First, look around and identify the largest group of people you can reach easily. If you are a member of the chandler’s union and you know how to reach several thousand candle makers free, they’d be a good group to start with.

Second, study those people and figure out what one thing they want most. For example, your candle makers may need more effective promotion, a cheaper source for wax or new wick materials that burn more slowly or more brightly.

Third, figure out how to give those people what they want. As you develop your solution, show it to people in this group and confirm that you are developing exactly what they need and what they are willing to pay for.

Fourth, begin producing and delivering the solution on a small scale. Let your profits drive growth for as long as possible, then work with outside funders to scale your business over time.

That is the easiest and fastest way to build a successful business quickly. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Find a group of people who want something and then give it to them.

Why Don’t People Build Companies This Way?

Most people start a business with a pretty firm idea of the solution they want to sell, the way they want to sell it and the people they want to sell it to.

Sadly, the products and services most of us want to sell represent our personal interests and passions far more than they represent the needs and interests of any large group of people around us.

The way we want to sell our products and services has more to do with what would be convenient to us, and the people we want to sell to are those we find interesting and they may or may not have the money to buy what we want them to buy..

In all sincerity, most of us start a business having made a huge number of decisions we are quite passionate about with little regard for any reality outside ourselves. Letting go of some offering the market just seems inclined to reject over and over again is the best way to get your business over a hurdle.

Do You Really Have to Give Everything Up?

The practical advice outlined above seems to indicate it’s necessary to give up everything you like most about your business in a search for revenue, but the truth is you can usually get by with giving up less.

If you are willing to change your product or service, you can usually keep the cool people you want to serve. If you want to keep your product or service, you may, over time, find a group of people that needs it.

Arbitrarily retaining one or more elements of a business that aren’t working won’t necessarily put you out of business, it will just slow your development and make the process of getting your enterprise off the ground slower and harder.

On the other hand, building a business based on a product or service you like, or for a target market you happen to like supporting, can make owning a business more enjoyable than running a business based on what elements come most easily to hand, even if the latter enterprise quickly becomes more profitable.

If Your Business is Struggling

Take a moment and think about your business. Consider its target market, what you are offering that group of people, and your current sales.

What are the arbitrary or “convenient” elements in your current business model. What important characteristic could you change about your product or service that would make it more valuable to those you serve? Who else can your solution work for? How would changing those elements impact sales? Answering these questions when your business is struggling will often help it struggle less.

Related posts:

1. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating & Testing Business Models
2. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Getting High Value Products & Services in Front of Key Individuals in Large Companies
3. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Proof of Concept

For artists who need to find a way to eat as well as do their best work, and for those who want to support artists by helping them sell what they create, this appetite for the novelty and originality represents a serious hurdle.

This is why those who market young artists frequently tell them to “pay attention to what the market wants” and to “look at what’s selling”.

The Worst Possible Advice?

Intuitively most artists understand trying to “follow the market” is terrible advice.

One of the few “rewards” an artist can guarantee himself is the freedom to do the work they enjoy doing. As long food, water and creative materials exist, the artist can work and enjoy a great deal of satisfaction in the freedom to express their vision and their emotions through their art.

What’s more, not being able to do work they care about has been known to drive artists insane. While some people feel only a limited need to express themselves through writing, drawing, painting, or one of a hundred other creative outlets, for others the pressure to reveal ideas and emotions through original work is overwhelming. It is simply not an option to forgo creating that work, and it is certainly not an option to “create the kind of art people want”.

“Paying attention to the market” in order to “create what sells” means creating derivative work There’s not much value in an artist who churns out variations on ubiquitous themes in a mass produced world. While such artists can often make a subsistence living, they will rarely if ever find great success.

Every work of art, or piece of content, an artists produces defines their brand to the world. If a modern Diego Rivera confines his work to the 24″x36″ paintings that can be hung on a wall because that’s what most people buy, how will anyone ever find out he can create those vast murals.

How can artists, and those who work to support them, find their market?

The first step is understanding that while an artist may experiment with the techniques and icons other artists have discovered, as Andy Warhol did with Campbell’s Soup Can’s and someone else’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe, the message in each piece must represent the artist’s own voice because bad copies of good art don’t sell well.

