I was watching The Real Housewives of Orange County yesterday and I was shocked to hear that 4 out of the 6 housewives are broke. I couldn’t find their salaries, but if The Real Housewives of NYC are getting paid $30,000 an episode, the Orange County ones must be making more.

Even if you account for the recession, there is no reason why they should be having financial troubles. The only conclusion I could come to is that they are spending all of their income, similar to how 78% of athletes go broke.

Now I don’t want to be judgmental because it is their life and they can live it how they want to. But the first thing that came to mind when I saw this was that if they were a “Patel”, they would have never ran into these situations.

There are a lot of reasons why many Patels do well, but the main reason is that we are cheap.

The main reason I think I am somewhat successful is because of what my parents taught me at a young age. They didn’t groom me into being a businessman, but instead they just taught me what their parents taught them.

Here are some things I learned as a kid that helped me down the road:

Get more for your money

Every time I used to go to Subway to get my Mom a sandwich I would ask her what she wanted on it. The reason I asked her this is because I knew that she didn’t like everything that they put on a sandwich, such as mustard. But she always told me to get every condiment that they had, as long as it didn’t cost extra. It didn’t matter if she liked the items on the sandwich, she made sure she got her moneys worth.

Now you could say my mom’s logic is a bit flawed and I would agree with you. None-the-less this experience taught me that you should always try and get more for your money.

You don’t always need to upgrade

There was one time when I convinced my parents to let me go rent a movie. But when I got to the movie store I saw some Bubblicious Bubble Gum and bought some.

When I got home my parents noticed that I not only had the movie, but I had bought some gum. Oh did they bitch me out for wasting money. I tried to explain that it didn’t even cost me a dollar for the gum, but they didn’t care. They explained that we had gum at home and even if it wasn’t the same kind, I should have chewed that first instead of buying more gum.

The point that my parents were trying to make is that gum is gum and most of them have the same after effects. They usually taste good, they are sweet, you can blow bubbles with it, and it usually makes your breath smells good.

So the next time you are thinking about getting something new, such as a faster computer, think about if you really need it. If your old one works, does roughly the same thing, and is fast enough, then why would you spend money on a new computer?

Sometimes you have to lose money to teach someone a lesson

What’s a dollar here or there, right? Well when my parents sent me to the grocery store, one time I accidentally bought the wrong milk. I bought a gallon of Alta Dena brand milk and I ended up spending a dollar or so more. My parents got so mad that they drove back to the store, returned it, and then bought the cheaper milk.

If you included the 30 minutes it took them to exchange the milk and the money they wasted to drive the car to the store, they probably didn’t even save money. I would even say that they lost money. But if they never did that, I may have not learned that it is easier to save money than it is to make it.

Your employees are going to make mistakes. You could yell at them and hope that they don’t make the same mistakes over again, but it maybe wiser to teach them a lesson. Even if it costs you more money to teach them that lesson, the chances are, they won’t make that mistake again.

Don’t forget about the holding cost

Just the other day I bought $163 worth of groceries on Amazon Fresh. I know, as a single guy how could I spend $163 on groceries, right? Well on Amazon if you buy things like soup, cereal, and chicken nuggets in bulk, you can get 50% off sometimes.

So I ordered 12 boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds, 8 boxes of chicken nuggets, 12 boxes of burger patties, a 12 pack of yogurt, 6 packs of soup, and everything else that I normally need for the week.

I was so happy that I got a box of cereal for $2.50 that I called my mom to tell her. Instead of her being happy she yelled at me because she said that it wasn’t a good deal. She is able to buy the same box of cereal for around the same price if not less.

But what she got mad at me for was not how much I paid for the box of cereal; it was that I ordered 12 instead of 1. She explained that by ordering too much food, I was tying up my money in things that I wouldn’t be using anytime soon (holding cost). And that I could of used that money to potentially make more by investing it in other business ventures or the stock market.

Buyer’s remorse can be costly

During my first year of high school I was used to my parents being so cheap that I started to become cheap. For example, during my birthday my parents asked me what I wanted and I ended up buying a $100 pair of sneakers.

Luckily enough my parents could afford them and without saying anything, they gracefully bought me them. After buying them, I ended up having buyer’s remorse and within a few days I had my parents return them and instead I bought a $60 pair of shoes.

When I returned the shoes, instead of my parents patting me on the back, they explained me to that buyer’s remorse can be costly. Although I was able to return the pair of shoes to Foot Locker, not all stores/companies would have allowed that.

So before you buy something for yourself or your business, make sure you need it. There have been too many times in which companies make bad business decisions, waste millions of dollars, and sadly they aren’t able to turn back the clock.

You can’t be too greedy

During the .com boom, I had the luxury to see my parents make a killing in the stock market. At the peak, my parents were pulling in around $10,000 a day in profit.

These good times ended up lasting for a while and my parents were slowly pulling money out of the market.

The sad part is that they didn’t pull much money out of the market before the market crashed. And the really sad part is that my parents lost all of their winnings and even put more money into the market.

The lesson I learned here is that what goes up must come down. There will be times in your life that your business is going to be booming and you will be living the good life.

But keep in mind that what goes up, must come down. In other words, when things are going well, don’t wait for the peak before you get out. There is nothing wrong with selling your business early or making some money compared to no money.

Arrogance diminishes wisdom

When I was in high school I got lucky. So lucky that business was booming and I was making six figures. And although that may not seem like a lot of money to you, it was a ton of money for me as a kid.

At one point, I thought I was so smart and cool I started becoming arrogant. At this point my mom told me that I acted like I was “high in the sky”. And I was so high that I stopped listening to what others where telling me.

In other words, I became so arrogant that I stopped listening to other people. And when you stop listening to other people, you tend to stop learning. So no matter how well you are doing, never become arrogant because if you stop learning you may stop earning the big bucks.

Conclusion

As a Patel I have learned a lot. Many of the things that I learned helped me in my business career and hopefully they will help you.

Now by no means am I trying to say Patel’s are great and that there are no other people with different surnames that are successful.

So what I ask from you is for you to share some of the things you learned as a kid that helped you out as you got older. Every surname has its own stories and it would be great if you would share yours.

In 2006 my business partner and I were running an Internet marketing agency called ACS. We were looking for new channels that would not only drive us more clients, but would also create additional revenue streams.

After brainstorming for a while we decided that I should start blogging. Our logic behind starting a blog about Internet marketing was that it would help brand myself as an Internet marketing expert, which would help us bring in more clients.

In addition to that we thought that if we could build a large enough blog about Internet marketing, we could then make additional money by selling ads.

The problems I faced as a newbie blogger

My first blog was called Pronet Advertising, which revolved around Internet marketing. Within the first week of starting the blog, I ran into a few problems:

1. I couldn’t write well – I had issues from grammar to spelling (which I still probably have).


2. Content – it was easy for me to come up with topics to write on, but it was hard for me to come up with good topics to write on.


3. Lack of time – I was running a company and going to college full time, so naturally I wasn’t able to blog frequently or write in depth posts.

After realizing the major roadblocks I was facing, my business partner and I started tackling our problems one by one.

• Lucky for me, my sister is good at correcting grammar and spelling errors, so she decided to correct my blog posts.


• During this time there was a popular blogging community called 9rules that was filled with a ton of great bloggers. So I started reading some of the blogs in the network, which helped me come up with good content ideas.


• Because I didn’t have much time my business partner helped me write a lot of my blog posts during the first few months of my blogging career. Without his help, I would have never came up with catchy headlines and stories like “Got Crunched”.

The traffic-building era

Although I was able to solve a lot of the problems that I faced as a newbie blogger, I ran into a major roadblock.
ACS wasn’t getting more leads through Pronet Advertising.

After digging around and talking with a few other Internet marketing bloggers, I learned that it could take months if not a year before the blog starts producing measurable results.

But, because I was impatient, I naturally started to look for solutions that would reduce the time before I saw measurable results. And the obvious one that stood out at me was to drive more traffic to my blog.

During this time social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious had millions of eyeballs. So what I started to do is tailor my content so that not only would it provide value to potential customers, but it would also do well on these social sites.

Within a few weeks my content started to reach the homepage of sites like Digg and I was able to drive thousands of visitors to Pronet Advertising. And after I did this a few dozen times the blog started to get noticed and client leads started to increase.

My first big lesson

Pronet Advertising was taking off like a wild fire and the blog started to reach new heights. Within a short period of time thousands of people were reading the blog on a daily basis and Technorati dubbed it as one of the top 100 blogs on the web.

But instead of this helping ACS, it actually started to hurt the agency.

Having a company blog on a separate domain can create brand confusion. What we should have done is added a blog to the ACS site, instead of starting one on a separate domain. This way people wouldn’t see Pronet Advertising and ACS as two separate companies.

And once the blog started to take off I started being classified as an Internet marketing expert. This made it so that people got to know me and my personal brand, but they didn’t get to know my company. And at the end of the day if you create a company that is revolved around an individual’s brand, it will never be worth as much.

Sadly these problems weren’t easily solvable for my business partner and me, which is why we were never able to fully tackle them. We tried things like branding the blog to look like the company website and even mentioned our company throughout the blog. But people were still confused.

My second big lesson

The next big lesson I learned was that more leads doesn’t always mean a good thing for a company. Yes we did want more clients, but we didn’t want to take on companies that could only afford to pay us $100 a month. We were looking for clients that could pay $20,000 a month.

The main reason we were getting bad leads at the time was that my content had shifted to be more tailored for social media users (Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon) instead of potential clients.

To solve this I started to write blog posts that had the full intention of calling out companies so that they would become a client.

For example, a company by the name of Riya (now known as Like.com) was generating a significant amount of buzz throughout the blogosphere. They had raised millions of dollars and people seemed to love them.

What I did was write a blog post about their company. But instead of praising them and talking about how great the company was, I took the approach of pointing out the mistakes they were making.

Now my goal wasn’t to be harmful to Riya or anyone else, but instead my goal was to show Riya and other companies what they shouldn’t be doing.

Within the first few hours of the blog post being published on Pronet Advertising I received a phone call. Munjal Shah, the owner of Riya, wanted to discuss what I had written. Although he wasn’t a fan of how I called out his company, he wanted to hire ACS to fix the things I pointed out.

What I learned from the Riya experience is that you have to really think about what you are writing for. If your goal is to get clients then it is better have one qualified person visit your blog every day then a million random people.

After realizing this I continued to copy what I did with Riya and I blogged about other companies such as Yahoo Answers. Although I got Yahoo’s attention, I wasn’t able to lock them in as a client like I was with Riya.

At the end of the day, it is a numbers game. You won’t be successful all of the time, but as long as you are writing blog posts that are geared around your potential customers, you can be successful.

Leveraging other blogs

Once I realized that calling companies out on a blog was an effective way to gain more clients, I decided to take things one-step further so that I could increase my visibility.

My blog was about Internet marketing so naturally I knew how to get more traffic to blogs. What I decided to do was to reach out to influential bloggers and help them out with their Internet marketing efforts for free.

By doing this I was able to get blogs like TechCrunch to link to my blog on every page of their site to my consulting company (they now link to Quick Sprout). Not only did this help drive more client leads, but it also helped build up ACS’s reputation because we were now working with well-known brands.

In addition to that we always jumped on every PR opportunity that would benefit the company. For example, Jason Calacanis wrote a blog post on how SEO was bullshit, so I challenged him that I could increase his traffic.

And after I increased his traffic, my company started to generate buzz throughout the blogosphere and quite a few web 2.0 companies signed on as clients.

My big realization

Although things were going well with Pronet Advertising, I realized that I wasn’t happy about blogging on Internet marketing. And because I wasn’t happy writing about Internet marketing the content quality started to drastically decrease.

For a while I took a blogging hiatus and did a bit of soul searching. I realized that I enjoyed helping entrepreneurs, so I decided to start a new blog called Quick Sprout.

Quick Sprout never really had the volume of content Pronet Advertising had, but the content quality was much higher. The reason being was that I enjoyed helping entrepreneurs.

Building a community

If you fast-forward a few years later, Quick Sprout is roughly the same size as Pronet Advertising was during its peak, even though I never really leveraged social media sites.

Plus, if you compare the community stats (number of comments), Quick Sprout is 12 times more popular than Pronet Advertising. And for me, this is the most important stat to track because it shows that you care about what I am writing.

What I have learned about blogging through Quick Sprout is that you should write high quality content and the most important thing you need to do if you own a blog is interact with your readers.

Every time someone emails you, you need to respond back. And every time someone comments, you need to reply back.

By caring about your readers you won’t necessarily build the most popular blog on the web, but you will build a loyal following.

And with a loyal following brings many more potential doors for you to open. For example, if I want to monetize Quick Sprout through a means other than ads, I could launch a Quick Sprout entrepreneur-training course.

On the other hand, I could have never done that on Pronet Advertising because I didn’t have a loyal following.

Conclusion

If you are going to blog, do it because you have something you want to share. Don’t just blog for the money, but do it because you have a passion for it.

If you are a passionate blogger you are more likely to create a successful blog, which will lead to many monetization avenues. If you worry about monetizing your blog from day 1, you probably won’t make much money.

As I have mentioned to you in the past, I have made a lot of mistakes. Luckily most of these mistakes where small and didn’t cause much harm to my business or me. But the one occasion I have made a big mistake not only did it cause one of my businesses to go under, but it also caused me to almost go bankrupt.

So here is the story of my million-dollar mistake.

The early days

Towards the end of my high school career, I started my first real Internet business. The business was called Advantage Consulting Services (ACS), which consulted small to medium sized businesses on their Internet marketing strategies.

At first, like most businesses ACS struggled. But from blogging, speaking at industry events, and cold calling, my business partner and I were able to grow ACS into a cash cow.

During our peak, we were pulling in millions of dollars with high profit margins. Once ACS started to do well my business partner and I decide to expand, but we didn’t expand in a good way.

Most entrepreneurs would expand their core business and try to accelerate their growth. But my business partner and I aren’t like most entrepreneurs; we decided we would be different and expand into new ventures that weren’t related to our core business.

The somewhat greedy life

One of our first investments that we made was into a company called Fruitcast. An individual by the name of James Archer from Forty Media came to us and pitched us on a cool idea that he had. His vision was a market place similar to Overture and Google AdWords in which companies could bid to have their advertisement in certain podcasts.

For example, a company such as GM could go onto Fruitcast, browse our podcast inventory (which we got from publishers) and bid to have their advertisement placed into the podcasts of their choice.

There were a few problems with this though:

1. Ineffective advertising – Fruitcast placed advertisements at the beginning and end of the podcast. These ads were not effective because they weren’t incorporated into the podcast, such as in the middle. We had no way of incorporating the advertisements within the podcasts unless the host themselves talked about the advertiser within the show. And although we could convince some podcast shows to do this, we didn’t have advertisers lined up ahead of time.


2. No ROI – We charged way too much to the advertiser. Every time a podcast was played with their advertisement they would be charged 5 cents. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up really quickly.


3. We rushed in – The biggest mistake we made with Fruitcast was we didn’t ask James enough questions before writing him the check. When we gave James the money for the company, we didn’t know that he wasn’t going to work on Fruitcast full time. By no means was this James’ fault, it was ours for not asking him if he was going to work on it full time.

The somewhat smart idea

After failing with our Fruitcast investment, my business partner and I decided it would be wiser if we spent some of our money getting into the realm of software as a service.

We didn’t know much about software companies at the time, but we did know a good amount about Internet marketing. So we decided to create two analytical companies called Siteblimp and Crazy Egg.

Siteblimp was supposed to be a free analytical solution like Google Analytics. At the time our main competition was Statcounter. But a few months before we were planning on launching Siteblimp, Google bought Urchin Analytics, made it free, and then released it as Google Analytics.

Because of that we decided to scrap the Siteblimp project and not invest any more money into it.

Crazy Egg on the other hand was supposed to be an analytics solutions that just provided a website overlay that was more detailed than any other analytics solution. And overtime the idea expanded to include a heat map feature.

Like most business, Crazy Egg struggled at first, but luckily after a few years it started to gain traction. It took a while to get there, but to this date Crazy Egg is still running and the company is doing well.

The dumb idea

With all of the money we were dumping around, sooner or later my business partner and I were getting strapped for cash. Although ACS was doing well, it took a ton of money to keep businesses like Crazy Egg alive and sadly we wasted a lot of money in ventures like Siteblimp and Fruitcast.

At this point in our lives we started to look for outside investors who would be willing to give us some cash in exchange for a percentage in our business.

We spent around 6 months pitching investors and got nowhere. So we did the next best thing and we took money from our family members and the bank.

Once we had a good amount of cash in the bank we decided to give old Siteblimp one more shot. But this time we decided that we weren’t going to compete with Google Analytics, so we shifted gears and concentrated on building a pay per click management software.

But unlike Crazy Egg we didn’t hire in house employees to create the software, we decided we would use contractors because it would be cheaper.

We hired a firm out of the Portugal called We Break Stuff. And like our Fruitcast experience, we ran into some problems:

• Communication – it was hard to communicate with a development agency that wasn’t based out of the U.S. There was an 8-hour time difference so we couldn’t communicate enough, which lead things to move slow.


• Spread too thin – my business partner and I were busy with all of the other things we were doing so no one was properly able to manage our We Break Stuff relationship.


• Laziness – because things moved so slowly we lost sight of the project, which also didn’t encourage the We Break Stuff Team.


• Ignorance – similar to Fruitcast, with this new Siteblimp product we didn’t know the space.

And similar to our other mistakes, the failure of Siteblimp wasn’t of the result of We Break Stuff. The failure was our fault.

The million-dollar mistake

Now the ventures I mentioned above (other than Crazy Egg) did lose me money, but they didn’t lose me a million dollars. Instead, what they did do is help lead up to my million-dollar mistake.

Drum roll please…

After the ventures I mentioned above failed you would think that I would learn my lesson and stop expanding into new industries, right? Think again because my business partner and I decided to use the majority of our money to expand into the web hosting arena.

Do you remember how Media Temple released their Grid System in 2006? Well, we were trying to release the same thing a year or two before they were. We were going to call the company Vision Web Hosting.

Here is where we messed up:

• Location – we found 3 talented employees in Rockwall, Texas. Because they were based in Rockwall we decided to set up base there which was a bit far from Orange County, California. This made things a bit hard to manage.


• Clashing partners – out of these 3 individuals two of them were married to each. When you have this sort of dynamics, fights between business partners can get really messy. And to top it off when all of the individuals live together in the same house, it really gets messy.


