video and compare to the page’s performance before the video. Conclusion According to Cisco, online video will increase from 30 percent of all Internet traffic to  90 percent of Internet traffic by 2013 . Of course, a lot of that traffic will be attributed to product page videos. It’s been proven that video drives conversions, traffic and sales while reducing returns- so what are you waiting for? Tim Gray is content strategist with Blue Fountain Media . He has wide ranging background in the online marketing space and writes about his experiences with SEO, Social Media, and all aspects of Web design for the company’s blog, The ROI Factor . Read more about Tim here .

Tagged as: business, entrepreneur, entrepreneur tools, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, video, video marketing

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Copywriting Makeover: How I Optimized The Onward Studios Squeeze Page

by Paul Joseph December 7, 2011 Featured

This week I have something really exciting for you. It’s a sneak peak behind the scenes of some work I did for a client. I must admit I love behind the scenes and before and after makeovers, especially when it has to do with marketing or copywriting. A big thanks to Carma Leitchy for allowing us to use… Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged as: copywriting, landing page, opt-in form, small-business, squeeze page, video, young

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How To Win At The Money Game

by Paul Joseph October 6, 2011 Featured

Hello again dear reader, I’ve got a follow up interview this week that I was particularly interested in sharing you, so you can find out about people who make money without worrying about mindset. A perfectly valid response that I hear sometimes goes like this… “Well what about all those people who don’t care about mindset and just use strategies and get rich anyway? There’s plenty of them around, and if they can make money without bothering with mindset, then why should I bother?” Strategy Works, Why Bother With Mindset? Good point! There are people around who just work on using strategies and they accumulate wealth anyway, so why bother with all this mindset stuff? I investigated this idea further by interviewing a man who has been a Financial Planner and Advisor for twenty years. Jeremy Britton tells the story of when he was around 19 yrs of age, he was given some guidance about how to accumulate wealth. He then spent many of those 20 years just working on strategy. And just working on strategy worked for him, in a way… he made a number of his clients into millionaires , and he was a financially wealthy man himself. Here’s the thing though, when I asked Jeremy about having achieved this kind of “success” in his life, he couldn’t help laughing and responded that it’s funny to consider how we often measure success in financial terms, and he certainly used to do this. He went on to explain that things started to go drastically wrong over a period of a couple of months when he had 13 clients blow all the money he had helped them accumulate and his own financial and health challenges started becoming increasingly serious . Jeremy was forced to take time out from his work and consider what was wrong with his strategy. Because strategy had always worked before, it must just be a matter of something being missing from the strategy. As he looked into why his clients were blowing their money and why he was living an extravagant lifestyle and spending more than he earned as well, he started to see the parallels in his clients making money really quickly and lottery winners. Why Winning The Lottery Doesn’t Make You Wealthy Many of you will have heard that lottery winners end up blowing their million dollar win in a couple of months or years and end up being just as poor as when they started. Jeremy realized it was no different for himself or his clients. He had studied, learned and applied so much about the strategies of making money , and he’d been successful in doing just that. Unfortunately, it was almost like pouring water into a sieve, as quickly as the money came in, it went out as well. The strategies worked but the people making the money were frozen in a mentality that didn’t allow them to keep their wealth. Jeremy and his clients needed to include mindset in their wealth building strategy in order to hang on to the money they made. So this extremely left brained, strategy-focused Financial Planner started to learn everything he could about understanding and working with mindset. Is Hypnotherapy For Hippies Or Hardcore Business People? During this time, he met a hypnotherapist. It didn’t occur to him that hypnotherapy might be a useful tool for working on a wealthy mindset, he had signed up to get help quitting smoking . In one session, over one hour, Jeremy stopped smoking and never felt the slightest inclination to pick up another cigarette. He immediately wondered if hypnosis could be used to help people shift their mindset from being stuck in poverty consciousness to retaining a wealthy mindset. After studying hypnotherapy and a wide range of other disciplines that work with the mind, Jeremy has combined them to create his own technique called “flicking your rich switch” , which helps his clients work on their mindset. Now, the first thing he does in a session with a new client is work on their subconscious beliefs about money and their mental blocks to accumulating wealth. After that, he’s more than happy to work with clients using as many strategies and techniques as they like to grow their wealth. Strategy Vs Psychology – The Answer It was a hard learned lesson, but Jeremy has realized that you really need to work on both strategy and mindset to create and accumulate wealth. Strategy without mindset can work but leads to some disastrous after effects , mindset without strategy is like hoping to win the lottery and never actually buying a ticket. If you want to find out more about Jeremy’s work, you can find him on YouTube or at his website where you can download his e-book, “Who’s Taking Your Money (And How To Get Some Of It Back)” for free when you subscribe. I’m also attending an entrepreneurs networking event being held simultaneously in numerous cities around Australia. I’ll be at the event in Sydney , Jeremy will be at the event in Brisbane , and the event will also be on in Melbourne and Perth . Hope to see you there and thanks for reading. I’d love to hear any comments you have at the end! Cheers, Neroli. Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