Lots of writers wrote books about witches and wizards but JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter and it wasn’t by copying someone else’s work. Instead she developed an entirely unique world and invited people into it. Michaelangelo didn’t copy the Pieta. Picasso had no interest in making pictures that looked like anyone else’s. Each of those artists found their “voice” and it is that voice that people came to know, love and value.

Second, an artist must understand each piece they do has to be their best work. People know the difference between good work and great work, can differentiate between well considered insightful work and things crafted quickly and badly. Each piece an artist makes goes out into the world as an advertisement for the artist. If an artist produces and distributes an ocean of great work a large audience may well find him. If he never fully develops some exceptional examples of his work for people to appreciate, how can he ever be discovered?

Finally, it is important to watch the market and see what the public is buying, but not because an artist needs to change their work to fit the market, but because they need to recognize related or similar work from others and see who buys those pieces.

Artists who watch the market should be looking at the people who buy their brand of art and the reasons they buy what they buy.

If a sculptor circulates through galleries and attends art fairs every weekend, they will begin to identify their customers through the purchases those customers make. They and their customers will tend to like the same things.

In time they may well find a gallery or an art show that caters to the kind of people the artist intuitively understands and wants to serve, whether it is the bohemian hipsters or the London Elite. Watching how other work is priced, packaged and sold will make it easier for an artist to understand how to sell their own work.

All this advice holds true for writers, directors and filmmakers as well as painters, sculptors, digital animators and architects. The media may change, but every professional artist has a voice and to be successful every artist must learn where to put their work so their audience can find it.

It’s All Easier Than it Sounds

Having the right perspective when it comes to marketing and sales makes becoming a successful creative professional much easier. You come to understand that your job is not to sell out but to search for and find the people who intuitively find what you have to say, and how you say it, interesting.

Related posts:

1. Doug Richard to Instruct & Mentor UK Writers, Artists, Filmmakers & Other Creative Professionals for 1 Year
2. Practical Q & A: Pricing, Marketing & Sales
3. An Entrepreneur’s Quick Guide to Closing Online Sales

Watch Video: UK Startups Benefit Most from Inbound Marketing

What does this mean?

It means that for people to find you, you must be easy to find through search engines.  And, to be brutally frank, people must be able to find you through Google because more than 90% of all searches begin there.

Given that customers will find you through Google, and you must be easy to find, it follows that you must understand exactly how your customers will search for you.

Generally they will look for:

• Your company name if they know it
  School for Startups, Apple, Microsoft, Gucci
• The names of your products and services if they know them
  Big Mac, 7-Up, iPad, iPhone
• The keywords that describe what they want
  Designer Motorcycle Clothes, Ethical Florist, Sheffield Gifts, Sheffield Events Planning

To be found by customers, and all the other important people who search for you including potential strategic partners and possible investors, you must ensure that Google ranks your business at the top of the first page when people use this information to search for you.

IMPORTANT: More than 40% of people click on the first non-ad link that comes up after they do a Google Search.  So try to make sure you always come up first in search rankings.

How to get found when people search for your company by name:

• Incorporate your company name into your domain name.
• Make sure that your domain name is in the same country as your customers.
• Ensure that those who link to you do so by company name.  The “anchor text” which is the text inside a link, matters.  If the link to your bed sheet website is  I bought my bedsheets here, instead of Best Bed Sheets, Google can get confused.
• If your business caters to local customers, list your business in Google Places.

How to Make Sure People Can Find You by Product or Service Name

For most people, a product or service name is easily confused with a company name. Most people probably can’t tell you who makes Twinkies, so it’s a good thing they can look up www.twinkies.com to find out that Hostess makes them.

• Give your products and services unique names.  Crispy Cream Donuts is hard to trademark, but Krispy Kreme isn’t.  Krispy Kreme is also easy to search for online.
• Create domains for each product or service and populate each with unique content for that product or service.
• Make sure people link to products and services from other sites using the correct name of the product or service and the correct domain names.   You can also have these domainsjust redirect people to the correct pages on your corporate site. For example www.itunes.com links to http://www.apple.com/itunes/ if people visit it from the United States.

How to be Easy to Find by Keyword

We’ll briefly address this topic here, but the bulk of the content on this site addresses this issue.  Your key assignment is to determine the keywords your paying customers use to describe what you sell.  There are several ways to do this.  The best way is:

• Ask them what words they used to search for you.
• Ask them how they describe your business to others.
• Ask them to describe exactly what they are looking for

You only need to ask a few dozen customers, or folks you’d like to be customers, to give you this feedback to get important feedback.  It is worth the effort . . .