• Poor money management – none of these individuals were financially well off. Not only did my business partner and I have to support the business but we also had to pay for their living expenses. This can really add up when there are 4 or 5 kids to feed.


• Feature creep – the management team in Rockwall continually came up with ways to improve our product offering. This caused tons of additional expenses and it delayed the launch of the company.


• Poor communication – we were running Vision Web Hosting out of their 3000 square foot house in Rockwall and eventually we found out that they didn’t own the house. The owner of the home wasn’t happy with the situation so we had to purchase it from him for around $200,000.


• We didn’t know when to say no – when you give people a bit, they start asking for a lot more. Sooner or later we were paying for things like medical treatments, groceries, gas, car payments…

Over a course of 2 years, this all added up to around a million dollars. The worse part about the experience is that it ended on bad terms.

Towards the end my business partner and I had to break it to the 3 partners in Rockwall that we couldn’t keep the business afloat. We were losing thousands of dollars every month and it was adding up very quickly.

So in the end we decided that we would financially support them for a few months until they found a job. And during that time my partner and I were selling all of the hardware we bought to recuperate some of our loses, but by mistake one of the companies that bought back some of our hardware sent a big check to Rockwall instead of Orange County.

This eventually led the partners in Rockwall to fraudulently cash the check, maliciously damage the house, and leave Rockwall without telling us.

Conclusion

Although I hope you won’t make big mistakes like I have made, the chances are you will. But what separates the true entrepreneurs from the phony ones is that true entrepreneurs don’t give up.

If I gave up, I would have been around a million dollars in debt and I may have never paid my family members and the bank back. But because I kept on moving forward things turned out well and eventually I was able to pay everyone back.

Don’t give up! Learn from your mistakes and keep on pushing forward!

Finding the right business partner isn’t easy. I have been an entrepreneur for about 8 years and I have been through my fair share of business partners. And although I have been blessed with having some great partners, I have also had a few that didn’t work out.

The business partners that didn’t work out weren’t necessarily bad guys and they didn’t do anything wrong, but for one reason or another things just didn’t work out.

Now before I go into finding the right business partner, I want to break down some reasons on why you should have a business partner:

• Manpower – hiring employees is a great way to get more things done, but when your business isn’t making much money it can be hard to afford talented people. If you have a business partner you can get a lot more work done without worrying about paying a high priced employee.


• Divide and conquer – it’s hard to do everything. One of the best things about having a business partner is that you guys can split up tasks and not worry about every aspect of your business. Plus you will be able to specialize on certain tasks, which will make you more efficient.


• Motivate – as an entrepreneur you’ll experience a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes things will be going great and other times they won’t. By having a partner you can motivate each other to stay on top of things.


• Ideas aren’t a dime a dozen – when you think of something cool and want to bounce it off of someone, what better person to do so with then your business partner? And if you can’t come up with any ideas, you can always ask your partner to help you brainstorm.


• Network, network, and network – you can never have a big enough network. If you have a business partner not only can you tap into your network, but also you can reach into his or hers.

Now that you know why you need a partner here are some things to you should know about finding the right one.

A business partnership is like a marriage

Before you pick one, you need to really understand that it is like a marriage. Once you enter into a partnership you’ll realize that things won’t be perfect and you will get into fights.

Don’t worry this is natural. Fights are typically good because they will help you progress and move forward. Just make sure your fights aren’t physical and filled with emotions. Both of you have to be logical.

And don’t expect to break off a partnership when things aren’t going well. You have to work through things because a divorce can be detrimental to your business.

Don’t put too many cooks in kitchen

Time has proven that the ideal number of partners to have in a business is 2 (one of them being you). You could have 3, but 4 is typically pushing the boundaries. If you have too many cooks in the kitchen you’ll notice that you will waste too much time making decisions and bickering over small things.

From my personal experiences I have always found that the ideally number of business partners to have is 2 (one of them being you). When there are more partners things can still work out, but you don’t really need all of them. You can typically hire employees to fill the voids in your company.

Never stop looking

You won’t know where you are going to find the right business partner, so don’t stop looking. For example, I have been to hundreds of trade shows and networking events, but I ended up finding my business partner through my sister.

In general a few good places to find partners are:

• Local networking events (you don’t want someone that lives far away from you)


• Industry events


• Friends and family


• College (if you are still in school)

Don’t jump the gun

Once you feel that you have met the right person, don’t get ahead of yourself by trying to get into bed with them. Before you make them your partner you need to get to know them.

In addition to that you need to get to know their family if they have one. Not only can their spouse affect your partnership, but their parents and siblings could too.

Typically if you don’t know someone for at least 6 months you shouldn’t jump into a partnership. There is nothing wrong with waiting because you can’t really get to know a person in just a few months.

Set expectations from day 1

Before you seal the deal you have to set the right expectations. All of my business partners that worked out did so because we both set the right expectations from day 1.

You have to know what each of you are going to do before your partnership even starts. This way if one of you doesn’t do what you are supposed to do, you can get each other back into line.

One thing to note is that your partner’s duties will change over time so on a monthly if not weekly basis you should check with him or her to make sure that you know what each person is doing.

You aren’t doing this to babysit each other, but you are doing this so that you don’t step on each others feet. Knowing what each person is doing will also allow you to provide each other with help if you guys need it.

Seal the deal

Now it’s time to seal the deal. You could do so with a handshake, but the best way to do this is through a lawyer. Make sure that both of your names are on the LLC or incorporation. This way each partner clearly has an understanding of what percentage of the company they own.

If you don’t create an incorporation or LLC you could run into problems later on. And these problems typically won’t arise early on, but they will arise when the company starts doing well.

Conclusion

Not only does it take time to find the right business partner, but also you’ll pick a few bad ones along the way. Don’t get discouraged by this because it happens to the best of us.

Just keep your head up and keep on moving forward. If you never try to find a good business partner your business will never flourish.

As one of my friends explained to me, his current business will never be worth 38 million dollars like his past company. It isn’t because his current business idea isn’t a good and it clearly isn’t related to money, but it is because he doesn’t have a business partner.

Update: As Scott mentioned below, you want to make sure that your business partner’s shares vest over time. This way, if your partner decides to quit working with you after a few months, he or she won’t be able to walk away with half of your company.

Adding RSS subscription link within your blog’s sidebar isn’t enough these days. Yes, those links will get clicked on and you will get some subscribers, but you won’t convert a lot of those visitors into readers.

If you want to convert a high percentage of your visitors into RSS subscribers, here is what you can do:

Offer multiple options

Not everyone uses RSS feed readers. Even web savvy users like me don’t use feed readers. But what everyone uses is email, so a good way to get more subscribers is to offer an email subscription option.

Location, location, location

The location of the link to your RSS feed will play an important factor in how many subscribers you have. Here are a few locations to consider:

1. Above the fold – you don’t want to have your readers scroll down to find your RSS feed.


2. Sidebar – you can use your sidebar to offer multiple subscription options, such as email.


3. Content – right after your blog post and right before your comments you can write a little blurb that convinces people to subscribe to your RSS feed. For example, you could use “Want to be notified when there is new content to read on Quick Sprout? Just enter in your email address and we’ll shoot you an email when there is new content for you to read. Don’t worry, I promise not to spam you or share your information with anyone else.”

Get creative

If you are willing to pay for services like Aweber, you can drastically increase your subscriber numbers. For example John Chow has gained a large portion of his subscribers through popups and footer ads (which Aweber and Ultimate Footer Ads provide).

If you look at the two images above you’ll notice that John Chow offers something for free to his readers. By offering a free guide or ebook, readers will be more willing to subscribe to your blog.

Play devils advocate

Many of your visitors will be nervous about subscribing to your blog. There are thousands, if not millions of blogs with good content… so why should someone subscribe to your blog?

By creating a list on why people ought to subscribe to your blog, you will be able to convince your visitors into subscribing. Here are some things you should cover in your list:

• List out your subscriber count – If you tell people how many subscribers you have, you’ll be more likely to get more subscribers.


• Use social proof – if you have ever been covered in a newspaper or magazine, make sure you let your readers know. If an authoritative source like the New York Times has something good to say about you, then your visitors will also think you have something good to say.


• Embrace laziness – people are lazy so if you explain how subscribing to your RSS feed will make their life easier, they will be more likely to do so.


• Make a promise and keep it – tell your visitors that you’ll help them do something if they subscribe to your feed. For example, I have promised you and other Quick Sprout readers that I’ll discuss the business mistakes I made so that hopefully you won’t make them.


• Offer something others aren’t willing to – one thing I offer that others aren’t willing to offer is that I respond to every commenter and every reader that emails me. That shows that I am loyal to you and other Quick Sprout reader.

Now if you take everything I mentioned above, you’ll end up having a list similar to this:

If you are reading this, you’re probably leaning towards not subscribing to Quick Sprout. Well, hopefully these 5 reasons will push you towards the other direction.

1. The Press is always right

Well, the Press isn’t always right, but I hope they are when it comes to me. I have been featured in newspapers and magazines like the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Inc, Business Week, Wired and USA Today. If they think the content I am writing is worth reading, well hopefully you will too.

2. Go with the flow

Over 10,000 readers are subscribing to the Quick Sprout RSS feed. I must be doing something right if they are continually willing to read my content, right?

3. I am dumber than I look

Dumb? That’s right, I am not the smartest person out there. I have made a ton of mistakes that have lost me a lot of money. By subscribing to Quick Sprout you’ll be able to read about my mistakes, learn from them, and hopefully you’ll save yourself from losing a million dollars like I did.

4. There’s nothing wrong with being lazy

I know I don’t blog everyday, so it can be a bit tricky to predict when my next blog post is coming out. If you want to come to the blog everyday to see if there is anything new, by all means do so. But if you want to be lazy, subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll be notified when I post new content on Quick Sprout.

5. I am always willing to help you out

If you have any questions about business or need help with anything for that matter, I’ll do everything in my powers to help you out. Don’t worry, I am not looking for any sort of financial compensation, I just ask that you follow Quick Sprout and tell all your friends about it.

So now that I have convinced you to subscribe to Quick Sprout, you have a few options.

• If you use an RSS feed reader, you can get the Quick Sprout RSS feed from here.


• If you use email, click here to get the latest Quick Sprout content delivered to your inbox.

Don’t worry, no matter what method you choose, I promise I won’t spam you. And if for some reason you aren’t happy with the content I am writing, you can always unsubscribe.

PS: If you aren’t familiar with RSS and would like to learn what it is, click here.

Conclusion

If you look at Quick Sprout, you’ll notice that I don’t do everything that I mentioned above. It’s because some of those things didn’t work well with this blog. Or it could be that I haven’t gotten to them yet. This means that you need to test things out and find out what works for your blog. Remember, different blogs have different audiences.

And on a final note, feel free to use anything you see on my blog on yours. If you want to copy my “5 Reasons on why you ought to subscribe to Quick Sprout” word for word, by all means do so.

Do you have a business idea that you want to pursue? If so, you are probably wondering if it is going to work and if it is going to make you a ton of money, right?

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the chances are, neither I nor anyone else is going to know whether your business idea is going to work or not. So instead of asking people what they think about your idea, here is what you need to do:

Start the business

If you are really passionate about your idea, you need to go with your gut and start it. Now, this doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily succeed, but you’ll never know if you don’t try it out.

If you just keep on asking people if they like your idea, you are going to get mixed results. Most people won’t know the industry you are trying to get into, so they won’t know if your idea is good or not. And even if they are in that industry, they could be wrong.

By no means am I saying that you shouldn’t ask people for advice, but take it as a grain of salt. Sometimes you just have to do what you want to do.

Save your money

When you are starting your business money will be tight, so you shouldn’t get fancy when it comes to laying the basic groundwork. For example, there is no need to hire a high priced attorney to incorporate your business when you could just go to Legal Zoom and spend $149.

Once you start making money you can go back and pay a good law firm to work on your incorporation. The point I am trying to make is that there is no need to spend thousands of dollars on things that won’t help your business make money… especially when you first get started.

You should reserve all of your cash for things like infrastructure, supplies, employees, and potentially marketing if you have enough cash. And most importantly, always keep a good portion of your cash on reserve for the unexpected.

Prove me wrong

I said your idea sucks, right? Well now that you have started your business you need to prove me wrong. And the only way you can prove me or anyone else wrong is by making money.

This doesn’t mean you have to be profitable, but instead you have to have meaningful revenue numbers. For example, if your company brings in $1,000 a month, that could be meaningful revenue number as long as your monthly expenses aren’t exceeding $5,000 month. On the other hand if your company brings in $3,000 a month and your monthly expenses are $30,000, that isn’t a meaningful revenue number.

If you are having trouble getting to revenue, I don’t know what to say other than to try harder. I wish I could tell you the secret sauce that will cause your business to boom, but I don’t know it. The secret sauce is different for every business.

The best advice I can give you is to look at your competitors and see what they are doing. This should give you a good understanding of what you need to do to make money. Just don’t copy everything your competitors are doing because what works for them may not work for you.

Don’t get ahead of yourself

Hopefully your business idea is working out and making money, but if it isn’t, don’t stress out. Pick yourself up and keep trying other ideas until something works.

If you are making money, pat yourself on the back because you’re half the way from not having a shitty business idea.

You now need to get to profitability. The two main ways you can do this is by either cutting your costs down (which could be a bad idea) or by figuring out creative ways to make more money.

I typically favor the second option and spend time on sales, marketing, and business development deals to get my companies to profitability.

Whatever route you decide to take, the best advice I can give you is to stop dreaming. What I mean by this is that you’ll tend to spend a lot of your day imagining what will happen if you get more sales, did more marketing, or even locked in a business development deal. You may even dream about what you’ll do with the money you’ll make.

Dreaming is a waste of time and all it will do is cause you not to reach your goals. If you really want to achieve your goals you have to act on things and work hard. And once you get to a point where your business is flourishing you still can’t dream because everything isn’t in your control. Things like lawsuits and recessions can crush your business and cause you to go broke.

Conclusion

I know this blog post is a bit basic compared to most of my blog posts, but I really want to get you to stop asking people for input on a business idea you may have. Just because someone was successful in the past or went to a good college, it doesn’t mean that they’ll know a good business idea if it stares them in their face.

For example if you asked me what I thought about Facebook, Twitter, or even Hulu when they first came out, I would have told you that they would fail. But I was wrong and I probably will be wrong when it comes to predicting thousands of other business ideas.

Remember, just because someone is in the industry you are trying to enter, it doesn’t mean they’ll know what’s best for you!

As you may already know, I have started a lot of companies and most of them have failed. But what you may not know is that I had a ton of other cool ideas.

So here goes:

1. Mesothelioma Girl 15

Do you remember Lonely Girl 15? She technically wasn’t 15, but she was a big hit on YouTube. Once I saw that, I wanted to film a hot chick that acted like she had mesothelioma (a form of cancer).

I know that’s a sad thing to joke about, which is why I never executed on the idea, but if you can get enough buzz and rank for the term “mesothelioma” on Google, you can potentially make millions.

2. Fast Food and Beer

America is a big fan of fast food. No matter how much crap you may talk about fast food, you still eat it.

The other thing you are a big fan of is beer. So why not combine the two?

The problem with this idea is that it is probably illegal to serve alcohol in the drive through. Cops kind of don’t like open alcohol containers in cars.

3. Rent My Site

Who doesn’t want a website? These days’ people are popping up websites about almost anything.

So why not create thousands of websites in different business niches, optimize them for maximum traffic exposure, and rent them out to people or companies who are in that space?

At one point in time I tried out this concept, but it didn’t go so well because people wanted to own the website. Why would you want to spend all your time building up a business you are renting?

4. Siteblimp

My business partner and I probably spent $60,000 on Siteblimp and it never ended up working out. The site is still up and I think the software may even work, but we never launched the company.

Siteblimp was supposed to be a free pay-per-click management software that helps you manage your advertising campaigns. The way we were going to make money off of it was by up selling users into a monthly subscription service.

The problem with Siteblimp is that the concept isn’t unique. It is just another me too company that didn’t do anything unique.

5. Fruitcast

Unlike Siteblimp my business partner and I did something unique with Fruitcast. We ended up creating the first podcast advertising network, similar to Overture.

This all happened a few years ago when podcasts were the new hot thing. We thought it was so hot that when the Yahoo Advertising department scheduled a meeting with us, we thought we were going to get acquired.

Time went on and we put either $50,000 to $100,000 into the company. We didn’t make any money because we placed advertisements in front of the podcasts, which isn’t too effective. People were ignoring or skipping the advertisements. You actually have to put advertisements within a podcast for an advertisement to be effective, but that’s hard to do unless the podcaster does it themselves.

6. MyStatCounter

Do you use StatCounter? It is such as popular service that I noticed that tons of people were going to my.statcounter.com to log in and use the service.

The concept behind MyStatCounter.com was to squat on all the users that were trying to go to my.statcounter.com. For a while it worked out and we got a surge of signups, but the users weren’t sticky.

7. 5 Dolla Holla

Do you remember William Hung? He was on American Idol and sang the song “She Bangs”. If you haven’t seen the video, you can watch it here.

The concept behind 5 Dolla Holla was to charge people 5 dollars to have William Hung prank call you or one of your friends.

The only issue with this business idea is that I didn’t know William. Plus after his 5 minutes of fame was over, no one would be willing to pay 5 dollars for a William Hung prank call.

8. Cabledescramblers.tk

In high school, I was known as the kid that sold all things pirated. I was so well known for it that I even sold pirated goods to some high school students’ parents.

So to expand my business I thought that it would be smart to sell pirated goods on the Internet. There was only 1 problem… it wasn’t legal.

I thought I could do it as long as I was under 18, but I wasn’t willing to risk jail time. Plus, I couldn’t afford a real domain name. I am not sure how many people would be comfortable in buying goods from a domain name that ended in “tk”.

9. The Homeless Kids Franchise

You have seen homeless people beg for money, but have you seen a homeless kid beg for money? You probably would turn down a homeless person, but would you turn down a homeless kid?

The concept behind The Homeless Kids Franchise is to create a franchise that taught kids how to act homeless and get free hand outs. And as the founder of the franchise, I would take a cut of each of the Homeless Kid Franchises around the US.

Other than this being illegal, I think the kids would end up being taken away by child services and placed in foster homes. Plus it would be really hard to collect the franchise fees.

10. 1-800-Strippers

Similar to 1-800-Flowers, you could call 1-800-Strippers and we would send a stripper to your friend’s door. What better way is there to cheer up a friend than to send him a strip-o-gram?