Tagged as: hypnotherapy, jeremy britton, mindset, neroli makim, small-business, subconscious beliefs, video, wealth creation

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The 80/20 Rule For Making Money

by Paul Joseph September 22, 2011 Featured

In today’s article I’m going to take a kinky look at the often-discussed 80/20 rule . In case you’re not aware of it, the rule states that 20% of what you do gives you 80% of your results , so the trick is to find out what that 20% is for you, focus on that and delegate the rest of the stuff. But here’s the kink, we’re looking at how 80% of something is actually responsible for most of your results. Another kink is that many people are focused on learning and applying the 20% element of this equation, and hammering away at it whilst getting little or no satisfaction from their results. This article is based on a fraction of an interview I did with Kerwin Rae recently. Amidst the massive quantity of high quality information and advice he shared, this piece jumped out at me as the starting point to the series of articles I’ll be creating from those interviews. The Million Dollar Difference Here’s the deal; psychology is 80% of the game . If you’ve heard this plenty of times before, but you’re still unsatisfied with the results you’re getting in life, then it means there’s still a missing link and you might find it here, so please read on. Kerwin’s created dozens of millionaires in the last ten years. What’s fascinating about this is that he’s trained thousands of people, yet thousands of people haven’t made the shift to becoming millionaires – but a percentage of them have. From interviewing those who have made the shift and doing his own research, Kerwin knows wealth creation has very little to do with the business techniques and tools, and everything to do with the psychology of the individual. (Techniques and tools for success in business is the 20% of the equation that many people focus 80% of their energy on, but still don’t get the results they’re after.) Is Your Operating System Faulty Or Fantastic? Kerwin explains that your psychology is your operating system . It’s built on your beliefs, values, and identity that pre-determines your behaviour. Your psychology, or operating system dictates what kind of information you register about life and the world around you, what decisions you make, what kind of life experiences you have and how you perceive those experiences. Whether it’s wealth creation, health creation, or finding your soul mate, the trick is being able to sense and perceive what’s right there in front of you, and what’s really going on around you rather than being blindsided by your blind spots. Kerwin explains that the human brain processes 400 billion bits of information per second , but we’re only conscious of 2000 of those bits of information. Becoming more aware or conscious of what’s in your environment means learning to see things as they really are, not as you perceive them to be through filters that include your psychological blind spots. There’s a term for these called a “ Scotoma ”. It refers to a psychologically induced blind spot . This means on some level, you haven’t observed and registered the existence of something that’s present, so you convince yourself it isn’t there. Then you eliminate from your awareness all visual information that exists about it. Is The Answer Right In Front Of You? Kerwin describes how this works in life by using the example of when you go to the kitchen cupboard and look for the salt – but can’t see it even though it’s right there in front of your face. So you yell out to your partner and ask where the salt is. They walk over and show you that it’s on the shelf right in front of you at eye level. It doesn’t matter that the salt was staring you in the face. At that moment, you couldn’t see it no matter how hard you looked because your mind hadn’t observed and registered any visual information to tell you it was there. This same process applies to making money and creating success in any area of your life. If your mind, or psychology, isn’t observing and registering the information around you that relates to being successful and wealthy, then no matter how hard you look, and how well trained you become in using