If, for some reason, this isn’t possible, you may try the following methods instead.

• Configure your website to use Google Analytics, then see what keywords people seem to find your site using.  The problem is that if your site is mis-indexed, they will be coming from keywords that only “kind of” work.
• Accurately document what your company sells and delivers, then see what keywords Google sees on the page. The problem with this is that how you describe what you create and sell may not be how the market describes it. That means that what Google sees on your page will simply be a record of the bad keywords you’ve already foisted on yourself.
• Decide how people will probably search for you, then incorporate those terms through out your web pages.  This kind of raw guessing is how most people pick keywords, and its pretty much the worst way to do it. You are not a customer for your products and services, so you aren’t the best one to know what language your customers search for it with.

The following methods work, but the disadvantage is that the keywords you end up with are those you already use.  You may sell “holiday cottages”, but in truth your customers may be searching for “holiday homes” when they stumble across you.

If you don’t have a website already online, you can build your very first batch of keywords your very first web pages by following the steps below.

• Write Down
  • A description of your product or service.
  • The name of the product or service
  • The names of your competitors
  • The names of their products and services
• Create a list of keywords based on this information
• Use the Google External Keyword Tool to look for frequently sought keywords related to your project that don’t have much competition. Incorporate those search terms into the page titles and text on your websites.

You may start out thinking you make “Designer Bags” then based on number of searches come to think you make “Designer Purses” because that earns more searches.

Being Easy to Find Takes Work

There are hundreds of billions of searches on Google every month, and everyone on earth is looking for almost everything they need online.  This means that an ocean of customers is searching for what you sell.  If you can just make yourself very easy to find . . . you’ll have a very successful business.

Related posts:

1. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Search Engine Marketing & Your Company’s Name
2. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Search Engine Marketing Site & Page Structure Matters
3. An Entrepreneur’s Quick Guide to Closing Online Sales

Get a Book into Amazon's Bookstore by Publishing Through CreateSpace

Writing, publishing and selling a book with today’s technology can take as little as a month.  In this article we review specific steps you can take to design, write, publish, distribute and promote your book profitably.