I never really looked into this business idea, but my guess is that there are a lot of issues that will come up; such as people not being home when the strippers arrive.

Conclusion

I know most of these ideas sound foolish, but I was a kid/new entrepreneur when I came up with most of these business ideas. The point I am trying to make is that you to will come up with a lot of dumb business ideas, which means that you will fail a lot. Just don’t get discouraged because sooner or later you’ll learn to come up with good business ideas.

And if that doesn’t encourage you, just look at Mark Cuban. At one point he had a business idea that revolved around selling powdered milk. In his eyes, it tasted as good as the real thing and you wouldn’t have to worry about expiration dates. But as you know, that isn’t how he made his billions.

PS: If you are looking for more bad business ideas, check out this post by Jeremy Schoemaker and this post by Brian Armstrong.

Since I could remember, my parents have been frugal. And not frugal like you maybe used to, but they’re down right cheap. So cheap that my mom doesn’t like my dad eating at Taco Bell because it’s expensive.

The funny part is, my parents aren’t struggling financially. They have a bit more than $500,000 in cash if you combine their bank accounts, stock market accounts and 401k. They also own a home that is worth around $550,000, although there is still $80,000 left on the mortgage.

My mom has a home daycare that isn’t doing too well because of the recession, but she is still pulling in around 4 to 5 thousand dollars a month in profit. And on a monthly basis, my parents don’t spend more than $2000, including all of their bills and mortgage payment.

So from a cash flow perspective, my parents are still saving money. But for some reason they are still cheap and when my dad lost his job a few years ago (he worked in the mortgage industry), they became even cheaper.

To top it off, my sister and I give my dad money every year. It isn’t like he needs it or asks for it, but we give my dad around $30,000 a year for all of the work he does for our company (my sister’s husband is my business partner).

So what has all of this taught me? It is easier to save money than it is to make it. You can’t always control how much money you make, but what you can control is what you spend your money on.

If you have frugalness ingrained in your head like my parents, not only will it help you in the personal world, but also it will help you in the business world.

The main reason I have been successful in the business world isn’t because I am smart, but it is because I spend the least amount of money as possible.

So if you are not cheap start learning to become cheap. And if you think you are cheap, think again because you can always save more money.

For example, I personally think I am cheap. So cheap that I convinced a lot of my friends to sponsor my new home; this way I wouldn’t have to pay for any of the furniture.

But when my mom found out that I spent $2000 on a bed frame, she started yelling at me. She knew that it was on sale, I got a 10% discount by going through an interior decorator and best of all it was free because my friend bought it for me; but that wasn’t enough. She was upset because I didn’t get more for my friend’s money and that I couldn’t convince the store owner to give me a discount.

Hopefully that will inspire you to become frugal and teach you that you can’t ever be cheap enough.

During the last two days I was at a conference, TechCrunch50, and I noticed that most of the attendees weren’t getting their money’s worth. It doesn’t matter if you got in for free or paid because the 2 days of your time spent at the event, is worth money to someone.

So if you want to get your money’s worth out of attending a conference, here are a few things you have to do:

Have business cards

It’s not cool to not have business cards. Over the past few years it has become a trend to not carry business cards, which is a big mistake. If you don’t make it easy for people to contact you, no one will.

If you plan on attending any event, make sure you bring plenty of business cards with you.

If you don’t have any business cards, create some. But don’t just create any type of card because it needs to stand out when thrown into a stack of hundred of other cards and more importantly it has to say something about you.

Come up with an elevator pitch

Although you have business cards, you aren’t quite ready to attend a conference. Before you can start mingling, you have to come up with an elevator pitch.

This elevator pitch should consist of a few things:

1. Your name


2. What you do


3. Why you are here

In addition to those 3 elements, keep your pitch shorter than 30 seconds and make sure it is relevant to the conference.

For example, TechCrunch 50 is a conference about startups in the web 2.0 arena. So during the event, I had the option of using a few elevator pitches.

Hi, my name is Neil Patel. I am an Internet marketer that has helped companies like TechCrunch double their search engine traffic through SEO. I am here to find startups that need help with their Internet marketing efforts.

Hi, my name is Neil Patel. I co-founded a company called KISSmetrics that is a web analytics solution for startups. I am looking to help startups solve their problems that revolve around metrics.

Hi, my name is Neil Patel. I co-founded a company called KISSmetrics that provides web analytics for small and medium businesses. I am here to meet investors.

I know these three examples sound weird, but they work. All you have to do is say them in a conversation so they don’t sound too cheesy.

Knowledge is power

I know the “cool” people don’t attend too many sessions, but you should. Sessions can provide a lot of knowledge and insight, so take the time to attend at least a few sessions.

What I recommend doing is that you look at the conference agenda ahead of time and circle all of the sessions that you want to sit in on. For these sessions you should try and sit in the front so that:

1. You can clearly see the presenter and their PowerPoint presentation (if there is one).


2. You can hear what the presenter is saying (the audio system may not be working).


3. You’ll have a better shot at getting to ask the speaker a question.

Don’t be a networking whore

No one likes a networking whore, so don’t be one. Plus what’s the value in meeting 1000 people over a two-day period? There is no way you can truly get to know every person at a large event.

Don’t waste your time getting to know a large group of people, concentrate on meeting high quality individuals that will hopefully turn into a relationship.

• Speakers – meet every speaker you listen in on. Don’t spend too much time chatting to them because they are getting hounded by hundreds of other people. Be considerate and give them some space.


• Conference organizers – meeting the conference organizer is a wise thing to do. No one really gives them the time of the day, when they should. Organizers can get you into future conferences for free and they know where the cool private after parties are.


• Competition – your competitors don’t have to be your enemy. If you build a relationship with them you can be their friend and potentially even get business from them.

The only group of people that I didn’t mention above is the regular conference attendee. You should get to know other attendees but this should naturally happen as long as you aren’t sitting on the sidelines.

Don’t eat lunch with your friends

Most conferences provide lunch. The lunch food usually isn’t that great, so when lunchtime rolls around you are going to have the urge to eat out. Don’t do it!

Not only should you be eating lunch at the conference, but you should also sit down at a table filled with people that you don’t know. And when you sit down introduce yourself and get involved in the conversation.

You’ll be amazed by who you’ll meet over a 30-minute meal.

Walk the floor

Most conferences have an exhibition floor filled with sponsors and companies who are showcasing their services or products.

Take at least an hour to walk through the exhibition floor and see if there are any companies that you maybe interested in. Even if you don’t want to buy anything, you can get a lot from exhibitors.

Other than swag you can get free products and services that will help your business grow. It just may take a bit of schmoozing to get these things for free.

Take someone out to dinner

If you want someone to open up to you, you have to talk to them on a one on one setting. It’s going to be hard to do this at a conference because you can easily get interrupted. But typically most conferences give you a few hours for dinner before any after parties.

Find someone that you want to get to know on a personal level and ask them to dinner. If they say no, move onto your next target.

During your dinner meeting don’t just talk about business. Find out how they are doing and chat about whatever is interesting to them.

There is nothing wrong with doing business over dinner, but it shouldn’t be the focus. The focus should be on build a relationship.

Once the dinner is over and the bill comes around, make sure you pay for it.

Attend the after parties

The biggest value of a conference is the after parties. This is where you’ll get all the good information and learn the most. When people are loose (have a bit of alcohol in them) they’ll end up talking and sharing almost anything.

Here are a few unwritten rules when attending after hour parties:

• What happens at the party stays at the party. Don’t go and blab everything you hear.


• Don’t push people for information…even if they are drunk. Get to know people and if they naturally want to share information with you, great.


• Don’t leave early, even if you are tired. The longer you stay, the more value you’ll get out of the party.


• Stay away from the dance floor and any loud speakers. It is difficult to have conversations in these areas.


• There is typically another party after the party is over, so try and go to it.

Don’t forget to follow up

At this point the conference is over, right? Technically it is, but for you it isn’t. You have to follow up with EVERY person you met at the event.

If you don’t, you’ll never end up building any real relationships. Meeting someone is great, but if you don’t get to know him or her you’ll never end up gaining value from the conference.

And for some reason if a portion of the people you email or call don’t follow up with you, you can try following up again in a few weeks, but I recommend letting it go. You don’t want to be that pestering person that people hate.

Starting a blog is easy…right? Technically it is easy to throw up a WordPress or Blogger blog, but it isn’t easy to create a successful blog.

If you want your blog to flourish and be looked upon as the go to resource for your industry, then it is critical that you follow and act on these steps over the next 30 days.

Day 1: Don’t launch until your blog is correctly setup.

No matter how tempting it maybe, you don’t want to launch your blog too early. You have to cover the basics by making sure you have an about and contact page as well as a decent looking design. Your design doesn’t have to be perfect or unique, you could just use a free WordPress theme.

And lastly, make sure you are using Feedburner to track your RSS feed and Google Analaytics to track your visitors.

Day 2: Pick a topic and stick with it

Even though it’s your blog and you can write on whatever you want, you have to pick a topic and stick with it. Although there is nothing stopping you from doing whatever you want, your blog will be much more popular if you stick with 1 topic.

It’s very rare to see a popular blog that covers dozens of different topics. Most of the popular blogs (TechCrunch, I Can Has Cheezburger, Gizmodo, Perez Hilton) write on 1 topic.

Day 3: Be consistent

If you have a lot to say and a ton of time, then blog daily. If you don’t have much time on your hands or much to say, blog once a week. Once you figure out how often you are going to blog, stick with it and be consistent. The biggest way to lose your audience is inconsistency.

If aren’t sure how often you can blog, start off by blogging once a month. If you happen to have more time, you can step it up by blogging more often. Just don’t reduce the number of times you are blogging.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at Quick Sprout. During the beginning of the year I use to blog weekly and my blog was getting roughly 100,000 visitors a month. Now my blog is only getting 60,000 visitors a month because during the second quarter of this year, I was averaging 1 to 2 blog posts a month.

Day 4: No man is an island

Now that your blog is a few days old, you should start seeing some comments. Although it is only a standard practice to read every comment on your blog, you should make an effort to respond to every commentor.

If you don’t, some of your commentors may feel like you are ignoring them. Responding to every commentor will help you build a loyal following, which will help build up your traffic in the long run.

This is the main tactic I have used to help build up Quick Sprout.

Day 5: Stop regurgitating content

Don’t just blog about the news or on something you saw on another blog. If you are going to write on stuff everyone else has written on, make sure you throw in your two cents.

People are reading your blog because they want to hear from you…right? Then give them what they want by providing your opinion.

Ideally you should only be blogging when you have something new and exciting to say.

Day 6: Don’t be afraid to get dirty

Most bloggers are afraid of saying what they really think, especially when it is something negative. Don’t be afraid to get dirty unlike most bloggers. If you really feel a specific way about something, then write about it. I don’t care how negative or positive it maybe.

Controversy is one of the quickest ways to build a large following because it will cause other bloggers to link to you. Just don’t abuse the power by writing controversial posts for no reason. If you do, it could end up backfiring.

For example, I saw that Matt Kirkpatrick was messing up on his blog, so I called him out. Not only did I get Matt to come to my blog and comment, but that post also caused me to see an uptick in my RSS subscribers.

Day 7: Differentiate yourself

Like anything else, you are going to have competitors. So if you want people to read your blog compared to your competitions’ you’ll have to do something unique. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, just something different.

For example, I blog about entrepreneurship like thousands of other bloggers. The way I try and differentiate myself is by writing detailed content that helps entrepreneurs take action. Entrepreneurs can get information from anywhere, but it is hard for them to find resources that tell them what to do.

Day 8: Survey your readers

Now that you have built up a small audience, it is time for you to survey them because the best way to improve your blog is to get feedback from your readers.

I usually use Survey.io to survey my blog readers and it has helped me realize that you want me to blog about things entrepreneurial related compared to things related to branding (Quick Sprout was once a blog on personal branding).

Surveying your readers will allow you to adjust your blog to meet their needs. You won’t be able to satisfy everyone, but you should be able to satisfy 80% of your readers.

Day 9: Leverage the social web

Two of my biggest sources of traffic are Twitter and Hacker News. Not only do these social sites drive visitors, but they also drive a lot of commentors.

Your blog may not be relevant toward the Hacker News audience, but it is relevant to someone on the social web.

Look for social sites that promote content similar to yours. And if you don’t know of any, you can always try going through this list.

In general sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon work well for most bloggers. And out of these 3, Twitter is going to be the easiest to leverage because every time you write a blog post, you have it automatically tweeted out.

Day 10: Network with bloggers

The easiest way you can grow your blog traffic is to get other bloggers to link to you. But if you just hit up 100 random bloggers you’ll be lucky if you can get a few to blog about your blog.

On the other hand if you start chatting with bloggers through instant messaging and email, you’ll start building a relationship with them. And when you need them to plug you on their blog, your chances are going to be much higher.

When I launched Quick Sprout, within the first few days I had over 1000 RSS subscribers because bloggers like Shoemoney and Paul Stamatiou blogged on my launch.

Just don’t abuse the privilege because bloggers can easily get irritated if you keep on bugging them for mentions on their blog.

Day 11: Analyze your Feedburner stats

Feedburner can do a lot more for your business than just tell you how many RSS subscribers you have. If you dig a bit deeper you’ll notice that they tell you how many times RSS subscribers clicked on different blog posts.

By studying this data you will have a better understanding of what content your readers like and don’t like.

In addition to that, you’ll have a better understanding of the type of headlines your readers like.

Day 12: Participate in the conversation

In addition to responding to the comments on your blog, you should comment on your competition’s blog. This is a great way to get some of their visitors to come over to your website.

Are you familiar with Mashable? If you aren’t, it is one of the top 100 blogs on the web when it comes to popularity. One of the things that led to Mashable’s success is that they commented on their competition’s blog when they first launched.

I know this can be time consuming, but you don’t have to do it with all of your competitors, just do it with the popular ones.

Day 13: Optimize your blog for search engines

According to Alexa, Google is the most popular site on the web. So why not optimize your website for it and other search engines? SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. If you have a WordPress or Movable Type blog, this article will walk you through the steps you need to take to be search engine friendly.

If you don’t have a WordPress or Movable Type blog, you can still optimize it, you just may have to put in more time.

Day 14: Write a three part series

Writing a 3 part series blog post isn’t going to be an easy task, but the results that it will produce will be worthwhile. By publishing a 3 part series over a week time span, you are going to encourage readers to come back more often.

For a new blog this is important because even if your readers like your content, they’ll tend to not come back. If you leave them wanting more they’ll naturally have to keep on coming back.

A good example of a blog that has created a multiple series post is Problogger. Problogger has taken this concept to a whole new level, with a 31 days series post about blogging.

Day 15: Come up with a monetization plan

You shouldn’t try and monetize your blog within the first few months of blogging because it can be a big turn off to your readers. But, you still need to know how you are going to make money from your blog.

Come up with a plan of monetization strategies you want to test over the next few months. And don’t just rely on the standard methods, such as slapping up Google AdSense.

Get creative; try out some affiliate ads and things that are more integrated with your blog, such as a subscription program.

If you don’t want to make money from your blog, that’s fine, but in many cases the popularity of your blog will increase as you make more money. Just look at John Chow.

Day 16: Encourage commenting

A good way to increase the number of comments on your blog posts, is to ask a question at the end.

For example, you could end your blog posts with questions like:

• So what do you think?


• If you have any other suggestions, feel free and leave a comment?


• Do you have any questions?

Or if you want, you can do what Gary Vaynerchuk once did:

If this post doesn’t receive 600 comments, I am going to stop blogging. So please comment.

Day 17: Have someone tweet about your blog (not you or your mom)

Tweeting about your blog posts isn’t enough. You need other people to tweet about your blog. Now that you have been leveraging Twitter for a while, here are a few ways you can get others to tweet about you blog:

1. Ask your followers to retweet your message (assuming you just tweeted about your blog).


2. Email friends and colleagues who use Twitter and ask them for a tweet.


3. Join a social media ring. If you join a group filled with social media users, you can ask each other for tweets.

Day 18: Leverage blogrolls

You’ll notice that a lot of bloggers have blogrolls on their blog. It’s their way of showing their readers which blogs they typically read.

If you can get your blog added to a few blogrolls, not only will you get an increase in traffic from the link, but you’ll also get a bit more traffic from search engines.

The best way to get your blog added to a blogroll is send out custom emails to bloggers. Build a relationship with them and nicely ask if they wouldn’t mind adding you to their blogroll.

Most bloggers are going to say no when you email them, but like anything else, it’s a numbers game.

Day 19: Get personal

Now that you have been blogging for roughly 3 weeks, it’s time to build a personal connection with your readers. You can do this through three ways.

The first is to write a detailed about page that includes your life story. I have done this with my about page and based on the comments I have received, it has been effective.

The second tactic that has helped me build a relationship with you was when I started blogging about my life experiences, such as the 7 business mistakes that nearly made me go broke.

And lastly, although this is more of a requirement than a tactic, you should add a picture of yourself in your sidebar. I don’t care if you’re ugly or pretty, people won’t bond with you unless they know to whom they are talking.

Day 20: Track your internal searches

Through services like Lijit, you can track what people are searching for and what blog posts they are clicking on. This will enable you to get a better understanding of what content your readers are looking to read.

Once you have enough data to crunch, then you can consider writing blog posts related to the keywords people are searching for.

Day 21: Survey your readers again

I know that you already surveyed your readers once, but you want to make sure that you are meeting their expectations. Hopefully after you learned what they wanted from you the first time, you were better able to satisfy their needs. But, if you don’t survey your readers, you won’t ever know.

And if you don’t happen to meet their expectations, that’s fine. It took me roughly 3 times before I met your expectations on Quick Sprout (or so I hope).

Day 22: Reduce your bounce rate

Now that you have a decent amount of traffic coming to your blog, you want to work on reducing your bounce rate. A few things you can do to reduce your bounce rate are:

1. Add a widget to your blog that shows your most popular posts. This way if a new reader comes to your blog they can easily find the best blog posts you have written.


2. If you don’t have a tagline, consider adding one. A tagline will help better explain what your blog is about to new readers.


3. In your sidebar consider adding a short paragraph that explains what your blog is about. This should help convince a few of your visitors to stick around a bit longer.

Day 23: Tweak your design

Similar to modifying your blog to reduce your bounce rate, it is now time to modify the design elements on your blog to meet your goals.

For example, if your goals are to increase the number of RSS subscribers you have, increase the number of comments per post, and make your content more readable you would:

• Move up your RSS subscription link above the fold as well as provide an email subscription option (a lot of people don’t use feed readers).