tools and techniques, your blind spots will keep you from perceiving and acting on what you need to experience success and wealth . Sam Stosur’s Secret To Winning The US Open Grand Slam This reminds me of something I heard Sam Stosur’s mother say in a radio interview after her daughter’s US Open grand slam win last week. When asked about her daughter’s success, she said: “This time she just had everything in place, she had her mind right. Her mind was in the right place and it all came together for her to win.” Sam Stosur has been perfecting the techniques of her game of tennis for years, but winning a grand slam, or success in anything needs more than techniques, you need the right psychology to win. Digging A Bigger Hole Kerwin shared with me his own experiences of how his blind spots and his own faulty operating system had got in the way of him experiencing lasting success and fulfilment in his life. Kerwin explained how in the past, he constantly felt like there was this void in his life. He came from a poor family; his mother was a single mum on a pension. Their idea of a big celebration was to have kiwi fruit on pension day. It wasn’t that they didn’t have a great life; as kids, they didn’t need money to have a good upbringing. But because he didn’t have money, when he felt there was something missing, money seemed like the most obvious answer. The problem was, when Kerwin made money, the void just got bigger! So he thought, “Wow, if it’s not money, maybe it’s cars!” (That made me giggle internally because it seems like most men jump to that conclusion, which seems very weird to me – but women generally think it’s shoes?). So he started buying flash cars, then houses, then dating model girlfriends and going on expensive holidays around the world. But the more he did all this, the bigger the void became. The penny dropped when Kerwin returned home from a 7 month trip around the world and had spent a ridiculous amount of money “trying to find himself”. He said that as the wheels of the plane literally touched down on the runway, he realized the gaping void was an internal emptiness that he was seeking to fulfil. Finding Lasting Success And Fulfillment Even though Kerwin had a keen interest in learning about psychology for many years, this is when he began to work seriously from the inside out to change his psychology and operating system. And the gaping void gradually became less of an eternal emptiness and more of an enduring satisfaction with life. Kerwin explains that often the case with relationships, health, wealth, finance and business, is that everything you’re seeking is right there in front of you. But you convince yourself that it’s not there because your blind spots have eliminated all the visual information that it exists. The only way to discover the things you’re seeking is to become more conscious , which means being more aware of the reality of what’s present , not just reality as it’s been filtered through your blind spots. If you’re operating system is faulty and you think something is missing because you can’t sense it in your life, then you will keep looking for it outside of yourself and your blind spots will keep hiding it from you. Like Kerwin and so many others, you could spend a fortune and years of your life looking outside of yourself, or you could start now by working from the inside out. Where 80% Of Your Success Is Hiding Psychology is so important because your psychology is 80% responsible for your success in any area of your life AND for your ability to experience lasting fulfilment and satisfaction from your success. Kerwin runs a number of programs to help entrepreneurs grow their business and increase their profits, but one of his programs “ The Power To Create ” works to help people create a different psychology or operating system to get the results they’re seeking in life . I’ll be writing more about this topic in future articles and attending the course later in the year. If you want to master the part of the equation that determines 80% of the success game, I’d thoroughly recommend you come along. Once again, many thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear any comments you have at the end. Cheers, Neroli. Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