1. Identify your target market and determine what they need to know and how they need to learn it.  Note: Putting this step first insures that your book will make money, and if you find it difficult then you will find it even more difficult to sell a conceptually flawed book once it is published.
   1. You will have completed this step when you put a 400-word description and an outline of your book in front of prospective customers and they ask if they can pre-order a copy.
   2. Make sure the title of your book incorporates the keywords your target market searches Google for when they want to find the kind of information you are providing in your book.
   3. If you are already selling your expertise, you will find creating the title, description and outline your target market likes fairly easy.  If you need to become an expert in order to write your book, this step will take longer.
2. Start writing your book.
   1. The big secret to writing a book is to write an outline, write the text, then edit the text. If you try to write without an outline you’ll get lost, leave stuff out and repeat yourself.  If you to write and edit at the same time, you’ll never finish because you’ll be second guessing yourself constantly.  If you have something well structured, completely, and accurately written you will find you can edit it after the fact.  You can also find an editor who can clean up what you’ve written. Never write and edit at the same time, and don’t edit a book chapter by chapter. Write it all, then edit it all.  Its faster and the result is almost always better.
   2. Start with the outline members of your target market have already approved, and write the easy chapters first, write the harder chapters last.
   3. Your objective is to write as quickly, clearly and effectively as possible. Don’t worry about the length of chapters, whether or not you are writing in the passive tense, or that your book seems too informal.
3. Once the book is written, give it to a professional editor and have them edit the text so it reads well You can find editors who work for as little as $200 to edit a well written book. You can spend $2K to have them rewrite a book for you.
   1. Elance.com is a great place to find editors who will work under contract and be paid based on milestones.
   2. Make sure that at each milestone you get a copy of the .Doc file that contains your book.  Alternatively you may write your book in Google Docs and have your editor make their changes there.  Google Docs has a feature that will let you see the edits made on each session on a shared document and that is a great way to track the work being done over time.  You can also roll back to previous versions if you like.
   3. When the book is finished, show a copy to a couple of members of your target market.   See if they have comments or edits you want to incorporate.
   4. Make sure your contract with your editor explicitly transfers all rights in the work he delivers to you as a “work for hire” transaction.
4. After the book is written and well-edited, start creating graphics for each chapter that illustrate the key ideas in each chapter.  Sketch them on paper or create them in Google Doc’s using the presentation or drawing tools.  Your objective for each image is clarity and simplicity.  Two or three simple images are far better than one complex image.
5. Hire a professional graphic artist to turn the pictures into 300 DPI images at 8”x9”. You may want to have them design a front and back cover for your book as well.  Make sure your contract explicitly transfers all rights in the work your designer delivers to you as a “work for hire” transaction.
6. Hire a professional book layout professional layout your book in Adobe InDesign.  You want them to deliver all source files and a finished PDF of the book interior that incorporates all your text and artwork. You want to make sure all the fonts are embedded in the PDF file.  This is critical because you are going to publish this book using CreateSpace.com or LuLu.com and if you want to completely control the fonts used they must be embedded in the document.   Make sure your contract explicitly transfers all rights in the work your book design professional delivers to you as a “work for hire” transaction.
7. Upload a copy of your book to the US Copyright Office.  For details on copyright, and the specific protections it provides you, go to www.copyright.gov or your own national copyright registration organization. Generally speaking, in most countries you own the copyright on your book from the moment you capture it in a tangible media, but you get specific statutory rights by registering it.
8. Go to CreateSpace.com or LuLu.com and create your book for free. Titles you upload onto CreateSpace.com give you a 45% royalty when people purchase them through Amazon.  You can make an even higher percentage on books you order from CreateSpace or LuLu.com and deliver directly. There are many Print on Demand (POD) book publishers. If you don’t like CreateSpace or LuLu for some reason, find another firm you do like through Google.  Note, make sure that whoever you publish your book through lets you retain complete ownership of the book. Don’t sign any agreement that says anything else.
   1. Upload your book interior PDF and your book front and back cover.
   2. Enter the description for your book, set a price for your book, and specify if it will be distributed only in print or available for download as well.
   3. Order a copy of your book.
9. Examine your copy of the book. Allow others to read it and suggest final edits.  Don’t feel compelled to take everyone’s advice, but if you get the same comment from seeral members of your target market you should probably make the fix.
10. Start sending copies of your book to members of your target market.  Ask for quotes. Incorporate their quotes into the content on LuLu and CreateSpace.  You will find that LinkedIn makes it easy to find people who may be interested in reviewing and purchasing your book. If you offer to send someone a free copy to review they will usually accept the offer.
11. Write press releases that incorporate quotes from those you’ve given the book to into press releases.  Write additional press releases for any “bulk sales” you make to schools or organizations Publish the press releases using free press release services.  Ensure the keywords your target market would use to search for this book appear in the title of the press release.  If your book is commented on by a well known Celebrity or purchased by an organization, incorporate their name into the title.  You can find a list of free press release sites on the School for Startups website.
12. Build a Word Press website on a domain name relevant to your book that incorporates the keywords your target market searches Google for.
    1. Make sure the domain name incorporates keywords and phrases relevant to your target market.  Post your press releases, comments and reviews as they become available.
    2. Make sure the categories on your site, and the titles of each article use keywords and phrases of interest to your target market.
    3. Make sure your website has a link that connects your website to where the book can be ordered.
    4. Ensure that it uses tools like Tweet Old Post and other social media plugins to promote your book through sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Linkedin.

That sums up the steps required to write, design, layout, publish, distribute and promote a book.  It really is possible to get a book out the door in 30 days if you have a good background in the topic you are writing about and have content you can pull from white papers you’ve drafted, training materials you’ve written, presentations you’ve given, etc.

Obviously you can hire a “ghost writer” to write a book for publication under your name.  You can also hire someone who will draft your book chapter by chapter as you outline what you want to say. You can, if you are more comfortable speaking, record the text for your book and have it transcribed.  Many people find this the easiest way to write a book.

Given all these solutions, there is no reason that you can’t write and publish a book profitably should you be so inclined.  The process is simple, straight-forward, and it can be very profitable if what you have to say is important and you take the time to ensure it is said very well.

Related posts:

1. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Marketing Well At Little Expense
2. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to SEO Through Press Releases
3. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Search Engine Marketing Site & Page Structure Matters

Are entrepreneurs born or made? — Bryan

Entrepreneurs are always made.