• Implement a threaded comment system that encourages a conversation.


• Consider using larger text and Arial as your font type.

Your goals may vary from the ones above, but whatever they are, make sure your design is helping you meet those goals. If it isn’t, modify your design.

Day 24: Write an in-depth guide

Now it’s time to figure out how in-depth your readers want your content to be.

Om Malik once said that if you have a blog post that is 1000 words, it could be written in 500 words. And if it could be written in 500 words, then it could be written in 250 words.

What Om was trying to say is that you shouldn’t ramble on because no one likes reading fluff. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write detailed blog posts that are long and actually provide a ton of value.

By writing a blog post that is 2000 plus words (assuming there is no fluff), it will give you an understanding if your readers like it more than your blog posts that were short. Based on that, you can adjust how long your future blog posts will be.

Day 25: Guest post on another blog

A great way to get more readers to your blog is to write a post on another blog. Whether it is a competitors blog or not, it doesn’t matter. As long as the blog you are guest posting on is popular and some what related, you’ll see an increase in traffic to your blog.

So create a list of 10 blogs that you would ideally want to guest post on and approach them. The majority of them will say no, but if one of them says yes, it will be worth the effort.

If none of those 10 blogs say yes, consider creating a list of 10 more blogs that aren’t as popular. In addition to that you may want to adjust your approach when you reach out to these bloggers. Not only should you ask them to guest post, but tell them what you want to write on and how it would benefit their readers.

Day 26: Keep on feeding the fire

Through services like Google Blog Search and Technorati, you will be able to find out when someone mentions you on their blog. Keeping track of this on a daily basis will allow you to thank every blogger that mentions you on their blog.

By showing your appreciation you will build up a larger fan base. Plus, those bloggers will more likely blog about you again because you said “thanks” to them.

Day 27: Join a blog network

Networks like 9rules and b5media have access to hundreds of popular blogs. By joining their network not only will you be connected with other popular bloggers, but you’ll start getting more traffic.

Don’t expect a ton of traffic from these networks, but expect a high quality of traffic. Plus, your blog is new, so every bit helps.

Day 28: Write an “ask the readers” blog post

If you aren’t familiar with what an “ask the readers” blog post is, check out this post I wrote. If that doesn’t help explain it, it’s pretty much a blog post that is asking a question to your readers.

Not only does this encourage a conversation, but it allows you to find out how many readers you actually have. And when a good chunk of your readers posts a comment, make sure you take the effort and get to know them on a personal level.

You can do this by replying to their comments, visiting their website if they have one, and by shooting off an email to them.

Day 29: Start cross-linking

A great way to get more pageviews out each of your visitors is to link to your older post. You can do this through a few ways:

1. Add a related posts widget at the bottom of each your blog posts. So if they like what they just read, they can read other similar blog posts.


2. Within your content link to other posts you have written. These links tend to get the most clicks because they are embedded within your content.


3. As I mentioned on day 22, in your sidebar, you can add a most popular post widgets. This will also encourage your readers to click through to other posts.

The other benefit that you’ll receive from cross-linking is that it helps with your search engine rankings. Over time, you’ll end up getting more Google traffic if you cross-link.

If you don’t believe me, just look at Mashable. They are notoriously known for cross-linking and it has worked out well for them.

Day 30: Don’t expect the world

Unlike any of the previous days, day 30 is a bit more relaxed. Instead of doing anything to your blog, I want you to sit back and just thinking about everything you accomplished and the areas you could improve upon.

And most importantly, don’t expect your blog to be popular. It can take months, if not years, before your blog really becomes popular. You just have to be persistent and keep on going at it.

If you stop, you’ll lose the traction you built over the last 30 days.

When you think of some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the web (Evan Williams, Jason Fried, Marc Andreessen, Caterina Fake, Elon Musk, Niklas Zennstrom and Arianna Huffington) what similarities come to your mind?

Yes, they all have built successful companies, but other than that what commonalities do you see?

When you look at it from a high level these successful entrepreneurs don’t share much in common. They aren’t all men, they have different levels of education, they are made up of different nationalities, and they live in different regions of the world.

However, there are a lot of commonalities between them and other successful entrepreneurs when you dig a bit deeper.

You have to be somewhat smart

By no means is a college degree required in the entrepreneurial world. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs like Michael Dell and Bill Gates don’t have college degrees, but yet they have made billions.

I know they are rare examples, but another candidate who has done well is Jeremy Schoemaker. He hasn’t made billions like Bill or Michael, but he has made millions.

Jeremy never graduated college and has always had a passion for computers. He was a security admin for Wells Fargo and like most entrepreneurs Jeremy hated working at his 9 to 5 job. So he decided to start a business; which happened to revolve around ringtones.

Because of his knowledge of the web and cell phones, Jeremy figured out how he could pull in 6 figures a month through a ringtone website. Formal education did not help him get there, instead he was smart enough to figure out what consumers wanted. Once he had enough eyeballs on his website he tested various monetization methods which is how he got to 6 figures a month in revenue.

You don’t need a college degree to be a great entrepreneur; you just have to be smart enough to make money and run a business. Granted a college degree may help, but street smarts can be a more valuable asset.

You have to be scrappy

Kamran Pourzanjani is known for starting a successful company called PriceGrabber. He sold the company for 485 million dollars to Experian in 2005.

Unlike most of his competitors, Kamran walked away with a good chunk of money from his acquisition because he raised under 2 million dollars in financing while some of his competitors raised over 30 million.

Kamran’s scrappiness didn’t start with PriceGrabber, he had that quality since he was young. When Kamran first immigrated to the U.S. he did whatever it took to succeed. Nothing was beneath him, he even tried selling knives door to door.

Are you willing to do whatever it takes to succeed?

You have to take calculated risks

Your business is going to change whether you like it or not. New opportunities will come your way as time goes on but it is up to you to seize them.

If you are like most entrepreneurs you’ll end up following your gut and doing whatever it tells you to do. But if you are like a great entrepreneur, you’ll making calculated decisions.

A few years ago Tony Conrad launched a company called Sphere, which competed directly with Technorati. Within a few months after launch, Tony took a calculated risk and switched Sphere’s business model to be centered around widgets. Although the move was bold and risky, it was smart because that market was under served compared to the blog search engine market.

In a short period of time websites like New York Times, AOL, TechCrunch, CNN, and 20,000 other blogs were using the Sphere widget. The mass adoption caused Sphere to receive over 1 billion pageviews a month, which led AOL to acquire the company.

You can’t be afraid to roll the dice

I know I previously said that you have to be willing to take calculated risks, but at the same time you have to be willing to roll the dice.

Case in point, James Hong was the founder of a company called Hot or Not. At one point in time the company used to charge for premium accounts, which accounted for $500,000 in month revenue.

After a few years or running Hot or Not, James and his co-founder decided to remove their paid subscription model and solely rely on revenue from advertising and virtual gifts. Within the first month of doing this the company had a growth of 60% in traffic and luckily they got to break even.

Although James reverted back to a premium subscription model due to spam, he was still willing to roll the dice when he needed to. The company still did very well and he ended up selling it for around $20 million in 2008.

You need to be cheap

Andy Liu isn’t a well-known entrepreneur like Evan Williams or Marc Andreessen, but none-the-less he is successful. His first company, NetConversions, sold to aQuantive in 2004 and his current company, BuddyTV, is dominating the television space. According to Comscore it is actually more popular than TV Guide and TV.com.

Similar to many other successful entrepreneurs Andy is well educated; he has an MBA from Wharton. But his degree isn’t what makes him successful, it is his frugal nature. If you read Andy’s blog you’ll get to know that he bargains whenever he can (even at department stores), which is what makes him an exceptional negotiator when it comes to business related affairs.

Whether it is consultants, employees or even potential investors, Andy makes sure he is getting the best deal. And to top it off he has also been able to buy companies for a steal… just take a look at I Can Has Cheezburger. According to this article, it was bought for around 2 million dollars, and with their traffic growing from 10 million pageviews a month to 170 million, the value of the company must be much higher.

Although there isn’t anything wrong with being frugal, you need to know when your company should spend money. For example, if you don’t spend money on things like marketing (when the time is right), your company will never reach it’s full potential.

You can’t ever be satisfied

If you are satisfied, there is nothing that will push you to grow. Two entrepreneurs that are never satisfied are Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals.

Even though their software company has been doubling it’s revenue roughly every year, they never seem to stop improving their products. They are constantly getting feedback from users and making tweaks to improve the experience.

They are also monitoring how users are interacting with their website so they can maximize their conversion rates. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at archive.org; they have been through roughly 116 variations of basecamphq.com in a span of 4 years.

You have to constantly evolve

Have you heard of the saying, “the bigger you are, the slower you move”? Well, it isn’t true in all cases; Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Facebook, is always evolving. Not only are they making tweaks to the website on a regular basis, but they are able to evolve their business model fairly quickly.

Just look at all of the news coverage they received on TechCrunch in 2009. Yes a lot of it is on things like lawsuits, but a good portion of it is about new website features and changes to their business model.

And if that doesn’t bring things in perspective for you, compare Facebook with Twitter. Both of the companies are growing rapidly, but Facebook has been able to evolve faster even though they have 14 times the number of employees.

You have to love what you do

You can make money doing something you don’t love, but you can make much more money if you spend your time on something you love. If you love what you are doing, naturally you will work harder and spend more time doing it. And best of all, it won’t seem like work.

A great example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk. He was able to turn his families $4 million wine business into a $50 million business within 3 years. Through his passion for wine and the social web, he was able to combine them and create an empire.

After Gary conquered all things wine related, he realized he had a passion for all things brand related. So he created Vaynermedia, a company that helps build brand equity. So far it seems that things have been going well for him. He locked in a 7-figure book deal and he has shares in a lot of predominate web companies like Twitter.

If you love what you are doing like Gary, not only are you more likely to make a decent chunk of change, but you will be happy.

Conclusion

Good entrepreneurs come in different colors, sizes, and even personality types. But they all share these quality traits. If you know of any other qualities that make up great entrepreneurs, feel free to leave a comment.

Despite the fact that the year isn’t over yet, I have learned some valuable lessons that have helped me grow my businesses. I would like to share them with you. Some of these may seem like common sense and others may be new to you…

Either way, here is what I have learned so far:

Shoot for the stars and you’ll land on the moon

As Donald Trump once said:

I like thinking big. If you are going to be thinking about anything, you might as well think big.

If you want to build a medium size company, you need to plan on creating a large company. Problems always pop up and they can derail your company off its current trajectory. As long as you are striving to reach a star, hopefully you’ll at least land on the moon.

Now when you try and shoot for the stars, you have to be realistic. You can’t just say you are going to create the next Facebook or your company is going to grow into a billion dollar business. Shooting for unrealistic goals won’t help you land on the moon, it will just cause you to keep on spinning your wheels and get nowhere.

If your goal is to generate $100,000 in revenue over the next 12 months, aim for $250,000. By creating a plan that will allow you to revenue $250,000 hopefully you at least hit $100,000. Just don’t plan on spending money as if you were making $250,000 until you actually hit that number.

Think for yourself

You can’t base your business decisions on what others are telling you. No matter how smart they may be, you have to think for yourself.

Even the smartest people out there make mistakes… a lot of mistakes. If you just listen to them and follow everything they are telling you, you are just setting yourself up for failure.

Be creative, and start thinking for yourself. You don’t have to ignore smart people, but just don’t rely on the advice they are giving you. Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, and most importantly stick to your guns.

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself

I or anyone else for that matter can only do so much for you. We can give you advice and tell you what to do if you want to be successful, but you yourself have to be willing to put in the time and effort.

If you don’t have the drive to be successful, you aren’t going to succeed. So here are some things that may help light a fire under your ass:

1. Hang around with successful people – being around successful people will make you want to be successful as well.


2. Get back to reality – watching a ton of TV, movies and even playing games is a great way to escape from reality. Although it’s fun, that will pull you away from your goals. Concentrate on your long-term goals and don’t get caught up in things that take you away from reality.


3. Stop thinking and start acting – to some extent, thinking too much isn’t good for you. Thinking will only get you so far; you have to start acting on things.


4. Read success stories – there are a lot of case studies on the web of entrepreneurs who went from rags to riches. Following these entrepreneurs should help in motivating yourself.

You never achieve real success unless you like what you are doing

If you don’t like what you are doing, you are going to get burned out. I know this sounds dumb and obvious, but even if you are making tons of money you won’t be happy if you don’t like what you are doing.

Just for a moment, think about what you really want to do. Is that what you are doing right now?

If it isn’t, stop doing it! You are more likely to succeed in life if you actually enjoy what you are doing every day because then it won’t seem like “work”.

And if you happen to be one of those lucky individuals that are making a ton of money from something you don’t have a passion for… just wait… because it won’t last forever.

Customers don’t know what they want

As Steve Jobs once said:

You can’t just ask a customer what they want and try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

Your customers don’t always know what they want. Yes they may say they want this or that, but once you give it to them, they may never use it. So instead of just taking your customers word for what they want, you have to get into their mind and understand why.

This will help you understand what problems your customers are facing and how you can solve them. If you can solve your customers’ problem, you’ll have something that they will use for a very long time as long it doesn’t require them to change their behavior.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Eric Ries has this philosophy called, minimum viable product, that is all about creating something that is bare bones, getting user feedback, and then modifying it from there.

The concept sounds obvious and you already know about it, but do you run your business that way? For example I just pushed out a new design for Quick Sprout and my designer was able to push something out within 7 days. By no means is it done yet and there are bugs, but if I wanted everything perfect I would have had to wait 30 days before a design would be up.

Plus, by throwing something up within 7 days I can get feedback from you and modify/finish the design with your vision in mind. Because at the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters?

By running your business with Eric’s philosophy, not only will it be more agile, but you will also waste a lot less time and money. Instead of you wasting 6 months of time creating something that your customers don’t want, you’ll only end up wasting a week or two before you realize how you need to adjust your product or service to satisfy them.

You learn more from success than failure

You learn from your mistakes, right? Well, that is true, but you actually learn more from success than failure.

Just think about it for a moment, this is the main reason why you make the same mistakes multiple times before learning from them.

Now this doesn’t mean you should stop learning from your mistakes or other people’s mistakes, but you need to start reading up how others became so successful.

And don’t just read up on people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, but read up on people who are successful in your industry. For example my businesses are in the software as a service category, so I may read up on companies like Salesforce and 37signals.

Run your business like NASCAR

In NASCAR the team that wins is one that does every little thing right.

Admire what each team member and vendor has to offer. Your business wins when the team does every job right. The engine, transmission, electrical system, chassis and aerodynamics all figure into a great race car. Dozens of people build several cars for every driver. At the race, the pit crew is there to keep the car running. The shop focuses on excellence, while the pit crew focuses on speed.

You need employees who specialize in specific areas. You don’t want employees who are considered to be a jack-of-all-trades because they won’t do any one thing really well.

If your employees specialize, they will do a better job and your overall company performance will increase.

Too much of a good thing is a bad thing

Remember when you were a little kid and your mom told you not too each too much candy or else you’ll get a tummy ache? Well, after you got a tummy ache you realized that how something so good can make you feel so bad.

The same goes with business, having too much of something good can be bad for you.

Just take a look at money. You love it and want a ton more of it. With things like money you can grow your business and create a big empire, right? Well if you have too much of it, such as by raising too much venture capital, you’ll end up wasting a lot of it. Instead, if you had a limited amount of capital, you would be much more scrappier and make smarter decisions.

So the next time you have something good, use it in moderation and don’t abuse it.

Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming

You already know that there are so many opportunities, that you shouldn’t jump on the first one you see. But did you know that you should be looking for opportunities with limited downside instead an unlimited upside?

Especially as a new entrepreneur, why would you want to take the risk of losing everything? By only taking opportunities with a limited downside, you’ll know what your worse case scenario will be.

Over time what you’ll realize is that whether you have a million bucks or a few hundred, going with opportunities with a limited downside is always a safer bet.

Yes, you’ll miss the boat on opportunities like Facebook, but that’s all right. At least you won’t lose all of your money because for every Facebook there are millions more failures.

Conclusion

Although many of the business lessons I learned this year are basic, you should really take a close look at them. Even if you already know them, are you really using these principles within your business? Because the chances are, you aren’t.

None-the-less, these 10 business lessons just skim the surface of your entrepreneurial education. If there are any other business lessons that you would like to share, feel free to leave a comment.

The Fortune 500 makes up the biggest companies in the U.S. The smallest of the 500 companies, Legg Mason, brings in a bit more than 4.6 billion dollars a year and the largest company, Exxon Mobile, brings in around 442 billion dollars a year.

The Fortune 5,000,000 on the other hand is composed of small companies. Most of them don’t even generate a billion in revenue and surprisingly enough, a lot of them may not even revenue a million dollars a year.

I know this doesn’t make the Fortune 5,000,000 seem attractive, but in actuality it is. Before I go into why you should target the Fortune 5,000,000, lets break down why you shouldn’t go after the Fortune 500:

1. Slow and steady doesn’t win the race – if you want to lock in a deal with a large company, it is going to take a lot of time. These companies move slowly due to their chain of command. You never know if you are dealing with the decision maker and even if you are, it doesn’t mean things are going to move quickly.


2. Time is money – in addition to the time you’ll spend trying to lock in a deal, you’ll spend a lot of money. From wining and dining to making multiple presentations to an executive team, it will all add up. And if you happen to get lucky enough to get to terms, just imagine the legal fees.


3. The money isn’t always great – there is a big misconception that you’ll make a ton of money if you lock in a Fortune 500 company. What you probably don’t realize is that the big bucks usually go to other Fortune 500 companies. Your company will usually get a small contract and even if you happen to provide a great service or product, you’ll be lucky if you get the opportunity for a large contract.


4. You’ll be a bitch – whether you end up getting paid a lot or a little from a big company, you’ll be their bitch. They’ll expect a lot from you, and in most cases you’ll end up doing more work than what was listed out in your contract.


5. You may not get paid – the bigger the company, the slower they tend to pay their bills. Just think of this way, if they hold their money for an extra 30 or 60 days to all of the companies they owe money to, they’ll end up earning a lot of interest. Although 2% interest from your bank may not seem like a lot to you, it adds up if you have over a billion dollars.

Targeting the Fortune 500 may have seemed like a great idea at first, but hopefully the points I mentioned above shows you why you shouldn’t target them.