Tagged as: 80/20 rule, blind spots, internal void, kerwin rae, mindset, neroli makim, psychology, small-business, the power to create, video, young

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How My Biology Blog Landed Me My Dream Job

by Paul Joseph July 26, 2011 Featured

Yeah, I know. It’s not what you want to hear about on a blog about Blogging and Entrepreneurship. Who comes here to know how to land a job? Isn’t the entrepreneurial dream never to have to work for anyone but yourself? Isn’t it all about working smart and not hard? Can you be an entrepreneur and still have a full time job ? The fact is, for some “entrepreneurs”, the end goal isn’t ONLY to work for yourself. I fit in this category. I’ve started an online business, and the main thing it does is that it supplements the income from my job as a teacher. It gives me the ability to do things I wouldn’t be able to do without my own online business. However, there’s something that I’ve realized that I can’t deny – I’m a teacher, and I LOVE teaching . Not only that, but I love teaching at the university level, and ever since my days in grad school, in the recesses of my mind, I knew that it’s what I wanted to do. My Educational And Teaching Adventures When it comes to education, I’m somewhat of a sucker for punishment. I did a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and went on for a Master’s degree in Neurobiology. I LOVE neurobiology, physiology and all of those kinds of subjects (yes, I’m a nerd). However, there was a significant problem – I HATED the research (or I thought I did). Although my Masters Research involved traveling to the beautiful country of Germany for two summers along with all kinds of cool stories like playing piano for a gospel choir, staying in a Fraternity house for $80 a month with a chef that came in once a week to feed us AWESOME food, and hiking through the Hartz Mountain, it also involved coming back to a small research lab dissecting crickets and doing electrophysiological recordings for up to 14 hours in a day – YUCK! It was at that point that I abandoned my dream of teaching at the University level. I loved the people, but hated the crickets (and for me, that represented the research). When I was offered a job as a High School science and Math teacher, I decided to jump at it. Teaching, without the research – YAY! This is where the 2nd problem came – I was also teaching things I wasn’t passionate about, and it wasn’t at the level I enjoyed. So, I decided to do something about it. I wasn’t qualified to teach at the university level, but I was going to teach University-level stuff whether it was my job or not. How? By blogging of course . . . My Blogging Experience Since 2008, I’ve been actively blogging and have been having a decent level of success. Working part-time on my blog, I have been able to net anywhere between $500 and $3000 per month , much of which has been relatively passive. Not a ridiculously large amount like many others, but enough for me to feel like I know what I’m doing. I learned about SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Generation, Building a list, and all of those phrases the readers of this blog have come to know and love (hopefully). What I eventually realized was that I could take those same principles and apply them to Biology. So, I started my Biology Website , where I started making short video clips teaching the content I wanted to teach , with no one telling me what I could or couldn’t do, and it was very exciting. The website grew quickly, and my videos are being viewed anywhere between 1,000 and 2,600 times daily , thanks to a lot of what I learned in Gideon Shalwick’s Rapid Video Blogging Course . Not only that, but I started receiving emails, almost every day, from people all over the world who have been using the site and finding a tremendous amount of value in the content. These people included University Students and Professors, Doctors, Pharmacists, Nurses and a variety of other professionals who have been using them as an integral part of what they are doing, or just as a tool to help them remember the things they forgot from Medical School or University. The Bad Story With A Good Ending Back in April, my father was diagnosed with a serious neurological condition, and was sent to a special hospital in Colombia (the country). Because we weren’t sure how things would go, I went down there to spend a month with my family. He was in an induced coma and was paralyzed to where he could hardly move his arms and legs even before going into the coma. While there, my main task was to help him with his Physical therapy. While he was in the coma , I would exercise his arms and legs twice daily, to help speed up his healing process, and when he was taken out of the coma, the exercises continued. During this relatively stressful period in time, there was a topic of discussion that kept coming up. My mother and aunt would constantly tell me that they thought that I should be a Physical Therapist. I actually let them know that it was something I had considered in the past, but that I knew that my calling was to be an educator. However, if there were one Profession I would want to do in the Health Care field, it would be Physical Therapy. At a certain point, with a lot of prayer, and some serious miracles, my dad’s condition took an abrupt turn for the better. We were planning for him to be in the Hospital for a few months, but in about a week, so many good things were happening that he was moved out of intensive care, into a different hospital, then to a hotel, and was then sent back to our country. The details of all of that would take many blog posts to get into, but the short version is that we’re praising God for the things that happened. The Invitation When I got back home from Colombia, there was a letter in my mailbox from the university I attended. It was an invitation to teach Anatomy, Neuroscience and Pathophysiology, in one of the top Doctor of Physical Therapy programs in the United States. When I received the invitation, I was quite surprised. I was not a Physical Therapist, nor did I have a PhD. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think how much of an “interesting coincidence” it was, with everything I had been experiencing. Well, I decided to apply. Yes, I was unqualified on paper, but I thought that my blog would give me some leverage to where they would at least consider me as a candidate. Then I called up one of my former professors for a recommendation. He went in to speak with the chair of the department, and then told me that I should consider taking a trip to the university to talk with the chair of the department, and show him the stuff that I was working on. The Importance Of My Blog Based on the recommendation of my former professor, I made an appointment and went to speak with the department chair. We had a very interesting chat. At the end of our meeting, the following was clearly established: There were over 30 people applying for the job, many of whom were actual Physical Therapists who were more qualified on paper than I was. The department had already decided that they were not going to hire someone with a Biology Background. They wanted someone with a physical therapy background. If I hadn’t come in, I would have never gotten an actual interview. BUT , he was blown away by what I had accomplished online . Based on my blog , he would make sure that, at the very least, I would get an interview. The Interview And Job Offer Then it was time for the interview. I came into a conference room and sat at the head of a conference table that was surrounded by eight highly educated individuals, most of which had PhDs and DPTs (Doctor of Physical Therapy) ready to grill me with their questions. I started off with an opening statement, highlighting my passion for Biology and the success of my website. I let them know what was happening at my site, and you could see their faces light up. Then they asked me all kinds of questions. I answered. I was cool, calm, and collected, with the confidence that whatever happened, I would leave the situation a better person. Now, I know that I didn’t do a great job with building up the suspense in this article. In fact, you knew the result by reading my title. Yes, I did get the job. In fact, it was a unanimous decision which, from what I understand, doesn’t usually happen in these committees. Why did I get the job? For a number of reasons. However, one of the main reasons was that I used my blog to demonstrate authority. In fact, I can proudly say that because of my blog, people all over the world have come to see me as an authority when it comes to biology. Does it mean that my blog is perfect? Nope. In fact, I make mistakes in my videos and get people saying things like “Umm, actually, that’s all wrong!”. Then I go in and correct the mistakes (sometimes). It’s a learning process, and I learn as I go, and then I share what I learn with people all over the world. If you would like to listen to this full story from my podcast, go to the podcast episode on my blog of How I left My Job because of My blog . The Importance Of Blogging Without a shadow of doubt in my mind, I now firmly believe that Blogging is one of the best ways to establish yourself as an authority in your industry/niche today. It’s a way of building credibility , nurturing relationships , and gaining an audience . These are factors that can help anyone accomplish their goals. Your goal might not be to get a better job. In actuality, that wasn’t my goal with my blog either. My plan was to eventually quit my teaching job and do internet marketing full-time. However, that was me settling because I didn’t think that teaching at the university level was plausible. For me, to a certain extent, doing internet marketing full-time would be settling. I know what I’m called to do, and now, because of my blog, I can do it. I don’t know what your goals are, but I want to encourage you to take this blogging thing seriously, because it has the potential to do great things . My Recommendations My first recommendation is that if you don’t have a blog, START ONE NOW . The concept of blogging is still young enough that most people don’t know how to do it well. You’re reading this blog, so you have access to resources to help you get started and to do it well. In other words, you’re at an advantage. At the risk of sounding like I’m writing this because this is Yaro’s blog, I HIGHLY recommend that if you haven’t taken his Blog Mastermind course , you need to get in on it. Without Blog Mastermind, I would NOT be where I am today. It gave me a strong Blogging foundation as a blogger, and has made me comfortable enough to start a blog and establish myself as an authority. The biggest thing is that it helped me to avoid making some of the common mistakes most bloggers make, and that is worth it’s weight in gold. My final recommendation is that if you are into video blogging, check out Gideon’s Rapid Video Blogging Course. It has really done a lot for me, especially when it comes to my Biology blog , and has helped me to go from hardly any video views to over 1,000 daily views in less than two months. Online video is thriving right now, and Youtube is allowing a lot of people to Crush it! Remember that you can’t keep doing the same ‘ol thing and expect to get different results. Well, you can expect it, but that’s the definition of insanity. Take action! Give yourself a kick in the butt and get going. Your Comments Have you started a blog already? If so, are you having success with it? If so, what has blogging done for YOU? Let me know in the comments below! Until Next Time! Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