People don’t come out of the womb knowing how to pitch, to sell, to design. One may make the case that some folks seem to want to be entrepreneurs more than others.  But that may be because they learn, sooner than others, what entrepreneurs do.  In a larger sense . . . no one “is” any profession or skill. That’s a convenient fiction. No one is a writer or is a salesman.  People write and sell.  You can master entrepreneurship by caring enough to acquire and master the skills you need to build businesses.  Get to work

How can you detach yourself from a venture? How to you evaluate a business that you’ve been emotionally attached to? — Keith

Actually, we have a great article about that. You can find it here.  But the short answer is that lots of entrepreneurs start businesses because they have “missions” they are passionate about.

Perhaps they want to bring clean water to villages. Perhaps they want to open the world of computers to senior citizens.  Maybe they want to teach people to dance.

Sometimes their vision of how to achieve that objective is so narrow and so flawed, they have a hard time of making a business of it.  When this happens they start a business and it fails to thrive.

The Market is a great educator.

The visionary entrepreneur has to realize that businesses are ephemeral.  They come and go. Your commitment to your mission can go on as long as you like.

Within that context, any business you create to support your mission is ephemeral.  You can reformulate an existing business in a new way, or close an existing business in order to start a new one based on a different financial model.  For those with very philanthropic objectives, you may even consider creating a social enterprise, cooperative or charity . . . .

Or perhaps you will find that the best way to achieve your mission is not starting an enterprise, but joining an existing one that is doing what you’d like to do.

I think you’ll find, given this perspective, it’s easy to let go of a business. It’s like letting go of business cards you don’t use anymore, or dropping that fax number you no longer need.  If it’s the work you really care about . . . you probably don’t have to give that up just cause a given business proves unfeasible.

Is the reason for focusing on internet based businesses because that’s where the future is or because it’s the type of venture the Cambridge set are likely to be ‘into’ and as such is the best fit for the attendees. — Martin

Well, actually, neither of those reasons are why we focus on the Internet.

Basically, folks who have a business need customers.  Very broadly speaking, there are two ways to get them.

• You can call people and knock on their doors and try to tell them about your product.
• You can put your product where people who are looking for it are likely to find it.

The second option, sometimes called “in-bound marketing” is very cheap and cost effective, and the Internet is the cheapest “in-bound” marketing solution around.  If you do your job right, you can put your product where people who want to buy what you sell can find it.

So . . . we focus on how to put your products and services on the Internet.  In most cases it is the cheapest and fastest way for many of our entrepreneurs to get access to hundreds, thousands or millions of customers.  The Build Your Business Now toolkit that we built to support the course explains how ot create the simple site you need in just a few hours.

Market segment analysis. Instead of searching on Google, are there any specific places to retrieve this type of information? — Katherine

Well, we think you’ll be happier looking on Google (and perhaps other search engines) for information on market segments because getting the data there is fast and easy and you know it is timely.

For most businesses, the easiest to reach market of “ready to buy” customers are those who are looking for your service on Google because they are ready to buy.  If someone goes to Google and types in “Dog Grooming”, chances are its not an academic search.  They actually want a Dog Groomer.  If some customers search for “Sidcup Dog Groomers” others search for “Chislehurst Dog Groomer” and still others search for “Organic Dog Groomers South East”, that’s a person who is almost certainly ready to buy.

You can also look at sites that you think offer competing services and see how Google sees them from a keyword standpoint.  Go to http://www.google.com/sktool/ and http://www.google.com/trends to explore your market segments and related keywords.

Pricing: how much is it worth to them? … I recognize that the price of a product should be set to what a person will pay, not set to what they say they might be willing to pay. There could potentially be a large gap between how different entities value a product or service. Apart from asking prospects, apart from only looking at competitors’ pricing, what other tips would you suggest for setting price? (coming from the perspective of an internet based, B2B SaaS model with a product attempting to resegment an existing market with a niche strategy) – Steve

Pricing is always a matter of trial and error and you’ll almost always leave some money on the table. If you check out the Build Your Business Now Toolkit that was distributed after the class, you’ll see some practical advice and steps for figuring out price.

Basically you have to identify your target markets, see what they are paying for competing solutions, and price yourself in that zone.  If there are no real competing solutions, you have to look at what NOT having your solution costs them.  Using those two “ballparking” procedures will usually get you in your zone pricewise for each market segment . . . and then the issue is making sure each segment sees the right pricing.