So now, lets look into the Fortune 5,000,000:

1. They move quickly – small companies move much faster than larger companies. Yes, they might not have the big budgets, but it is easier to get money from them.


2. You can easily reach them – through normal means of advertising, you can reach the Fortune 5,000,000. You don’t have to build out a sales force and spend thousands of dollars like you may have to if you are targeting the Fortune 500.


3. Your income will be recession proof – most of the Internet companies that didn’t get affected by the recession are those that targeted the Fortune 5,000,000. It is much better to have 100,000 customers paying you $10 a year compared to having 4 customers paying you $250,000 a year. If you end up with a client who is paying you $250,000, they own your ass.


4. They can pay more – if you are going after big contracts, there are big enough companies in the Fortune 5,000,000. If you want someone to cut you a million dollar check, they don’t have to be making billions of dollars a year, they just have to be making millions.


5. You’ll have more evangelists – as long as you treat your customers’ right, it is better to have more than less. The more customers you have, the more people that will be telling their friends about your company, which will indirectly grow your revenue.


6. Smaller valuation periods – larger companies typically want to try things out for at least a few months before they make a decision. Smaller companies are fine with short evaluation periods, if any at all. This will help you with cash flow.


7. Less competition – because the Fortune 500 looks more lucrative, more companies are targeting them. If you target smaller businesses you’ll end up with less competition, which will lead to better market penetration.

Conclusion

Targeting the Fortune 5,000,000 doesn’t mean you can’t go after the Fortune 500. If you target smaller companies, sooner or later the Fortune 500 will flock towards you.

But instead of concentrating your efforts on the larger companies, concentrate on the smaller ones. This will cause your company to grow faster and your revenue will be more stable.

And as a final thought, every time one of my companies targeted the Fortune 5,000,000 the juice has always been worth the squeeze.

Do you have a web-based business? Well, if you don’t, you should consider starting one. If you do, what you’ll notice is that there is always more room for improvement.

Over the past few years I have started a handful of web-based businesses and consulted a 100 or so. No matter what size company I was working with I noticed that there are were always 8 things (if not more) you could do to improve it.

Hopefully you are already doing some of these 8 things, but if you aren’t, here they are:

Perfection doesn’t exist

Nothing is ever going to be perfect. You have to get the misconception out of your head that your website has to be perfect. Just look at some of the worst websites out on the web, a lot of them make a shit load of money.

So instead of going the route of creating a perfect website why not just throw stuff out there and fix it up over time? I am not saying that your website has to be ugly or non-functional, but instead realize that your website visitors aren’t as picky as you.

Keep it simple stupid

Features, features, and features! Who doesn’t want the latest stuff on their website? Having the latest and great features on your website will make it look cool, but it can also ruin the usability.

Some of the most successful sites on the web are very simple. Just look at Craigslist. There isn’t much to it from a users perspective, but yet it is popular.

A great way to keep things simple is by focusing your site on 1 major objective. If things fit around that objective, then do them. But if they don’t, don’t waste time on them.

Ask your users for feedback

Does it really matter what you want? No! All that matters is what the customer wants. Before you make any major changes to your website, consider surveying your visitors.

Find out what they want or don’t want and why. And after you figure that out, dig a bit deeper because a lot of times people will say that they want something and never use it.

Or in other words surveying your users is a great first step, but you actually need to get to know them if you want useful feedback.

Help your visitors trust you

Even if you aren’t, people are afraid to swipe their credit card online. If you want convert visitors into customers, you should consider a few things:

• Add testimonials – don’t just create fake testimonials, add real ones from real customers. If you don’t have any testimonials give away your product or service away to a few people in exchange for an honest testimonial. And once you have a few testimonials, integrate them into your website, such as on the checkout page.


• Badges build trust – whether it is the Better Business Bureau badge, or a money back guarantee sign, badges help build trust.


• Contact options – in addition to listing your email address, consider adding a phone number and a live chat option. All of these things will show your visitors that there is a real person behind your website.


• Video clips – it doesn’t matter if you are ugly and have a terrible voice, people want to see and hear from you. Having a video on your website will help build trust.


• Press – if you’re website gets showcased on any popular blogs or in the mainstream media, let your visitors know.

Optimize for conversions

The smallest changes like the color of your call to action buttons can drastically affect your conversion rate. Consider testing every aspect of your website’s layout so that you can maximize your conversion rate.

A few things to consider testing that you may have not thought about before are:

1. Use different font typographies. Certain fonts are easier to read than others.


2. Test different website copy. All the way from your headlines to the text within your paragraphs, the copy on your website is one of the main things that will affect conversions.


3. Remove different elements from your design. Typically, less will result into more conversions.


4. Try different variations of your website’s background color.


5. For your call to action buttons, don’t just test how different colors perform. Test how different shades of a color perform.


6. If you have pages that are very long and your goal is to get people to read all of your content, try adjusting the color of your scroll bars. Different color scroll bars can affect how many visitors actually scroll through your content.

If you are new to maximizing website conversions, try using Google Website Optimizer and Crazy Egg. Both of these will help you understand how to maximize your conversion rate.

In addition to that, make sure you check out popular sites like Amazon who have already invested millions of dollars in optimizing their conversions. There is nothing wrong with copying.

Optimize your website for search engines

An easy way to get more traffic to your website is through search engine optimization. 2 detailed guides that go over search engine optimization are the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Optimizing Your Blog for Search Engines.

Now the guides above are going to be a bit long and overwhelming, so if you were to prioritize some SEO aspects to consider doing first…

1. Make sure you URL structures are clean. You don’t want extraneous characters (* & % $ =) in your URL. Ideally a URL should only consist of numbers and letters. Dashes are also acceptable, but try not to use underscores.


2. Both your title tag and meta description tag should be unique on every page of your website. They should also be descriptive of what the page is about, and readable. The last thing you want to do is stuff keywords into your title and description tag.


3. Create an XML sitemap that includes all of your URLs and submit them to the major search engines. This will help them index your pages faster.


4. Google Image Search can drive a ton of traffic as long as you describe what each image on your website is about. Bots can’t look at an image and understand what it is. By using alt tags to describe each image, search engines will do a better job of categorizing your images.


5. When you are reading a book, how do you know what a chapter is going to be about? Headings… right? Just like how books use headings, you should also use them on your website. You do this is through the use of h1, h2, h3, and h4 tags.


6. The most important aspect of search engine optimization is related to links. The more websites that link to you, the higher chance you’ll have of getting more search engine traffic. So creating a good website is the first step in increasing your chances of getting other websites linking to you, but it isn’t enough. You have to get creative and leverage social media sites like Digg, or create things that are viral such as games or quizzes.

There are hundreds of other things you can also do to improve your SEO, but the 6 things I mentioned above are a great start. None-the-less, I still recommend reading the 2 guides that I linked to above.

Sell, sell, sell, and then sell some more

If you already have people coming to your website that are purchasing, why not up sell to them? Just look at sites like GoDaddy, have seen how many times they up sell?

There is nothing wrong with up selling to your existing user base. Up selling converts very well because the customer already has some faith in your company.

But before you start up selling, take a look at the emails Amazon sends and walk through the GoDaddy checkout process. Hopefully those two sites will spur some creative ideas that will help you up sell to your customers.

Step outside of your little box

Your web based business doesn’t end with your website, instead, that is where it starts. If you want to grow it you have to start looking at some of the new hip mediums around the web such as Facebook.

Does your company have a fan page on Facebook? And if you do, are you also leveraging Twitter?

The possibilities are endless. If small companies like The Purse Blog can make money through their Facebook fan page and big companies like Dell can generate 3 million in sales through Twitter, the it’s possible for you to leverage the social web.

Conclusion

In addition to this list, there are a ton of other things you can do to improve your web-based business. Although you should never stop looking for new opportunities you have to prioritize what you should do first with your website.

Typically the answer is going to be: go after the lowest hanging fruit.

Anyone else have any ideas to share?

Who said marketing has to be expensive? Whether you have money to spend on marketing or not, there a lot of things you can do that don’t cost a dime. Here is a guide on how you can market your company for free:

Track before you act

Before you start any marketing initiatives, you need to make sure you have the correct tracking in place. This way you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The last thing you want to do is spend time on things that aren’t working.

An easy way to do this is through the use of Google Analytics, which is free. If you are already using it, that’s great. If you aren’t, here is a short video that explains how to use it.

Search engine traffic converts

One way to get more traffic to your website is to optimize it for search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have millions, if not billions of visitors. So why not have some of those visitors come on over to your website?

Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are a few things you should know:

• There are 2 main aspects that will affect how much traffic you receive from search engines.




1. Links – the more websites linking to your website, the higher it will ranking. Think of links as votes, if you have more votes than your competition, you will usually rank higher than them.


2. Code – if a search engine can’t read your website, then there is no way that it will know what it is about and what keywords to rank it for. It is very important to make sure your website code is clean so that a search engine can understand what your website is about.




• Keep it simple – there is nothing wrong with having a cool looking site, such as those flash based movie sites, but they usually don’t rank well on search engines. In most cases, the simpler looking sites rank better.


• Content is king – you have to have content (text) on your website. If your website is about blue widgets, then naturally the word “blue widgets” should be inside your websites content. This helps search engines determine what to rank your website for.


• Page 1 is all that matters – if you want traffic from search engines, you have to rank on page 1 of the search results. Ranking on page 2, 3, or even 4, doesn’t drive much traffic.


• The long tail – your goal shouldn’t be to rank for generic keywords. Instead you want to rank for niche and highly relevant keywords because those visitors will more likely convert into sales.

Now that you know a bit about search engines, there are 2 articles you need to read if you want search engine traffic.

1. If you want more search engine traffic for your blog, read this post that I wrote a few months ago.


2. If your website isn’t a blog, read the beginner’s guide to search engine optimization. It will teach you everything you need to know about getting more search engine traffic.

Email marketing isn’t spam

No matter what type of website you have, you should be collecting your visitor’s email address. Now you shouldn’t force this upon them, but if they sign up for something or purchase a product, make sure you collect their email address.

For example, John Chow offers his readers a free ebook. To receive the ebook, you have to enter in your email address, which he’ll send promotions to in the future.

Once you have collected a few emails, you can use services like Mail Chimp to blast out special promotions to your email list. But before you get started, there are a few things you need to know about email marketing:

• Only send emails to opted in email addresses. If you send promotional emails to addresses that aren’t opted in, your emails will likely get marked as spam. And if too many of them get marked as spam, no one will be able to receive them.


• Don’t send out too many emails. If you send emails every day, you’ll notice that people will tend to ignore them. So try and only send them when you have something good to say or offer.


• Avoid spam filters. Before you send out any emails, read up on spam filters.

Create some buzz

The blogosphere is a great place to go to if you want to create some buzz about your company and boost your traffic. If you want to get covered in the blogosphere there are a few steps that you have to follow:

1. Create something that is news worthy – bloggers want something hot to talk about. Whether it is something cool and exciting about your company or even a simple contest, bloggers need something to talk about. If you don’t have that, you won’t get coverage from the blogosphere.


2. Target a select group of bloggers – after you have something that is news worthy, you want to create a relevant list of bloggers to target. You can determine if a blog is relevant by checking if they have written on things similar to what you want them to blog about.


3. Contact bloggers – once you are ready to get covered in the blogosphere, you want to start contacting your list of bloggers. The easiest way to do this is by writing a custom tailored email to each blogger on your list.


4. Build relationships – even after you are done contacting the bloggers on your list, you should try and build relationships with other bloggers. You never know when you’ll want more coverage in the blogosphere, and knowing bloggers on a personal level never hurts.

Getting bloggers to write about your company isn’t an easy thing to do. Just like most things, it is a numbers game because most of the bloggers you email won’t write about your company. So don’t give up too easily!

Don’t be afraid of social media

Although social media maybe new to you, it doesn’t mean you should be afraid of it. Just look at Dell, they have sold 3 million dollars worth of computers through Twitter.

Here are some useful links that will teach you how to use social media as a marketing channel:

• Create a Facebook profile – although Facebook profiles are personal, they can still be used to drive traffic to your business. For example, Facebook is one of the top referring traffic sources to Quick Sprout. Every time I write a blog post, I also push it out on my Facebook profile so my friends can see it.


• Don’t use Twitter for fun – why not use it to promote your business? Dell isn’t the only company on Twitter, there are thousands of companies that are leveraging it every day.


• Get dugg – although Digg isn’t the hottest social site on the web, it is the most effective social site in driving links to your website. All you have to do is get to the Digg homepage. And as I mentioned above, the more links you have the more search engine traffic you’ll end up getting.


• Videos can go viral too – if you have a camera handy, you can always create a video and get it popular on video sites like YouTube. Not only do they get tons of traffic, but those videos will also rank well on search engines like Google. Just make sure you mention your business or URL within the video.


• Look beyond the surface – social networks aren’t the only type of social sites that you should be leveraging. Sites like Docstoc and Scribd let you upload documents on whatever you want. Through those sites you can upload documents about your company. Those sites are so powerful that your content will rank high on the search engines and more people will end up knowing about your company.


• Old is sexy – although forums aren’t sexy, they are still popular. Find forums related to your business and start contributing to them. Don’t talk about your business, but just contribute by answering people’s questions. As long as you add your company URL in your forum signature, you will get more people to come over to your website.

The possibility with leveraging the social web as a marketing channel is endless. You just have to be creative and think out of the box.

Final thoughts

Don’t fall into the mindset that marketing costs money. You don’t have to spend money to market your company!

There are tons of examples of successful companies like Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo) who didn’t spend money on marketing and are very successful. Hell, even Google didn’t spend money on marketing for the first few years they were in business and they did very well.

So don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend money on marketing. There are always other options.

Do you want to become a better entrepreneur? Well who doesn’t, right?

Over the past 8 years I have started around 9 companies. Sadly most of them failed, but the good news is, I have learned a lot over the years. Some of these things maybe obvious to you, while others may not, but none-the-less there will be something that will be beneficial to you.

Here are 53 things to keep in mind if you want to be a better entrepreneur:

1. Don’t let emotions cloud your decisions.


2. Accept criticism, no matter who gives it to you.


3. Never stop networking.


4. Learn from your own mistakes.


5. Learn from other people’s mistakes.


6. Around every corner lies an opportunity for you to sell something.


7. Don’t get too greedy… pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.


8. Try not to mix your family life with your business life.


9. No matter how successful you are, you shouldn’t stop learning.


10. Spending money on good lawyers and accountants will save you more money in the long run.


11. Don’t pick a stupid company name… and if you do, don’t change it later on.


12. Hiring employees won’t solve most of your problems.


13. Be agile because slow and steady won’t win the race.


14. Being agile isn’t enough, you also have to be scrappy too.


15. Having a good business partner will be a key factor in your success.


16. Don’t be afraid of the unknown.


17. It is easier to save money than it is to make it.


18. You don’t always have to innovate; there is nothing wrong with copying.


19. Have a marketing plan.


20. Don’t under estimate your competition; you can’t always know what they are doing.


21. Watching movies like Boiler Room, will teach you how to sell.


22. If you don’t have a business mentor, you better get one.


23. Your income will be the average of your 5 closest friends, so pick them wisely.


24. Diversifying is a good way to play things safe.


25. It doesn’t matter what you want, it only matters what your customers want.


26. When others are fearful, you should be greedy. And when they are greedy you should be fearful.


27. You don’t always have to pay for advice. You’ll be amazed with the free advice you can get pick up from the web.


28. The best chances you have of becoming rich is through your willingness of working hard.


29. Even the most idiotic business idea can make money.


30. Sex sells and it always will.


31. An easy way to make more money is to up sell to your current customer base.


32. Base your business decisions around metrics.


33. There is no such thing as a safe bet.


34. You don’t have to start a business to be successful.


35. Raising venture capital is harder than being struck by lightening.


36. Staying under the radar isn’t always a bad thing. Being out in the open is a great way to attract more competitors.


37. Learn to be a team player.


38. If you ever get screwed over, think twice before you burn the bridge.


39. Learn to manage both your personal and business money.


40. Live in a location filled with entrepreneurs.


41. If you don’t take any risks, there will not be any rewards.


42. Don’t let anything stand in your way.


43. Sometimes you have to wait for good deals to come to you.


44. The smartest route isn’t always the easiest route.


45. Being too aggressive can backfire.


46. With networking, it isn’t about whom you know, it is about whom your network knows.


47. It’s never a bad thing to know too many rich people. Whether you like them or not, they can always come in handy. So make sure you always play nice with them.


48. Use your email signature to promote your business.


49. Don’t be afraid of social media. It is a great channel for customer acquisition.


50. You’ll learn more from starting your own business, than going to business school.


51. Having a personal blog doesn’t only help build your personal brand, but it helps your business as well.


52. Your competitors don’t have to be your enemies, you can learn a lot from them.


53. You can grow your business by working for free.

Hopefully these suggestions will help you improve your entrepreneurial skills. And if you have any other suggestions that will help other Quick Sprout readers, as well me become a better entrepreneur, feel free to leave a comment.

You are thinking about starting your own business because you want to be rich, right? If that isn’t the case, I’ll be the first to call you out on your bullshit. But if you want to become filthy rich, that’s good because there is nothing wrong with it.

But before you embark on your journey to the riches, think about this:

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

It pays to be greedy, but not too greedy or else you’ll get in trouble. If you get too greedy like a hog, you can end up loosing it all.

For example, when my business partner and I started Crazy Egg we could have sold it for around 6 million to one of the top Internet companies. We were a bit greedy at the time and wanted no less than 10 million dollars.

At this time the company had been around for a year and it wasn’t even bring in $20,000 a month. On top of that we were losing money because our costs were higher than our revenue.

We should have been grateful that someone wanted to give us that kind of money, and accepted the offer. If you analyze the numbers, we weren’t even worth 6 million. If we took the 6 million at the time, we would have been happy pigs, but instead both my business partner and I wanted to be hogs.

Now that 6 million dollar blunder wasn’t even the worst mistake I made, but we won’t get into that right now. So in hopes that you won’t make mistakes revolved around greed, here are some things you should know if you plan on owning a business:

Don’t be afraid to give out equity

Whether it is a business partner or the right employee, you can’t be afraid to give away equity. Yes, you will own less of the company, but hopefully that person will make the company worth more.

You’ll make mistakes by hiring bad employees or by finding bad business partners, but this shouldn’t stop you from giving out equity. As long as you have a good lawyer to give you advice, you can give out equity so that it vests over a period of 3 or 4 years. This way if you make a bad decision you won’t lose all the equity you promised someone, but instead a fraction of that.