Tagged as: country, health, industry, internet, interview, podcast, small-business, video, videos

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What Do Microsoft, Tim Ferriss, Donald Trump and Katy Perry Have In Common?

by Paul Joseph July 8, 2011 Featured

I know most of us will agree that Microsoft does not make the best products. Competitors with better products have smaller market share and less influence. The operating system market was monopolized by Windows for many years while Linux and Apple had single digit market share. (Of course today it’s different with Apple coming in strong with its Apple OS .) Now here is the question that pops up in my mind – How did Microsoft become a giant while producing less impressive products than its competitors? How did Microsoft dominate many markets ingeniously and remain strong, while its competitors put their heart, soul, sweat and blood into producing better products and not getting any closer to beating this giant? The answer to my question is one single word: Leverage . Let me explain by shedding some light on history. Microsoft recognized early on that the industry was going to shift from hardware focus to software focus. The hardware provided the base processing ability that would improve with time, while the software logic gave infinite capability for a programmer to produce softwares that performed any task the mind desired. At that point in time, Microsoft joint forces with IBM , the industry giant at that time, to provide Operating System software for all of its machines. The second strategic move Microsoft made was to charge IBM a small license fee per unit sold. Now, if you think about it, Microsoft did a joint venture with IBM, and leveraged their mass distribution and deep market penetration to reach the entire industry while getting paid for it. This is holy smokes smart! Not revolutionary, just strategic . It was not a marketing plan, it was a business strategy . Today, Microsoft is Microsoft not because of some marketing campaigns, but only because of their ability to command the distribution through multiple mediums in multiple markets consistently. I don’t think that things just worked out for them every time they tried something. They probably had to try ten things to come across this idea. But they were willing to take shot after shot that most of us are not willing to take. A recap on Microsoft moves: Recognition of the industry trend before it was apparent to others Forming a deal with a giant that gave them access to massive distribution I think you got my point! As entrepreneurs, we strive to grow our businesses as fast as possible, and in the blur of feverish activity, we loose the ability to look at the bigger picture . We focus on day to day activities and begin to micro-manage projects. Soon the business runs us. Sad. The reason for this is lack of perspective and business strategy . If you are somewhat active in the Internet Marketing Courses industry, you know that many gurus have built their business purely through joint venture partnerships. That is through partnering up with multiple businesses that complement or compete with theirs and then cross promoting each other’s products in exchange for a sales commission. Sounds sweet, right? Paying only per sale. The Timothy Ferriss Strategy This idea is not limited to the Microsoft or the more familiar Internet Marketing Guru industry. Let me give you a more recent and unconventional example: Timothy Ferriss , the author of two best selling books, “ The 4-Hour Workweek ”, and “ The 4-Hour Body ”, openly holds blogging responsible for his mega success. Now of course Tim had the goods ( solid content ) in his books, but he built his community and following by appearing in numerous leading blogs throughout the Internet (including Entrepreneurs-Journey.com). He spread his message, one blog at a time and one media outlet at a time, while he attributes his success more to the blog partnerships he did as apposed to any other media outlet. Donald Trump & Robert Kiyosaki I know you are convinced already, but how about another unconventional example, Donald Trump . As you know Donald Trump is expanding his business in diverse markets, many of which he is not experienced in. One example is the “financial awareness industry”. Although Trump has many resources at his disposal to become successful in this market, he decided to partner up with best selling author, Robert Kiyosaki , to co-author the book “ Why We Want You to Be Rich ”. Trump knows that Kiyosaki’s book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” has been on the best seller list for many years and anyone looking to become financially educated, more than likely knows about Kiyosaki. Co-authoring a book with Kiyosaki is a strong leverage for Trump to penetrate this market in a big way. Katy Perry Realize this, it’s unconventional; Katy Perry became enormously famous after her album “ Teenage Dream “. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know her before this album, and this is not her first album. Her first music video for this album, “California Gurls”, featured Snoop Dogg . Talk about leverage of association. I agree, Snoop Dogg’s appearance was not the only reason for her success, Katy is a talented artist indeed, but there are many other talented artists in the world who do not receive the kind of attention they would like. Snoop Dogg’s appearance in her video is more of a marketing play than a business strategy, but again it’s leverage. Here Are The Rules The rules are that there are no rules. There are no clearly defined rules or a secret formula to creating such joint ventures that pay big time and for the long term. At least I don’t know of any yet. I was having a conversation with Perry Marshall one day and he said “Aziz, I have tried many things in my business, but the Google Adwords stuff worked for me the best”. If you think about it, when you think of Perry Marshall, the one thing that comes to mind is AdWords. I know just a year ago Perry attempted to dominate the Facebook Ads market by launching his Facebook Ads training course. Still when you think of Perry today, Google AdWords comes to mind. This is just to reiterate the point that there is no ONE SECRET FORMULA, therefore stop looking for one. I believe in noticing patterns that appear in multiple business successes and developing my business strategy and marketing plans accordingly. It is crucial to notice that such partnerships are unconventional , out of the box, and not as common as they should be – since they create massive successes for entrepreneurs. This is good news for the few of us who are literally going to take this message to heart and do something with it. For the vast majority (80% +), this message will serve only as entertainment value and nothing more. Sad, but true. Aziz Ali Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