Related posts:

1. Practical Q&A With Doug Richard: Mentoring, Recruiting & Seeing Opportunities
2. Start Here! STARTING & GROWING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS
3. Starting a Business: The 3 Things I Really Believe

And nothing happens.

Except, perhaps, that your sales fall off a bit because you’ve spent so much time creating and marketing your website that you’ve neglected to make the contacts you usually use to generate business.

Take heart. Making your website do what it is supposed to do doesn’t cost much and doesn’t take long. It has never been easier to sell products and services globally.

Start by Making it Easy to Place Orders

Having a website doesn’t mean you no longer have to market and sell your products. What it does mean is that you can have an order taker standing around 24/7 to take people’s money.

If your objective is actually to close sales online, the process of ordering your products and services online has to be effortless for your customers. If they go to your site knowing what they want, they should be able to find it in two clicks and they should be able to order it in one more.

If this is not how your website is working, then you have found a key reason why your sales are not what they should be.

Sometimes the problem is your page design. It spends more time talking about you and your team than getting people to the products and services they want to buy. Having articles and blogs online does help bring people to your site, and can keep them there until they decide to shop, but a sluggish or confusing ordering process “unsells” people. It is so easy to get online commerce right these days that most folks have no confidence in people who get it wrong.

How do you make placing orders though your site easy?

Paypal makes it easy to create “Buy Now” buttons for any product on any page on your site. People trust PayPal. The PayPal checkout process is quick, secure, and predictable. If you have under ten simple products to sell on your site, just stick Buy Now buttons on your pages and you should see sales go up. If your products require people to pick sizes, choose colors, select shipping options, or specify other parameters, Buy Now buttons probably aren’t the best choice.

Online ecommerce solutions like Yahoo Stores, Pro Stores or EventBrite, make creating full featured catalogs of products and services easy. You can be online in minutes with these online store solutions, even if you nothing about HTML or programming. These tools handle size, color, shipping and most other purchase options quite handily.

Open source catalog solutions like Magento work well for people who just believe, very strongly, that they have to host their catalog on their own servers. You can install them in a matter of hours, add your products and services to them, and start taking sales in under a couple of days. You can customize their look and feel completely.

It almost never makes sense for a small business to create a custom online sales solution when there are so many that can be had for next to nothing, that customers already trust, and which are so easy to customize. Your time will be better spent driving traffic to your fully functional site.

Marketing & Selling Products Online

Once you can take orders for your products and services on your site, you can begin pouring customers onto the site to take orders from.

If you have been taking orders for your products offline with some frequency, then you already know who your customers are, why they buy your products and where they can be found. You can tell your existing pool of customers your website address and you’ve effectively given them an order taker they can turn to at any time to get your products and services.

When you want to get new customers via the internet, your understanding of who your customers are and why they buy your products will remain, for the most part, unchanged. You will just need to determine where your customers lurk online.

If your products and services are delivered to local populations, then you may find tools like Google’s Local Business Center useful. It lets you geographically locate your business in Google Maps, so that when people in your geographical area search Google for “florist”, “plant nursery”, “child care center” or “computer repair” a link to your business pops up along with a pointer to your location on a map. This gets them to your page where they can place an order.

If your products and services are, by and large, location independent then you will use other mechanisms to drive traffic to your site. You may decide to:

• Place ads on Google and other search engines that will display when potential customers are searching for the products and services you provide.
• Use Search Engine Optimization techniques (SEO) to get more links to your business high in the normal listings for your target keywords.
• Place advertisements on the websites that your customers go to for news or entertainment.
• Advertise in print magazines or newspapers that your customer read.
• Work to have articles and blogs written about your product or service by writers that your customers read.

If, after several weeks, you find that your website is not helping your company earn more, the cause is almost invariably one of the following:

• Your site makes it hard to place an order.
• Something about your site makes customers doubt that you can fulfill their order (inaccurate information, misspellings, unattractive layout or design, etc.)
• Your site doesn’t provide the information customers need in order to decide to buy.
• The wrong people are visiting your site because your marketing is funneling the wrong people there.
• No one is visiting your site because your online marketing is ineffective or non-existent.

If your website is equipped with a page counter or Google analytics toolset that lets you track how many people are coming to your site, what pages they look at, when and if they click the order button then you should be able to discern which of these issues is effecting your online sales.

A methodical approach to resolving these problems will result in increased revenue for your site.