It’s better to own a small piece of a big pie

Using your own money to start your business is always a good thing, but there isn’t anything wrong with using someone else’s money. With my current company, KISSmetrics, my business partner and I raised a total of 4 million dollars.

We started the business with a few hundred thousand dollars of our own money, but if we wanted to create a hundred million dollar company, there is no way we could do it on our own. If we tried, we would have ended up with another small business like Crazy Egg.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the math. Isn’t it better to own 10% of a 100 million dollar company, than owning 50% of a 6 million dollar company? Now granted there is no guarantee that your company will be worth 100 million, but there also isn’t a guarantee that it will be worth 6 million either.

What goes up, must go down

Just because things are great now, it doesn’t mean they will be like that forever. Good things always come to an end, so don’t try to ride them till the end. Get out while things are positive and move onto something else. This way you will hopefully walk away with more money and less stress.

For example, when the economy was great, I could have cashed out of my consulting agency at a really good deal. We had big clients that were paying thousands a month and some even hundreds of thousands a month. Profit margins were really high, but when the economy hit, we lost clients like General Motors.

At first I thought my business was recession proof because clients were paying me $100,000 a month and I was able to make them millions in profit. The problem with my thinking was that it was too logical. At the end of the day when big companies make budget cuts, they look at a spreadsheet and analyze each line item. And when there are lines items called “Search Engine Optimization”, CEOs and VPs usually have no idea what they mean, so they cut them.

So when things are looking great with your business don’t assume that things are going to get even better. Remember, although it only takes a few months to land a multi-million dollar contract, it only takes a second to lose it.

Stop concentrating and start diversifying

Concentrating on one business model will either make you filthy rich or get you slaughtered like a hog. I personally don’t need billions of dollars; I just need a few hundred million.

So instead of me putting all of my money into 1 dotcom company, I raised money from outside investors. I also take a lot of my personal money and invest it into other dotcom companies, real estate, the stock market, and whatever else I can get my hands on.

Diversifying is a good way to live like a plump pig. Concentrating and focusing on one thing is smart if you want to be filthy rich, but the odds of that happening are slim to none. Instead, you will probably end up getting slaughtered like a hog.

Conclusion

Don’t get too greedy! There is nothing wrong with having a bit of greed, but too much can hurt you. If you ever have the opportunity to walk away from whatever you are doing and put a few million dollars into your pocket, do it. A few million dollars is life changing!

After you have your first few million, you can be a bit greedier and go after a lot more, but until then, take whatever you can get.

Do you want to start a business? You get to be your own boss, set your own hours, and potentially even work from home. Doesn’t that sound great?

Most of the perks that you hear about, aren’t accurate. I know it sounds like an awesome idea, but there is a lot that you don’t know about starting a company. Before you make your decision, here are a few things you should know:

You don’t have one boss, you have multiple bosses

When you work at a 9 to 5 job you have one boss that you have to report to. Whatever your boss tells you to do, you do. You may not always like what he or she is telling you, but at least you only have one person (worse case 2 people) bossing you around.

If you decide to start your own business, every one of your customers is a boss. If you think one boss is bad, think about having 100. Whatever they want, you have to do. If you don’t, your bosses (customers) won’t be happy, which means you won’t be in business much longer.

You don’t get to set your own hours

You can’t always choose your own hours or get to work from home. Business is all about making money, so you have to do whatever it takes to succeed. If that means you have to answer calls in the middle of the night, then so be it.

For example, when I had my consulting agency people thought it was pretty cool that I started work at around 10 or 11 in the morning. Boy, where they wrong! In many cases I worked late because I got calls from Germany in the middle of the night and then I had to work early because I got calls from the New York. Or even worse, if my client in Germany wanted to see me, I had to hop on a flight, spend 24 hours in Germany, and then fly back home.

What a great way to travel.

Your business will impact your personal life

Could you go weeks without seeing your wife or kids?

Could you go months without seeing or talking to your friends?

There is no way you can keep your business and personal life separate. Your business will impact how much time you can spend with your family and friends. If you aren’t willing to make a sacrifice, then you are going to have a tough road ahead of you.

And even if you are willing to make the sacrifice, is your family ready to make it as well? Because if they aren’t, you may ended up losing them.

The odds are against you

Yes, Zappos did sell for $928 million. Yes, Ebay bought Skype for $2.6 billion. And best of all, Facebook is worth billions.

You are hearing all of these great stories, but are you hearing about all of the failures? I don’t know what the exact odds of succeeding are, but I’ll bet you for every Facebook there are millions of failures. You never hear about these failures because no one likes talking about how they failed, but instead they only like to brag about how successful they are.

I know what you are thinking though.

But Neil, look at people like Evan Williams. Not only was he the founder of Blogger, but he also founded Twitter. If people like him can be successful twice, why can’t I be successful just once?

Yes Evan is very successful, but you aren’t him. The odds of any entrepreneur succeeding more than once is very low. A lot lower than succeeding once.

When it rains, it pours

Everything may look great when you are first starting your business, but believe me, a lot of things will go wrong. And when things go wrong, it will probably be your luckily day because more things will end up going wrong.

You can’t predict the future or control everything. All you can do is try your best, which in many cases won’t be enough. This is one of the main reasons that will cause you to stress out, lose a lot of your hair like me, and maybe even get depressed at times.

This happens to all entrepreneurs, and it can be devastating. For example, I just recently met an entrepreneur who had a company that was profiting 15 to 20 million a year. But after we went into this economic downturn, he had no choice but to sell the company and walk away with nothing.

You’ll have to become an asshole

I know you don’t want to be that mean guy, but sooner or later you will have to. Just think about when you have to fire someone. It may seem easy at first, but after you have worked with that individual for a few years and they become your friend, it won’t be easy to let them go.

Trust me, you’ll feel like an asshole!

And firing someone isn’t the worst thing you’ll have to do. Every business has it’s own set of problems; you just have to be willing to lay down the law, when the time is right. It won’t feel right, but that’s life.

Your lifestyle is going to change

If your company does well, you will be living the life of the rich and famous. But the chances of it doing well aren’t so hot.

When you first start your company, you are going to have to make sacrifices. For example, when I started my first company this meant that I couldn’t do anything that cost money because I didn’t have any. I had to work at a theme park, picking up trash and cleaning restrooms, so that I could have enough money to keep my business a float.

Your lifestyle can get back to normal, but it maybe years before that happens. Or even worse, if things don’t go the way you are planning, it may never go back to how it was before.

Success isn’t easy to come by

I personally don’t think I am successful yet, but you may think otherwise. You may look at me and say that you want my life.

Yes from an outside perspective I have done well at a young age, but it took me years to get here. I am now 24 years old and have been creating businesses since I was 16. 8 years is a long time to put into something and you probably never hear how I struggled for the first 3 to 4 years. It doesn’t matter if I was making tons of money because at the end of the day I was in debt around 1 million dollars.

If you are going to start a business you have to be willing to pay your dues. Don’t expect things to look good within a few years. Even if you are starting to make good money, you shouldn’t get greedy by taking a high salary. Consider the bigger picture and reinvest that money back into the company.

Conclusion

By no means am I trying to tell you that you shouldn’t start a business. But before you pull the trigger, you need to consider all the negative aspects and not just think positive.

With me, I got lucky. I started a business at a young age (I didn’t have a family to worry about), my parents took care of all of my bills, and I knew that I could always live at home.

Now on the other hand if you aren’t in the situation I was in when I was 16, your risk of starting a business is much higher. And if you can live with that… well… that’s what makes you a true entrepreneur.

How hard could it be to write a blog post? If a teenager can do it, you can too… right? Well writing a blog post isn’t hard at all, but writing a great blog post is very difficult.

Over the past few years I have started 2 blogs. Although my first blog was a Technorati 100 blog, the content was crap. Readers didn’t care to read the content or engage in the conversation (comment on the blog).

Quick Sprout on the other hand isn’t a Technorati 100 blog, but you actually read the content and engage. I constantly am getting great feedback from you and requests to write more content.

Now I know I am not the best writer out there and I still have a lot to improve upon, but I feel that I have a good formula when it comes to writing blog posts.

Here is how you can write blog posts like me:

Get out of your old ways

Do you remember writing term papers in high school or college? If you don’t, lucky you! If you do, then writing blog posts is going to be a difficult task for you. You have to ignore all of the things that your professors taught you about writing.

You aren’t here to write a term paper, you are here to create a conversation!

If my blog posts sounded as if I was talking at you instead of to you, wouldn’t you get bored and irritated with me? Make sure you do the same and talk to your readers and not at them.

Know what you want to write about

Before you start writing the first word, you have to know what the last word is going to be. I don’t mean this in a literal fashion, but you have to know how you are going to start off your blog post, the points you are going to convey, and how you are going to wrap everything up.

If you are one of those people that likes to wing things and be spontaneous, that’s great. As one of those people, I have realized that it doesn’t work too well with blogging. All it will cause is you to spend more time writing than you need to.

Plus, I am pretty sure you are already strapped for time. Right? So why waste more of it.

Create an awesome title

So are you ready to start writing now? Wrong! Until you can come up with an awesome title, you shouldn’t start writing your blog post. You could have the greatest content, but if your title sucks, most people won’t end up reading it.

To come up with some cool titles, I tend to look at 3 blogs:

1. Brian Clark from Copyblogger has written some cool blog posts about titles.


2. Leo Babauta from Zen Habits usually uses cool titles for his blog posts. Although his blog isn’t about blogging, it is a great place to go to for some inspiration.


3. And last but not least, Darren Rowse from Problogger also uses catchy titles.

The approach I use when browsing these 3 blogs is to not only look what titles they have used, but also how many comments each blog post recieved. What I am doing here is correlating how readers feel about a particular title because blog posts with good titles usually get read more, which means more people comment on them.

Hook your readers

You only have a few seconds to grab people’s attention. If you can’t grab someone’s attention within the first few sentences you write, you have lost them.

The way I hooked you into reading this far was through:

How hard could it be to write a blog post? If a teenager can do it, you can too… right? Well writing a blog post isn’t hard at all, but writing a great blog post is very difficult.

If you look at the paragraph above, you’ll notice that I have done a few things:

1. I created a conversation with you.


2. I showed you that anyone could write a blog post, which makes you feel that you can do it to (which you can).


3. I enticed you to read further by alluding to the fact that not everyone writes great blog posts.

In the second paragraph I use social proof, so that if you are new to Quick Sprout, you don’t think I am just an Average Joe who is giving advice.

Over the past few years I have started 2 blogs. Although my first blog was a Technorati 100 blog, the content was crap. Readers didn’t care to read the content or engage in the conversation (comment on the blog).

Showing you how I was a top 100 blogger, helps you take my advice a bit more seriously. And at the same time, telling you that I screwed up shows you that I am not perfect and that you can always improve.

Now everyone has different writing styles, so I don’t expect your introductory paragraphs to be like mine… and that’s fine. As long as you use some of the elements I used, your readers will be engaged.

Get into the nitty gritty details

For a moment, take a quick break and go to some of your favorite blogs. The chances are these blogs are pretty popular. What you’ll notice when reading these popular blogs is that most of them contain very detailed content.

They don’t just cover the basics; they actually get down into all of the little details. Sometimes they go into it so much, that it seems like they are holding your hand and walking you through whatever they are talking about, step by step.

When I first started Quick Sprout I was writing decent blog posts, but for some reason the blog wasn’t growing in traffic. I couldn’t figure out why, but one day I wrote a very detailed blog post (unintentionally) and my traffic started to grow. Ever since then, I have been writing detailed blog posts and traffic has been going up.

I hope you’ll learn from my experience and not waste your time writing mediocre blog posts.

Wrap it up

Remember in school how your professors told you to summarize what you wrote in your conclusion? That works great for an essay, but it doesn’t work well in a blog post.

I take a 3-prong approach with my conclusions:

1. Keep it simple stupid – good conclusions aren’t long, they are short and to the point.


2. Add your final thoughts – don’t just regurgitate what you talked about within the blog post, but say something new and meaningful.


3. Leave things open – if you want to get more comments on your blog, you have to leave your conclusion open. The easiest way to do this is by asking your readers a question.

Adding the final touches

Don’t you feel relieved that you are now done writing your blog post? I hate to break it to you, but you still aren’t done yet. You have to check for spelling, grammar, and most importantly flow issues.

We all make mistakes so not only should you check and double check for these issues, but you should have someone else read through your blog posts before you post it.

And after you do all of that, you have to find a cool picture to add within your blog post. Reading content off of a computer screen can be hard on the eyes, but if you add a picture within your blog post, it will make it a bit easier on your readers’ eyes.

Conclusion

The way I write my blog posts, may not fit your writing style. This doesn’t mean that you have to adjust your writing style, but you should take the elements I described within this blog post and incorporate them into your writing style.

And lastly, you’ll never perfect your blog writing skills. But don’t worry, no one else will either. There is always more room for improvement! So in that spirit, do you have any recommendations on how to write a great blog post?

If you are trying to grow your traffic, you have to first understand your visitors. When I first started blogging I thought that I could get a better understanding of who you are by just interacting with you through comments and emails.

Boy, was I wrong! Yes, I did learn some things about you through your comments and emails, but the majority of you don’t comment or email me.

After realizing this, I decided to survey you and dig through my analytics. Here is what I learned about you.

You love entrepreneurship

As you can probably tell from my about page, I started Quick Sprout as a personal branding blog.

If you want to become a “rock star” in your industry, you have come to the right place.

But over time it slowly changed into a blog about entrepreneurship. The interesting thing is, the change didn’t happen because of me, it happened because of you. You wanted me to blog on things that were more related to entrepreneurship. I didn’t realize this until I surveyed you a few times.

Because of these surveys, I started blogging about business related topics and traffic started going up. On top of that you promoted Quick Sprout on other entrepreneur focused sites like Hacker News, which has resulted in huge traffic spikes.

You engage when you come from Twitter

Although Google.com is my number 1 source of traffic, Google visitors aren’t engaging. They don’t subscribe to my RSS feed and more importantly, they aren’t commenting on the blog.

On the other hand referring sites like Twitter are driving a small amount of traffic, but those visitors are commenting on the blog. Once I learned about this I added Twitter (ReTweet) buttons at the bottom of each blog post, which has increased traffic and engagement.

You want me to blog more often

Another thing that I learned from the survey is that your biggest complaint about me, and I agree with it, is that I don’t blog often enough. Sometimes I will only blog once a month, while other times I will blog once a week. If I kept a more consistent schedule you would read Quick Sprout more often.

Over the course of the next 30 days I am going to try and blog on a regular basis, so that you come back more often.

You love when I write about search engine optimization

The most popular keyword searches you perform on Quick Sprout are related to Internet marketing. Although Quick Sprout is a blog about entrepreneurship, this does make sense because my background is in Internet marketing.

I will start blogging a bit more about marketing related topics. After all, marketing is a key component to every great company. As an entrepreneur you need to know about the latest marketing tactics that work.

You like my old content

You visit the old content on the blog more often than the new content. Since you aren’t just reading the new stuff I publish, I need to do a better job of cross-linking my old blog posts with my new ones and vice versa. This will help you find more content, more easily… especially if you are new to the blog.

Maybe I should consider listing out the most popular posts in my sidebar.

You want to be rich…if you already aren’t.

The most popular way you tend to find Quick Sprout is by searching for the phrase “how to become rich” on Google. After finding this out I decided to write a few blog posts about my financial failures. It is hard to teach you how to get rich; since chances are that you will make your money in a different way then me. On the other hand it is much more realistic to tell you what you shouldn’t be doing if you want to be rich.

You tend to StumbleUpon my blog posts

You probably use StumbleUpon, and if you do, you tend to stumble the new blog posts I write during the weekdays. The interesting thing is, although you read older blog posts, you rarely stumble those.

So if I want to get the most traffic from StumbleUpon I need to publish my blog posts early in the morning because every time I write a blog post at night or on the weekend, you tend not to stumble much on Quick Sprout.

You are actually using Bing

Who would of thought that you are using Bing? I am actually getting a significant amount of traffic from Bing. This tells me that I shouldn’t ignore browsers like Internet Explorer because most of you Bing users are using Internet Explorer.

At the end of the day if your website isn’t compatible with all major web browsers, you are going to lose a lot of readers.

Conclusion

And to wrap it all up, here is the most important thing I learned about you.

Drum roll please

I know very little about you!

Although I can learn a lot about you by surveying you or digging deep into my analytics, there is still a lot that I don’t know about you. So if you could, please leave a comment with something about yourself; don’t be shy!

And if you don’t know much about me… feel free to check out my about page.

PS: Hopefully this blog post teaches you that you should try to learn as much as possible about your visitors. And once you get to know them, don’t stop learning because peoples’ interests, preferences, and tastes change over time.

As you already know, Twitter is one of the hottest websites out there. At first, I didn’t think it was useful , but I was wrong. Here is how you should be using Twitter to grow your personal brand and business:

Follow relevant people

Twitter isn’t too useful unless you are following other users. You could go the route of following everyone out there, or you could follow people that interest you.

I have tried both of those routes and I can tell you first hand that following thousands of users is a very difficult thing to do because you won’t be able to keep up with all of the tweets. Due to this I recommend that you go with the second route and only follow people that are sharing their knowledge.

Create interesting conversations

After you follow a few people, you’ll notice that some of those people will naturally follow you back. But if you really want to gain followers, you need to start twittering.

You could tweet about your day, people you are hanging out with it, or any random thing that comes to your mind. The problem with doing this is that you will gain followers that won’t care about your tweets.

Instead, I recommend sharing your knowledge on Twitter… for example, I try and tweet about business related topics that get people thinking.

We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference. – Steve Ballmer

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

Tweets like the ones above are great because they cause other users to retweet my tweets and join in on the conversation. The best part about creating a conversation is that it allows you to get to know other users and it allows them to get to know you.

Join the conversation

Not only should you be creating interesting conversations, but you should also be joining other people’s conversations. If people are talking about something you are familiar with, don’t be shy give your input.

When joining conversations, you don’t have to agree with other people. There is nothing wrong in debating others on Twitter. Controversy is a great way to gain some followers as long as you don’t abuse it by only doing it for the attention.

Leverage your followers

Once you have built up a loyal following on Twitter, you need to start leveraging them. You can do this by tweeting about your blog, company, or anything you are involved in. What you’ll notice is that your followers will start retweeting your tweets which will help drive more traffic to your business and hopefully help you increase your sales.

To make Twitter a bit more effective you should be using the following applications:

• Twitter Feed – every time you write a blog post, Twitter Feed will push it out to all of your followers.