Tagged as: apple, facebook, Featured, marketing, microsoft, mind, online, small-business, video

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Aniruddha Gupte, Layer3Media Technologies: Helping distribution of video content

by Paul Joseph June 16, 2011 Featured

Aniruddha, please tell us what Layer3Media Technologies is all about. Layer3Media helps video content-owners distribute their video to anyone, anywhere, anytime and make money from their content easily without any upfront costs whatsoever.  We do this by providing industrial grade copy-protection linked with easy payment methods including “free-with-ads”. (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: content, frontpage, other-content, please-tell, technologies, video, visit-yourstory-in, yourstory-in

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Looking Ahead: Developing Your Long Term Marketing Strategy

by Paul Joseph June 9, 2011 Featured

We hear about the importance of business plans all the time, and many entrepreneurs would never think of launching a new venture without one. Most startups carefully plan production, distribution and delivery, and even internal culture. When it comes to putting together a long term, strategic marketing plan though, it’s shocking how many small to midsized companies skip it altogether. It often seems like marketing is something that’s an afterthought. Everyone knows it needs to be done, but we’ll figure it out as we go along. Marketing is not something to take lightly though. In fact, it can literally make or break a business. You can have all the other pieces in place – a great product, a seamless sales process, outstanding service, etc. – and if you don’t do a great job with marketing, none of it will matter. Sure, word of mouth will (eventually) help, but the more people spreading the word, the better, and marketing is the only way you’re going to get the process moving forward. Not IF but HOW Marketing should never be thought of as optional. Instead, it should be an integral part of your business planning, and the question should be how you can do it most effectively. Of course, today more than ever, that’s the million dollar question. With the ever growing array of marketing options opening up online, as well as many traditional, offline avenues still in play, it can be enough to make an already swamped entrepreneur want to run and hide. But take heart. The fact that there are so many options is actually good news. Blogging, Social Media, Email and Article Marketing, PPC, Video, SEM – they’re all simply more tools in your marketing tool box, and once you start to use them, the rewards can easily outweigh any initial learning curve frustrations. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to choose between internet marketing options and offline avenues, such as PR, direct mail, radio, etc. Instead, think about how an approach using all your options would look. You might be thinking that your business is 100% online, so you don’t need to do anything that’s offline. But can you say that a write-up about your company in The New York Times business section or a guest spot on Good Morning America wouldn’t give your business a boost? At the very least, PR can be used in conjunction with internet marketing to realize maximum impact. The key is to mesh the various tools available into one consistent, well-thought-out marketing plan. 7 Steps to a Brilliant Marketing Plan Define your target market. (And drill down to get as specific as possible.) Develop a clear, concise message to be used across all channels. Identify short and long-term goals for each marketing channel as well as overall. Study your market to find out where potential customers get their information. Set a budget for all marketing. (Remember: Social Media isn’t free when you do it right.) Plan each marketing channel individually; then work on melding them into one cohesive plan. Measure and tweak – constantly! (Your plan should be fluid and flexible to adjust to changes in your market, industry, and culture.) See? That wasn’t so hard! Of course there is a lot more to each of the seven steps, but none of it is beyond the abilities of most entrepreneurs. Research online, to find resources that will help you in the areas where you have questions. And if it’s all too much to take on, hire it out. But don’t ignore this piece of your business, whatever you do. An effective long term marketing strategy can take your business exactly where you want it to go.