Closing Sales Online

In designing and developing a functional website to sell your products it pays to take a very analytical, very practical, very limited approach to deployment.

Start with ensuring that purchase of a product is a matter of a few clicks, that customer’s you’ve met in the real world feel comfortable buying through your online interface, then work on driving more traffic to your site so more customers can be closed. Make sure it is very easy for people to ask you questions about your products and services, and that you request feedback on the order process after every sale. Your online customers are the best people to provide you with advice and guidance on how to sell more online.

Related posts:

1. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Controlling Your Identity Online
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I launched my first commercially profitable website in 1996 when the Internet first started to “go big”, so I find many of the things currently touted as “new” are really “new again”.  In the 1990′s there was huge pressure to get your sites listed in the search engines, to have people link to your site from forums, and to create content that was “sticky”. Flash forward to today, the chatter is all about social media, search engine optimization, and viral marketing . . .

Don’t get me wrong. It is obvious that the Internet is evolving.  But I am struck by what seems to be a universal constant when it comes to marketing a great business well.

Marketing is never the job of a few in a business these days.  It has to be everyone’s job. Why? Because every person that works for an enterprise talks to hundreds of people, if not thousands every year, in a variety of media.  Without unity of vision and clarity of message, your company dissolves into a shapeless puddle of messages. By trying to be everything to everybody it becomes nothing special for anybody.

As we are getting our ducks in a row for the upcoming Start Here classes as well as several future courses and some really big plans for an exceptional summer, School for Startups has become a hive of communication activity.

Every single soul, and there are a lot of us now, is on the front lines interfacing directly with customers, sponsors, the media, event guests, featured entrepreneurs.  There’s this complex “square dance” where three or four of us are working on an email blast, five or six of us are posting content on the site, some of us are sending big press releases out, some team members are working with Doug on television and radio events.  We are all in constant communication with one another and the outside world . . . across media, day in and day out.

And recently it has hit me that we really must speak with One Voice.

Because efficient as we are, and as well known as we are getting in entrepreneurial communities across the UK, we are still a very small business. We don’t have the bandwidth or resources to send a flurry of imprecise marketing messages out.  We have to be needle sharp in what we say about who we are so our message finds our customers.

We must make it clear that “We teach entrepreneurs how to start and grow stronger, more profitable businesses“. Every operation we undertake is to forward that goal. Every strategic relationship we start is toward that end.

Every communication we have with an outsider must communicate that vision. Every message we put out on Twitter, Facebook and Linked In say must say the same thing. That core value must be at the heart of every blog article, every course, every interview.

To steal a phrase from Doug . . . we must become a “wall of sound” when it comes to delivering that message.

We face real challenges as we work for unity of marketing communication:

• Every new person who comes into the business has to go through the process of finding out that our company helps our entrepreneurs create better, more profitable businesses.  They have to learn that we aren’t just another training business teaching whatever course pays best.
• Specific language for our unified marketing message, and the “flavors” that support specific courses and initiatives have to be developed and communicated internally almost constantly to everyone.
• Sometimes the apparent distance between a specific undertaking and our core business objective seems very wide.  For example, why does Doug Richard, founder of School for Startups, assume an active “voice” in UK politics. Because one of the most important ways School for Startups can help our entrepreneurs found stronger, more profitable businesses is to help foster an economic environment that supports business rather than inhibits it.

Building a unified wall of sound that emanates from every person in a company is something I never hear people talk about, and yet that “unity of message” is something I’ve seen in every successful startup I’ve ever worked for or with.

It was certainly a key feature in Doug’s ITAL Business Computer Systems and Visual Software, and is true of School for Startups as well. Maybe the first people you really, truly have to sell on your business . . . is the people who work with you.

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1. The Naked Business: What We Get Right
2. Doug Richard’s 7 Virtues of a Sound Business
3. Naked Business: A Startup & A Small Business are Two Different Things

“O2 recently came on board as our big business supporter. I for one think that their superb business strap line, “we’re better, connected” reflects our beliefs about early stage businesses. Their financial backing will allow us to connect with a new generation of businesses through a major expansion of accelerated business training for entrepreneurs online.” — Doug Richard

Simon Devonshire, Head of Small Business Marketing at O2, is a guest on today’s blog.