• Tweetmeme – by adding a Twitter button to your website, anyone can easily spread the word about your website on Twitter.


• Twitthis – if you use Twitthis when tweeting, you’ll naturally start getting more followers through their “suggested users” feature.

Acquire customers

You could use Twitter for fun, but why not make money while using it? Through their search feature you can find out if people are talking about:

1. Your company (hopefully people are saying good things)


2. Your competition (hopefully people are saying bad things)


3. Your industry (track generic terms related to your industry)

Tracking these three things will help you create a conversation with your current customer base and potential customers. Although this may seem like a hard thing to believe, a lot of companies use Twitter as their main source of customer acquisition.

For example, if someone tweeted how they had a bad experience in dealing with your competition, you could message them and tell them about your company.

Build relationships

If you do all of the things I talked about above, you are already building relationships with people, but you aren’t building relationships with the major influencers.

1. Look for popular users on Twitter that are interested in the same things you are interested in and start messaging them. Not everyone will respond, but like most things in life, it is a numbers game.


2. There should be other members on Twitter that live by you. Search for users that are local to you and get to know them.


3. A lot of the users on Twitter also blog, so get to know the users that blog. This can open up doors and cause people to blog about your business.

Conclusion

Although Twitter can be used for personal entertainment, I recommend using it for business purposes, similar to the ones I mentioned above. Stay away from doing stupid things on Twitter because it will create a public record that anyone can see.

The last thing you want is your boss, potential employers, or business colleagues to find something on Twitter that makes you look bad. Instead you want them to see impressive tweets that make you look good.

Do you want to be a better entrepreneur?

Do you want to make more money?

Here’s how you can do it in 6 steps.

1. Take a break

Just for a moment, sit back and relax. Before you dive back into your work you need to figure out where you are financially in life. One of the main reasons you are going into business is because you want to make more money. So the main question that should come to your mind is:

How much money do you want to make?

You don’t need a billion dollars and the odds of you making anywhere near that are slim to none. So what’s your number?

Chances are the amount you want to make is far more than you’ll actually need. Sit down and take a moment to write down everything you want to buy and how much money you’ll need to make to buy it all. Maybe a fancy house, some exotic cars, and enough cash where you don’t have to worry about working. If you add up the total of everything you want, it shouldn’t run you more than a few million dollars and if you break it down into yearly income it probably won’t be more than a few hundred thousand dollars.

If this isn’t the case, then you are smoking crack. You don’t need tons of toys to be happy. If you think you do, you will have a tough time making all of that money because it is really unlikely that you will make a few million dollars a year or sell your company for a hundred million dollars if you haven’t even made a few hundred grand first.

So stop swinging for the fences, especially if you haven’t hit a single yet!

2. Stop innovating and start copying

Now that you know that you don’t have to make millions of dollars a year, you have to come up with a business that will help you make a decent amount of money. It doesn’t have to be an innovative business that solves a pain in the market place; it just has to be a business that can turn a healthy profit every year.

A good way to find one of these businesses is by talking to friends and family. You’ll be amazed on how many basic businesses like plumbing (I am not saying you should be a plumber) make a decent amount of money. Find something that you’ll enjoy and start the business. Just don’t pick something that requires millions of dollars to start.

If you already have a business analyze how you are currently doing and see what tweaks you can make to it, so that it fits your financial objectives.

3. Time isn’t on your side

Nothing has to be perfect. What you may see as faulty might look perfect to your customers. It doesn’t matter what you want, it matters what your customers want.

This is why you don’t want to make any big decisions because if something goes wrong you’ll end up wasting a lot of time. Break that big decision into a few small decisions. Then survey your customers or potential customers to get their opinion; this should help you determine what route to take.

Even after you talk to your customers you are still going to make mistakes. Just make sure you are agile enough to adapt quickly. It is all about testing small things instead of taking months to roll out changes in your business.

4. Work hard, play hard

If you work 12-hour days, you are going to get burned out. It doesn’t matter if you love what you are doing you need to take breaks.

• Don’t work longer than a few hours without taking a break. Taking small breaks throughout your day will make you more efficient and cause you to accomplish more.


• Every week you should do something that is out of the ordinary. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it could be as simple as going to the park and having a picnic with your family. Just do something that will take your mind away from work and reduce your stress level.


• Create a work environment that you want to be in. Small things like having plants in your workspace, putting up motivational posters, and having a window to look out of can do wonders for you. If your work environment is dark and boring you’ll be forcing yourself to work everyday.

5. Stop deviating

New business opportunities are going to come your way and you will want to jump on them. But all of these things are going to be distractions. They’ll cause you to deviate from your path to success and it will take longer for you to reach your ultimate goal.

You to have to resist the temptation.

If you happen to take any of these opportunities you’ll soon find out that you will be increasing your risk intake. The more things you do, especially ones outside of your skill set, the higher the chance that something is going to fail.

Plus, the more things you do, the more spread out you will be. Once you spread yourself too thin you won’t be able to spend enough time on any of your businesses and you’ll notice that they will all suffer.

6. Never stop learning

The most important and last thing you should know is that you should never stop learning. No matter how successful you are, there is going to be someone out there who has accomplished more than you.

So instead of being arrogant, take every opportunity you get to learn new things. Whether it is from an experienced entrepreneur who has been around the block, or a 16-year-old kid, everyone can teach you something. You just have to learn what to take away from a conversation because there are going to be some things that are going to benefit you and others that won’t.

Conclusion

As an entrepreneur you have learned a few other things that I didn’t include in this blog post. Would you mind leaving a comment with some tips that would help others become a better entrepreneur in the next 30 minutes?

Well, let’s not be silly. Of course you have to make money to build a business, but it doesn’t mean you have to charge everyone. Some people have large followings and when they speak thousands listen to what they have to say. These people are known as influencers.

By helping out influencers for free they will tell thousands of people about you and your company. Not only is this good for sales, but it is great for branding.

For example, when I had my Internet marketing agency I was trying to figure out how I could get more clients. One thing that came to my mind was that everyone wants more traffic and if I could claim that big companies or powerful people were using my services, my business would explode. I didn’t know how I could get these companies or people to pay me, so I thought I would try helping a few out for free.

So I hit up bloggers like TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki, Mashable, and Gigaom via email to see if they were interested.

Hi XXXXX,

I noticed that your blog is being read by thousands of people and it has been growing at a rapid rate according to Alexa. But you know what… it isn’t growing as fast as it should be. You can be getting a lot more traffic if you do 2 things:

1. Make your code more search engine friendly. Modifying things like your meta tags and your URL structure can help increase the amount of traffic you get from search engines.


2. You write awesome content, but you aren’t really leveraging the social web. Sites like Digg, Twitter and Delicious can drive you thousands of visitors in a single day.

If you don’t know how to do these 2 things, don’t worry, I can help you for free. I know that you are probably thinking “what’s the catch”, because there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Well after I increase the popularity of your blog I want you to tell all of your friends and colleagues what I did for you by blogging about the traffic increase you received from my services.

As you probably already guessed, this benefits me because it will increase my credibility and help me get more clients. But if I don’t increase your traffic, you won’t be obligated to write a blog post.

Now that you know you have nothing to lose, what do you think about me helping you out?

Sincerely,
Neil Patel

Now granted a lot of the bloggers I emailed didn’t care to respond to me, but a small percentage did. And by helping out a handful of influencers for free I was able to increase my credibility and grow my business.

When you are offering influencers free work, there are a few things you need to know:

• Only make the offer once – if you keep on sending emails or pestering people, it can hurt you more than it will help you. If someone doesn’t respond to your offer, it is his or her loss. The last thing you want to do is look desperate and make someone so angry that they bash you.


• Don’t ask for a lot – if you ask for a lot, no one is going to take your free work because at that point it isn’t free.


• Be upfront – if you aren’t upfront you won’t be able to get influencers to respond. An influencer gets hit up by thousands of people, so if you are up front they’ll at least respect you.

Once you get a few influencers to accept your offer there are a few more things you need to know:

• Don’t bug them – once you have helped someone out you don’t want to bug them. They are already busy, so keep your contact with them at a minimum.


• Keep on giving – never stop helping influencers. If you continue to help them and give them free work when they need it, it will go a very long way. If you stop helping them, they may forget who you are.


• Don’t call in all of your favors – if you keep on asking for favors, you will start running out of them. If you give them more than you are getting back, you’ll always be able to call in a favor when you really need it. Remember it is always better to give than to ask.

Conclusion

Working for free can help grow your business in the long run, but it won’t help in the short run. Don’t expect to get a return on your investment anytime soon. You have to be patient because it can take months if not years before your free work pays off.

Don’t worry about calculating a return on your free work; over time things will work out. You just have to make sure you are helping out influencers for free and not random people.

Attending conferences and going to local meet-ups is a great way to meet new people, but it isn’t a good way to get to know someone. If you really want to be successful at networking you have to follow these steps:

Put your feelers out there

Every time you attend an event, you’ll notice that there are a few networking whores in the room who hand out business cards to every single person they see. They usually get to know thousands of people, but when it is time to call in a favor or ask for help, no one steps up to the plate because they haven’t built any personal relationships.

The goal with networking is to build personal relationships and you don’t do this by being a whore. The next time you attend an event and are looking to network, here are a few things you can do:

1. Look for the most popular groups in the room. These groups are popular because they are made up of the “it” crowd. These are the type of people you want to be associated with for obvious reasons.


2. Once you have found the popular groups, look to see what individuals make up those groups. You don’t want to cut into a group and try to join the conversation because it will create an awkward moment. Instead you want to wait till one of those individuals leaves the group for a moment (to get food, get a drink, go to the bathroom…) and start to get to know them.


3. After you start getting to know a few people in the “it” crowd, you can then join the group they are in. This way, there won’t be an awkward moment because you’ll know a few people in the group.


4. When the conversation starts dying down, you want to get people’s contact information. You can either do this in a casual fashion by trading phone numbers or by trading business cards.

Start following up

Within 24 hours of meeting someone in person, you want to follow up with them. If you don’t, they might forget who you are. The easiest way you can do this is by sending an email like this:

Hey John,

It was great meeting you at the Seattle 2.0 Awards. We should meet-up for lunch or drinks next week. Let me know when you are free.

By the way, I noticed that your company provides design services for small online businesses; I know a few people that could be interested in your services. Let me know if you would like an introduction.

Thanks
Neil

If you read the email above, you’ll notice that I did was two things:

• The first was to give a few options on meeting up


• And the second was to offer to help them out

By doing both of those things your chances of getting a person to follow up with you will be higher. If you just invite someone for lunch or drinks, they may not respond. But if you do something for them, they’ll feel obligated to respond.

Setup a meeting

Once you get someone agree to meet-up with you there are a few etiquette rules that you have to follow:

1. Pick a meeting location that is convenient for the other party, and not just you. If you are the one who wants the meeting, why should they have to come to you? You should be the one driving to them.


2. Don’t be late to the meeting! I don’t care if there is traffic or if you have some family issues, always be on time for a meeting you setup. And if you tend to be late to meetings, it is better to be extra early than late. If the person you are meeting happens to be late, that’s fine, you just can’t be late.


3. When it comes time to pay the bill, you have to be the one paying. Don’t wait too long before you throw your credit card down, and if the other persons offers to pay, tell them that they can pay next time. The worst things you can do in this situation is split the bill in half or take time to throw your credit card down because it makes it seem like you don’t want to pay.

Build a personal relationship

Meetings don’t have to about work. Talking about money or business all the time gets boring. If you want to successful at networking you have to build personal relationships and not just business relationships. You can do this by talking about general topics such as sports, family, or anything you think may interest the other person.

When chit chatting, pay close attention to their body language. If you are feel the other person is getting bored, change the topic. You want to talk about stuff that you both find interesting.

Conclusion

Once you finish your first meeting you’ll notice that you are building a friendship and not just a business relationship. This is the secret with networking because if a friend asks you for something, you are more likely to do something for them compared to if a business colleague asked you for something.

And lastly, you’ll want to have many more meetings with the same person. You never build great friendships over one meeting you build friendships over years. So don’t expect your networking to pay off within a few weeks or months, it can take years before you see a ROI.

As a first time entrepreneur you probably have tons of questions. And every time you do a Google search for an answer you are bombarded with too much information and in some cases that information contradicts other things you have heard. Due to this, I have created a list of 54 resources that should help you out.

Legal & Accounting

Legal and accounting issues may not seem important when you are starting your company, but they are. Legal and accounting mistakes that you make early on can haunt you for years and can be expensive to fix. So if you are going to start a company you should do things right from the get go.

• S Corp. vs. LLC: Which Structure is Right for Your Business – Determining the type of legal structure for a new business can be daunting for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Learn more about S Corporations and Limited Liability Companies (LLC), and decide if one of these business structures is right for you.


• Legal Zoom – a cheap way to get incorporated.


• Findlaw – a directory of all the lawyers throughout the US.


• Bookkeeping 101: Debits and Credits – Accounting ends with score keeping but begins with record keeping. The first task of accounting is to accurately record transactions. Transactions are events that change the composition of a firm’s assets, liabilities, and equity.


• Accounting Basics – This explanation of accounting basics will introduce you to some basic accounting principles, accounting concepts, and accounting terminology.


• Docstoc – A free place to get legal documents and templates which can drastically help reduce your legal fees and in some cases allow you to do some legal stuff yourself.


• You’ve Been Sued: What Do You Do? – Everything you wanted to know about being sued.


• Opening a Business Bank Account – Business bank accounts and your identity.


• Closing Down Your Business Permanently – If you’re shuttering your business for good, there’s more to it than drawing the blinds.


• Legal Issues to Consider When Starting Your Business – There are a multitude of legal issues to think about when it comes to starting your business. Everything from your business name to its structure to its operation has legal implications.

Web Design

Design is something we tend to take for granted. Not only is important for your website to look good, but you also want to make sure it is usable and converts.

• Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design – The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.


• Google Website Optimizer – A free tool that will help you maximize your conversions.


• Web Developers Handbook – Everything you need to know about web design and development.


• CSS Vault – Web design inspiration.


• A Roadmap to Web Standards – Before you start designing your website, make sure you are complying with web standards.


• Signal vs Noise – A design and usability blog by 37signals.


• Crazy Egg – A simple tool that shows you how website visitors interact with your website.


• How to choose a website design agency – Choosing the right web design shop can be a tricky thing.

Internet Marketing

You can have a great product or service, but if no one sees it you will never make any money. Now this doesn’t mean you have to hire a marketing firm to help you out, but you could learn some basic things about Internet marketing.

• Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – The basics of search engine optimization.


• Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide – Interested in leveraging the social web? Here is what you need to know first.


• Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged On – Getting bloggers to blog on your company isn’t an easy thing. If you flow these rules and you should be successful at it.


• How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines – What you need to know if you want your corporate blog to get traffic.


• Web Analytics: An Hour A Day – Google’s analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, breaks down web analytics and the tracking needs you may need for your website.


• Dullest – The blog of Google’s main search engineer, Matt Cutts. Before you get into search engine optimization, you probably want to read his blog.


• MailChimp – Sending high quantities of emails isn’t an easy thing to do. In most cases your emails won’t go through unless you use a service like MailChimp.


• Banner Basics: Create Ads That Work – Banner advertising isn’t dead… you just have to learn how to effectively use them.

Hiring Employees

When you don’t have much cash in the bank, you can’t afford to make hiring mistakes. Sooner or later you are going to have to hire a few employees, so you better know what to look for.

• When to hire your first employee – if you are considering hiring an employee, you should read this first.


• 5 tips for hiring your first employee – Microsoft breaks down some useful tips for new companies.


• 9 Steps Before You Hire – 9 good tips for first time business owners.


• ADP – Payroll can be a hassle. ADP provides good payroll solutions for a very affordable price.


• How to Fire an Employee – If you hire a bad employee you better learn to fire them.


• When to Fire an Employee – Analyzing when it is time to accept that a performance improvement will not happen.


• Fully-Baked: The real cost of adding a new employee – Employees cost more than just their salaries.


• 201 ways to turn any employee into a star performer – A book that you should read if you want to maximize your employees output.


• Tsheets – Employee time tracking software.


• RescueTime – Employee time tracking and time management software.

Raising Venture Capital

Raising money can be a pain in the ass, especially if you have never done it before. If you want to raise money, you need to know the basic terminology that venture capitalists use, how to create a pitching deck, and how to get in front of venture capitalists.

• Vfinance – A directory of venture capitalists, angel investors, and business plan templates.


• Forbes Midas List – A list of the top 100 venture capitalists for the year 2009.


• The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint – Before you make a powerpoint that showcases your company and how much money you are raising, you should read this.


• How to Raise Venture Capital – An detailed overview on how you can raise money.


• Venture Hacks – A blog for entrepreneurs that discusses everything about venture capital.


• The Funded – An online community of entrepreneurs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide.


• How To Raise Venture Dollars – Ben Elowitz who has raised over 40 million dollars breaks down the tricks to raising money.


• Paul Graham – Awesome essays about venture capital and entrepreneurship.

General Business Advice

Other entrepreneurs have already solved many of the problems you are going to face. So when you run to into these generic problems, here are some websites you can turn to.

• Inspired Startup – Successful entreprenuer Andy Liu breaks down how to take your startup to the next level.


• The 50 best business blogs – There are thousands of business blogs, but here are the 50 best according to Times.


• The Top 10 Mistakes People Make When Starting A Business – You don’t want to make any of these mistakes.


• 10 Timeless Business Tips From 10 Millionaires – If you want to be a millionaire then you better learn from them.


• Solving Your Business Problems – Start solving your problems before they even take place.


• Struggling Entrepreneur – The Struggling Entrepreneur is a free podcast series that deals with the issues, challenges and problems of the individual who wants to be an entrepreneur, but who encounters a somewhat difficult path and appears to be struggling.


• Smarta – A support community for entrepreneurs.


• Litemind – Exploring ways to use your mind more efficiently.


• Mixergy – Successful CEOs share their experiences with the masses.

Living The Frugal Life

Although it may sound sexy to be an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs don’t make a ton of money. You are going to have to learn to live a frugal life so that you can continue to do what you love and not worry about paying your mortgage.

• Little Steps: 100 Great Tips For Saving Money For Those Just Getting Started


• 75 Painless Money-Saving Tips – Saving money can be painful, but here are 75 ways that are painless.


• Strapped For Cash? Billshrink Can Save You Thousands!


