Category: Finding Customers
Go Mobile or Go Home
Today’s modern consumers are changing the way they interact with brands. They are changing the way they do business, and they are changing the way they obtain and process information. Is your company hearing what they are saying? The Modern Consumer As a business owner, understanding who your target audience is may only be half [...]
Hacking Elance – The Step by Step Guide to How I Made $23,700 in 4 Weeks
At 24 quit my dead end restaurant job and launched a SAT test prep company. Things were going great and business was going well. But preparing students for a comprehensive exam is no easy task. It’s actually quite exhausting. Gradually I began to wonder if there was anything I could do that would: a.) Allow [...]
Your Ability to Tweet Doesn’t Make You a Guru
Too many companies endanger their brands’ reputations by falling victim to opportunists who claim to be social media “experts” without any understanding of social strategy. At their most innocuous, faux social gurus can rack up a bill without providing your company any real benefit. At their worst, a few social missteps can confuse and alienate [...]
Creating a Crash Course for Your Industry
You don’t have time to keep up on industry trends. You’re an entrepreneur, marketing manager, or HR executive, with a schedule jam-packed with the day-to-day activities of your career — not sticking your head in whitepapers on your industry for hours on end. Believe me, I feel your pain. Running Influence & Co., I constantly [...]
Finding Small Ways to Solve Big Problems – How Leaders Can Get Unstuck
Whether you’re working at a startup, a mid-sized company, or an enterprise organization, leaders at all levels typically find themselves stuck at one point or another. I’ve interacted with my fair share of founders and executives across industries, and they all encounter the following: a looming, lingering doubt that keeps their organizations from being great. [...]
Will It Walk? Determining Whether Your Business Idea Has Legs
Every problem is an opportunity because a good business idea can lie in the solution. Most successful businesses begin with someone merely solving a problem. Chances are if you’re experiencing difficulties with something, then others are, too. If you solve that problem for yourself, you can probably make things easier for everyone — and it [...]
How to Survive a Conference Where You Don’t Know Anyone
I am sure most of you have been in a situation similar to mine. Last week, I attended Social Slam in Knoxville, Tenn. I knew absolutely no one who was going to the conference, but I decided to attend because I believed it was relatively close to my new home in Charleston, S.C. (Seven hours [...]
Kansas City’s Motto: Go Big or Go Home #BigKC
Kansas City is suddenly “the next hot thing” in entrepreneurs’ minds. In fact, Kansas City just landed on the Top 30 list for Under30CEO’s Best Cities for Young Entrepreneurs. It’s not surprising that companies like Google are flocking to this Midwestern town — big things are happening under its big skyline. Google launched the beta [...]
Give More, Get More: A Guide to Smart Collaboration with Your Advertising Agency
“We need a cross-platform, transformational digital campaign that reaches our target audience (24- to-35-year-old unmarried males interested in making hobby airplanes). Oh, it needs to be disruptive. And we need to track the ROI. Can you throw some social media in there as well?” This might be the initial discussion between an agency and client, [...]
Advertising on a Bootstrapper’s Budget? 15 Tips for Making It Work
How should bootstrappers allocate resources for marketing and advertising? How do you figure out what’s reasonable when your company is still new? The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free [...]