Tagged as: article, business, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, market, marketing-strategies, small-business, video

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Chandra Thimmannagari, VidTeq, Video Maps for Bangalore

by Paul Joseph June 2, 2011 Featured

Are you tired of asking driving directions? Are you tired of locating a business? VidTeq is here to help you out. In a conversation with YourStory.in, Chandra Thimmannagari, Founder of VidTeq tells us how. Tell us about VidTeq. We are a 3 year old startup in the field of Navigation, Location and Local Search. We build VideoMaps, Digital Maps and Search database for Navigation and Locational… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: content, digital, field, frontpage, location, other-content, video, yourstory-in

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YongoPal’s Moment of Zen: A High-Tech Startup Simplifies for Success

by Paul Joseph May 25, 2011 Featured

Darien Brown thought he had a good idea for a business when he came up with a way to connect English language students in South Korea with conversation pals in the US over social media. He had studied in Korea as an undergraduate and made some money on the side as a conversational tutor to students who wanted to turn their book-knowledge of English into genuine fluency. He knew first-hand the pent-up demand for informal, person-to-person interactions, and also knew that teen and college-age Koreans were even more deeply steeped in mobile technology and social media than their digital-generation American peers. Brown’s instincts were confirmed when his company, YongoPal , won the top prize of $25,000 in the 2010 University of Washington Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Business Plan contest , got funded by Dave McClure’s  500 Startups , and moved shop from Seattle to a high-end incubator in Silicon Valley. Brown and his team were flying high, building out the first version of their application as a traditional browser-based Web service to include every bell and whistle to provide the richest possible experience for language learners. Features included messaging, application sharing, scheduling, online video and everything their developers could think of. “Sign-ups for the service exceeded our expectations,” said Brown. “The problem is, usage was practically non-existent.” Users, it turned out, loved the idea of the service, but found it too hard and frustrating to use. The YongoPal team listened carefully, shut down the 1.0 release, and got to work on a refresh that tried to address the usability issues by fixing specific points of failure in each element of the feature set. “We launched the next version to great fanfare in December, and very little changed. We got huge early interest and very little activity on the network.” Things changed when the management team attended a user experience (Lean UX) workshop in February, 2011 offered as part of the curriculum at their incubator. “That’s when it all clicked,” said Brown. “We realized we had dramatically over-designed our product. The technology was getting in the way of what we were trying to achieve.” The team began streamlining the design, feature by feature. Finally, they got down to the video chat component, the centerpiece of the product’s original conception. “It turned out that the video conferencing was the real problem,” said Brown. The need for fast, continuous connections, schedule coordination, and privacy worked against the flexibility and portability that made the concept so attractive. “Our users discovered that the only time they could really do the video chats was first thing in the morning, before class, or late at night. It was very limiting and didn’t work at all for the students in our target audience.” Reluctantly, Brown let go of the core technology feature of his product – and his friend and roommate who had been the principle developer. “It was really tough, but there was nothing more for him to do. There was no code to write anymore.” YongoPal began testing various new approaches, but with less than two weeks ahead of the incubator’s big Demo Day for press and investors, YongoPal still didn’t have a firm strategy. As the clock ticked down, the company decided to move ahead with a new concept using shared photographs and instant messaging. They continued their user tests and refined their pitch for the streamlined service right down to the last minute. Less turned out to be more. The new concept wowed the judges and the press. Venture Beat named them one of the “ The Coolest Companies from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups .” The YongoPal team then started coding in earnest with a much surer sense of their product and mission. “Basically, it was the opposite of what we’d done before — which was to write a mountain of code before knowing how users were going to accept it,” said Brown. “By the time we started coding this product, we were confident that we had the basic formula down and had a firm general idea of how people were going to adopt it into their daily lives.” While the basic value proposition of the original idea – creating conversations between Koreans and English-speakers through social media – remained the same, the new approach was much lighter weight and a better fit for the audience’s lifestyle. “You can do it with any smartphone,” says Brown. “Just point the camera at something, share the photo and start a conversation. It’s a great way to use the routine details of day-to-day life to have natural conversations about real stuff.” Results from early testing were a complete turnaround from the disappointing first launch. “People love it, and best of all, people are using the hell out of it,” says Brown. YongoPal plans its official release in later this spring, assuming all goes well with Apple App Store certification. Unlike so many tech-driven startups, when faced with a choice between its technology innovation and its business priorities, YongoPal chose the latter. The company now has a new outlook and a new lease on life because of its willingness to rethink its strategy down to the fundamental level. If YongoPal achieves success, it will owe it to characteristics rarely associated with willful young entrepreneurs: the ability to listen, adjust, and bend when necessary to achieve the larger goal. Rob Salkowitz is author of Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up , and Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap . Follow him @robsalk .

Tagged as: apple, book, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, innovation, time, video, young-entrepreneur, youth

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