• High Yield Savings Accounts at 20 Largest Banks – If you are going to keep your money with a bank, might as well be a bank that has high yield savings accounts.


• Scrooge Strategy – 1 premium tip every week that helps you save money.


• How to Reduce Rent – Rent is probably your biggest expense, here are a few ways to reduce it.

Conclusion

There are a ton of resources out there for first time entrepreneurs, but these are the main ones I use. Do you have any other recommendations?

Update: If you feel that a specific site should be added to the entrepreneurs handbook, leave a comment and I will add it to the blog post.

I have started a handful of companies and every time I start another one, I always learn something new. If you are a new entrepreneur you are going to make a lot of mistakes, but hopefully you won’t make the big mistakes I made.

Don’t pick a stupid company name

My first two companies were called Advice Monkey and Advantage Consulting Services. The first company was a job board, but because “advice” was in the name people thought it was a career advice site and not a job board. And the name of my second company was so long that people couldn’t remember it.

The reasoning behind me picking those 2 names were that they started with an “A”. This way when someone listed out my company with all of my competitors, I was usually at the top of the list. Although the concept of being at the top of a list is a good thing, it shouldn’t be the main reason for picking a company name.

Whatever you do, make sure you put thought into picking your company name. And for some reason if you happen to pick a stupid company name, stick with it and don’t change it later on. If you happen to change your company name, you will lose the brand value that you have built up over the years.

Don’t hire a lawyer, hire a law firm

Not only is it important to hire a good lawyer, but you also want to hire a good law firm. Lawyers specialize in different types of law, such as corporate, tax, or litigation. When I hired my first lawyer, he was a one-man show and tried to do everything that I needed. He did a decent job, but he didn’t do a great job because he didn’t specialize in everything I was asking for.

After realizing that my current lawyer wasn’t too good, I decided to contact one of the biggest law firms, thinking that they could solve all my problems. But, I was too small of a client so my work wasn’t given priority, they charged me for every little thing, and the quality of their work sucked.

Sooner or later I found the perfect lawyer, Bill Bromfield, from Fenwick. He always goes out of his way to make sure I am protected, he doesn’t nickel and dime me for every little thing, and if he can’t do something I need, he recommends someone who can.

When looking for a lawyer, don’t just look for a really big law firm; look for a lawyer who will take care of you. Ideally if they work in a decent size law firm, that’s great because someone there will be able to solve your problems.

Hiring doesn’t solve all of your problems

There are four big mistakes I made when I hired people:

1. Just because someone did really well in their last job, it doesn’t mean they are going to do well in your company. For example, if they were a rock star sales person that worked for your competitor, it doesn’t mean they will be a rock star sales person for your company.


2. Hiring more employees is a lazy mans way of solving a problem. If you want to increase your sales, try to do it yourself before you hire someone. Yes in the long run you should hire employees if you want to grow your business, but if you don’t know what problems these employees will run in to, you will have a tough time managing them.


3. There are a lot more costs to an employee other than their salary. Office space, insurance, computers, and other expenses add up. The biggest of those expenses are probably management expenses to manage your employees.


4. Having virtual employees sounds great at first, but some people aren’t too efficient when they are virtual. If you have any virtual employees consider using efficiency tracking solutions like Rescue Time to see how your employees spend their time.

Slow and steady doesn’t win the race

You will love your first company like it was your own baby. You’ll want everything to be perfect and you will probably over think things. Don’t worry, this is a common way most first time entrepreneurs feel; I know I felt this way with Advice Monkey. But, when you see your first company as your baby, you start thinking with your emotions instead of using logic, which causes things move really slow.

Things don’t have to be perfect! Whatever you have now will improve over time, so get out there and do whatever it takes to make money. Because if you don’t someone else will.

Networking is the key to success

I didn’t know what I was doing with my first few companies. I didn’t have too many people that I could get advice from and I ended up winging a lot of things. After being in business for a few years you learn a few things, but you never stop making mistakes. Instead you end up making new mistakes.

If you want to be successful, you have to network. By going to conferences or local business networking events, you will learn a lot from other people. Plus if you are uncertain about specific things, you can always ask others for advice.

On the other hand if you don’t go to industry networking events, whom will you ask advice from? The best person to ask advice from is someone in your industry or your competition. Trust me, you will be amazed on how friendly your competition can be and what they are willing to share.

No one is god

When I started my first business a lot of people gave me advice because it was my first time around the block. Every time someone gave me advice I followed it because they were more successful than I was. But instead of this helping me, it caused me to run around in circles and make more mistakes.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t listen to people, but don’t take people’s word for everything. Do your own homework and make sure the advice people are giving you is right for your business.

Remember no one is god. I don’t care if they sold a company for a billion dollars, they probably don’t know your business as well as you.

Have a business partner

When you have to make all the decisions in your company by yourself, you are more likely to make mistakes. Although I had a business partner with my first business, he wasn’t active so I had to make all of the decisions myself.

Luckily I found a business partner, with the help of my sister, and we have worked together for over 6 years. The cool part about having a good business partner is that they can bring something to the table that you don’t have.

For example, my business partner is great at managing employees, coming up with our corporate strategy, and talking to investors. I on the other hand am good at sales and marketing.

It is never an easy thing to find a great business partner, so don’t rush it. Make sure you get to know the person before you go into business with them. You should also expect to get into arguments and heated discussions, so you better be prepared to deal with him or her.

Don’t be afraid of the unknown

Advice Monkey didn’t accept payments online because I didn’t know how to and I was afraid of all the problems that it could cause. I know that sounds stupid, but as a 16 year old and I didn’t know better.

My fear of accepting payments online was one of the biggest reasons my business failed. Instead of being afraid of it, I should have done research on accepting credit card payments and the implications of charge backs.

If you are afraid of something that you aren’t too familiar with, suck it up and deal with it. The worse that can happen is that you’ll stumble along the way.

Conclusion

It’s too late for me to go back in time to when I was starting out, but it isn’t too late for you. Hopefully you won’t make all of the big mistakes I made.

The chances are, you probably haven’t heard of the name Andrew Warner. And if you have, all you will see is a young man who throws local web conferences and interviews successful entrepreneurs. But the thing is, there is a lot more to Andrew Warner than meets the eyes.

Although Andrew spends most of his day interviewing successful entrepreneurs, he himself is more successful than the people he is interviewing. On top of that you can probably learn a lot more from listening to Andrew than if you listened to Internet celebrities such as Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin.

By no means should you stop listening and learning from Internet celebrities, but you need to start listening to people who are more like you. Andrew Warner wasn’t a rich kid who had everything handed to him. He had to return his old clothes to J.Crew so he could have enough money to start his first business, and it happens to be that company made 38.5 million dollars a year.

Here is the Andrew Warner Story!

So Andrew, tell me a bit about yourself?

I’m an entrepreneur and salesman living in a world that has little appreciation for either.

In elementary school, I had this little business where I bought packs of gum from the candy store and sold each piece to kids in my class. I bought each pack of 10 for 50 cents and sold the pieces for 10 cents each. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but I doubled my money and I was proud.

You think the teachers were proud? If a kid wanted to draw or write poetry or do anything artistic, they were full of praise. But as soon as they found out what I was doing, they shut me down. Sharing your candy with others if fine, but there was something disgusting to them about commerce.

Isn’t the same true on the Internet? Everyone cheers user-generated content. But if one of those users wants to profit from all the time he’s spending online, the community is turned off.

Ever since elementary school, I wanted to show that businesspeople are the heroes and encourage others to become entrepreneurs. After I cashed out of my Internet company, I dedicated myself to doing that.

How old were you when you started your first .com business, how much capital did you put into it, and where did you get the money from?

When I was 21, I discovered the business that would make me my first (mini) fortune. It was the mid-90s and I got this daily word-a-day email newsletter. I liked it, so I called up the guy who wrote it and said, “I love your email newsletter, but why aren’t you running ads in it? You can make some money.”

“You don’t understand,” he told me. “If I ran ads in it, it would taint my work.”

There were a bunch of email newsletter guys who felt that way. In their stupidity, I found an opportunity. My brother Michael is a brilliant coder, so I partnered up with him and in about a week, he whipped up a system that allowed us to manage our own email newsletter.

Within a year, we were making a profit of about $1,000 a day.

What inspired you to create an online greeting card business?

In the mid-90’s, people would subscribe to just about any email newsletter because email was still a novelty to them and they wanted to see something in their inboxes. As the excitement wore off, people were less likely to go out of their way to sign up for a service that sent them more email. We were constantly looking for new ways to get people to join. Michael is a fast developer, so when we saw something promising, he coded it up quickly and we measured the results.

Then I read a BusinessWeek article that changed my life. It talked about virtual gifts. There were web sites that let people email each other pictures of flowers. The concept seemed ridiculous to me, but it was insanely viral. So I showed it to Michael and in about a week he built what we simply called “virtual gifts.”

Mostly we copied the people in the BusinessWeek article, but we added one thing that I don’t think the others were doing. When users sent virtual flowers, we also let people join our mailing list.

Since flowers did well, we wanted to see what else people would want to send. We let them send virtual toys, gag-gifts, whatever. Eventually, we realized that greeting cards were the most popular, so we focused on that.

Suddenly we got hundreds of new subscribers every day–for free!

You took your business from 0 dollars in revenue to 38.5 million dollars. How did you get your revenue that high and how long did it take you to do that?

Great question!

Getting hundreds of people to send our greeting cards was exciting, but we were too ambitious to be satisfied with hundreds. We wanted millions.

So we took the basic functionality of our greeting card system and opened it up to other Web sites. Using Michael’s code, anyone could add a greeting card section to their site. And when their users’ sent out a greeting card, we asked them to join our newsletters.

Now we were getting thousands of people to join our newsletters. But remember, we wanted millions, not thousands.

That’s when we decided to pay web sites to use our system. We’d give them 10 cents every time one of their users sent out a greeting card. Now that was powerful. Suddenly millions of people were using our greeting card engine and our newsletter had millions of subscribers.

That was great, but as you can see, it’s also scary. Because for every million people who used our greeting card engine, we had to pay webmasters $100,000. We didn’t have that kind of money. The newsletter business was profitable, but revenue was slow. Every day, we made a fraction of a penny on each user. That added up to real money, but it took a long time to get that money. And the affiliates that sent us all those users didn’t want to wait.

So we needed a way to bring in money quickly.

This is where that salesmanship that teachers tried to beat out of me came in handy. I noticed that there were some venture-backed firms with a lot of money and an urgent need to get new users. So I told them that every time a user joined one of my mailings, I’d urge them to become members of the venture-backed company’s site.

They loved the idea so much that companies offered to pay us anywhere from $1 to $3 per user.

Millions of people used our greeting card engine each month. Venture-backed firms paid us $1-$3 every time we convinced those users to sign up for their services. You can see how that adds up nicely.

Your business had high profit margins. How did you keep your costs so low?

I’m amazed that you noticed our margins Neil.

Let’s do the math. We paid webmasters 10 cents every time one of their users used our greeting card engine. We got paid up to $3 by venture-backed firms every time we got those users to register for these venture-backed firms’ services. That’s how we got our margins.

Even when we raised our payouts to 25 cents, our margins were good.

But those are gross margins. From that, we had to pay for servers, salaries, office space and more.

I reached for the moon and rented a floor of office space in mid-town Manhattan. That alone cost over a million dollars a year.

So, in 2000, the only year we had our finances audited by Earnst & Young, our revenue was $38.5 million, but our net profit was $6.7 million.

You sold your company to Brad Greenspan, who was one of the MySpace founders. How did you go about selling your company?

We sold the business in pieces to people we did business with over the years.

Netcreations, for example, bought our opt-in email database. They were the leaders in that space and managed that part of our business, so they knew what it was worth and how to run it.

Brad Greenspan bought the last of the business. He was one of the few people who discovered our company on his own. He must have been monitoring traffic rating services to see whose traffic was spiking. As soon as our business hit his radar, he called me and tried to buy me out.

I turned him down, and over the years we became both competitors and friends. We competed fiercely with each other, but we also did some mutually beneficial business deals.

Brad’s company had a super-smart group of guys working in it. So when I needed to move on, I made a deal with him. I knew his guys could run the business without needing me to stick around through a long transition period.

What advice would you give to someone who doesn’t have much money and wants to start a business?

I hate the pansies who whine that “it takes money to make money.” No it doesn’t! It takes a sense of mission. If you’re on a mission, you’ll find a way.

When I didn’t have money to start my company, I called up J.Crew and asked if they’d take back the clothes I bought from them over the years and give me a refund. Believe it or not, they said, “sure.” That J.Crew refund check helped put me in business.

The problem with most people who want to start companies is that they’re not real entrepreneurs because they’re not enterprising.

I have shelves full of biographies or great businesspeople who all started with nothing but somehow found a way to build their businesses.

Any last words to the Quick Sprout readers?

Keep learning from others. We’re fortunate in the Internet business because successful entrepreneurs are willing help startups. We have to take advantage of that.

In college, I worked on Wall Street. The guy who made it in the market had zero interest in helping out the younger guys coming up.

Today I run a Web site called Mixergy, where successful Internet entrepreneurs teach others what they learned. There is no way that anything like that would happen on Wall Street. It’s too competitive and people are too ruthless.

We need to be grateful for this environment and soak up as much knowledge as possible.

If you watch the video above, you’ll notice a gentleman by the name of Nick Vujicic, who was born without any arms or legs. When he was 8 years old he wanted to end his life because he felt hopeless. But the thing is, he didn’t. Instead of hating his life, he learned to embrace it and live life to the fullest.

Just like Nick there are going to be times in your life when things aren’t on your side. The world is going to come crashing down on you and you won’t want to get up. This has already happened to you in the past and it is going to happen to you again in the future. It happens to all of us.

Now the next time this happens to you, I don’t want you to feel depressed or hopeless, I want you to suck it up and get right up. You are going to have roadblocks in your life, but you shouldn’t let them slow you down. No matter what they are, you need to keep on moving forward!

I can tell you from first hand experiences that things can turn around for you. Just look at me, most of the businesses I started failed and at one point I had a million dollars in debt. The majority of my businesses didn’t succeed, and after a while I wanted to give up. My friends and family kept on pushing me to move forward and sooner or later one of my businesses did really well. That one success made 4 years worth of failure worthwhile.

The thing I want you to learn from my experience and Nick’s, is that it doesn’t matter how you start, it matters how you finish.

So the next time you are feeling down and want to give up, I recommend watching that video of Nick. I hope he is as much of an inspiration to you as he is to me.

Times are tough! Getting a higher paying job or a second job is a great way to make some extra money, but it probably is not a realistic solution for you. A more realistic solution is to make smarter spending decisions. As the saying goes, “it is easier to save money than to make it”.

You don’t have to change your lifestyle by not buying things you want, but instead, try to save money by buying things that are on sale or look for better deals.

Billshrink

Recently, I was turned onto a new service called Billshrink. The cool thing about it is that it can help you save money on your credit card bill and your cell phone plan, without changing your spending habits or cutting back on your cell phone minutes.

Cell Phones
When you first sign up for Billshrink you are asked to enter in your cell phone number and your carrier password so that they can analyze your cell phone plan. Here is what mine looked like:

If you look at the picture above, you can see that Billshrink analyzes:

• How many minutes you are paying for every month versus the actual number you are using.


• The number of phones on your cell phone plan.


• If you use a data package.


• If you use text messaging.


• The areas in which you make calls from and the provider signal strength in those areas.


• The networks you most frequently call (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint).


• What times you most frequently use your cell phone.

Based on these factors Billshrink tells you which cell phone plan/provider you can switch to and the amount you would save every month by switching. For example I am with Verizon and I pay $264.75 every month. If I switch to AT&T, I would save $2,968 over 2 years and that even includes the cost of breaking my Verizon contract. I know that may not sound like a lot of money to you, but that is roughly a years worth of cell phone payments.

Credit Cards
I currently have a Wells Fargo Visa credit card that I use to spend an average of $2050 every month. Most of that money goes towards entertainment, airfare and shopping. My credit score is good, and I pay my bill off in full every month.

What I found out about my credit card is that just because there isn’t any annual fee, doesn’t mean it is good. The Wells Fargo Visa card doesn’t have a good rewards program.

Because I am a jet setter Billshrink recommended that I switch to a United Airlines credit card. By doing this I will earn an extra $832 worth of rewards point within a year, which is two or three free domestic flights.

Deals

On top of using Billshrink, you should always look for deals. You can still buy what you want (within reason), but try to find a good price when making purchases.

Monthly Bills
In most cases there isn’t much you can do to save money on your monthly bills without changing your lifestyle. For example, if you want to save money on your electricity bill you can’t switch to a different provider, you have to use less electricity. But the thing is there are two monthly bills that you can easily reduce:

1. Television – chances are subscribing to satellite or cable TV. Check out your plan and figure out if you actually watch all of those channels. If you don’t, cancel the channels you don’t watch. Other than that, you should play satellite and cable TV providers against each other. Call them up and tell them what another provider is offering you until you get a good deal.


2. High speed Internet – there are tons of different high speed Internet options for you, all you have to do is find the cheapest and best one. Just like with satellite and cable TV providers, you can pin them up against each other. On top of that consider getting a lower high speed Internet package if you aren’t using it to download files. Trust me, you won’t notice a difference in speed.

Clothing
If you have a shopping addiction like me, you can save tons of money if you buy your cloths online compared to going to a store. For example, I shop at Banana Republic, Nordstroms, and Saks Fifth Avenue a lot. So instead of buying clothes from their retail stores, I buy them from their Internet store.

If you buy clothes from the Internet, you can use coupon codes to get good bargains. Here are some of the websites I use to find coupon codes:

• Retailmenot – find coupon codes for 20,000 online retail stores.


• Coupon Album – coupons for every online apparel store.


• eBay – you will be amazed how cheap 20% off coupons and gift cards go for on eBay.

Electronics
Best Buy and other electronics stores are a great place to buy gadgets if you want to get ripped off. Instead of going to the store to buy electronics, you should go to the store to figure out what you really like and want to buy.

After you figure out what you are going to buy, search blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo, and CrunchGear for special offers. On top of that you want to search price comparison engines like PriceGrabber, check popular ecommerce stores like Amazon, and browse eBay to see if you find a steal.

Conclusion

There are a ton of ways you can save money, you just have to get creative. What I propose to you is to leave a comment with a creative way you can save money without changing your lifestyle. Whoever comes up with the best way to save money will win a $100 from me.

A winner will be announced by 12am, Monday night (PST).

Update: The winner is Network 21.