Schools for Startups is an impressive initiative which will no doubt motivate and inspire entrepreneurs. Doug is an especially talented and thought provoking presenter and business coach. The content of his lectures is about helping businesses to grow which I believe is relevant to all businesses. Doug makes a phenomenal difference to the thinking and performance of small businesses and we’re proud to be on board to support the creation of additional online training programmes targeting entrepreneurs.

We know that access to good quality training can be difficult and expensive for new businesses who are just getting off the ground. That’s why it’s so great to see School for Startups filling the gap.  Enterprise creation is so important for the recovery of the UK economy, and small business sits at the heart of entrepreneurialism. Being able to access expert training and advice for free online at a time that suits them can only help young enterprises continue to flourish.

But it’s not all about O2 & School for Startups sharing our support and experiences. It’s a two-way relationship. We want to learn from entrepreneurs and help our business customers to grow their business. More small businesses do business with O2 than any other network. If we are to continue to be there to support them every step of the way, we need to make sure we understand the ongoing challenges they face in the ever changing modern business environment.

One thing O2 well understands is that entrepreneurs and small businesses absolutely rely on flexible communications technologies.

Many businesses these days launch and run for years in a ‘virtual office’. Owners, key employees and strategic partners spread across the UK. When customers call, they need to feel the coherence and cohesion of a traditional brick and mortar business even when one doesn’t exist.  Web hosting, e-commerce, cellular internet connectivity, broadband wireless, various forms of VOIP, small businesses now require the kinds of service and support that was available only to multinational corporations less than a decade ago.

Doug Richard’s pragmatic advice on launching ‘ultralight’ businesses with little or no outside funding is, we believe, founded on bedrock of a telecommunications company that provides a truly tremendous number of ‘just in time’ services for entrepreneurs.  O2 and School for Startups share a single vision for  entrepreneurs in the UK.  Speed, agility, flexibility, insight, value . . .  Like O2, School for Startups is determined to give them the tools they need.

We look forward to the opportunities that this partnership will bring for us to work more closely with startups and are committed to supporting Doug in championing entrepreneurs and new business in the UK.

– Simon Devonshire

We mention in passing . . . O2 has launched a ‘Joined Up’ communications service, which extends beyond its core mobile offering. The new services provide businesses with one single converged solution for their telecoms requirements spanning mobile, fixed line, data, broadband communications, equipment and professional consultancy.  It gives businesses of all sizes an opportunity to outsource their telecoms, ICT and consultancy needs to just one provider, reducing the amount of time spent handling and managing systems and communications services, which are not core to their business.  Find out more.

Related posts:

1. Naked Business: Building a Wall of Sound
2. Naked Business: A Startup & A Small Business are Two Different Things
3. Press Release-Doug Richard to Teach UK Entrepreneurs How to Start and Grow a Business at Newcastle University on February 3

LOW COST FAST GROWTH MARKETING

DATE: THURSDAY 25TH FEBRUARY 2010

LOCATION: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON, UCL ADVANCES, ENGINEERING FRONT BUILDING

Doug Richard, serial entrepreneur and original BBC2 Dragon, moves ahead with his ambitious plan to fast-track fledging entrepreneurs and business owners onto the road of success. Due to popular demand Doug and the School for Startups team are holding their much esteemed “Low Cost Fast Growth Marketing” for growing businesses master-class in London this February, located at the outstanding University College London. School for Startups is the UK’s premier provider of business training and tuition. The seminars are designed to be fully interactive, incorporating ‘live’ on the day delegate case studies, video examples, lectures, interactive discussions and Q&A; sessions. Doug’s goal is to teach participants the questions they need to ask themselves and equip them to find the right answers. Doug is a humorously entertaining host and will leave you feeling inspired and refuelled!

Event Details

In this seminar serial entrepreneur and investor Doug Richard digs deep into advanced online marketing tactics: the essential lessons that every entrepreneur needs to understand. Finding fast growth, effective and affordable channels to reach customers is critical to any business; but especially so for growing businesses during a recession.

Doug demonstrates how the Internet has levelled the playing-field between your business and your largest competitors and why there has never before been an opportunity like that which exists for today’s businesses.

At Low Cost Fast Growth Marketing you will learn:

• Using Thought Leadership to drive Social Media
• PR in the 21st Century
• Blogs, Conversations and Gossip: Key Tools for 2010
• No Cost Video
• How SEO is changing and what to do about it

Event Information

* Registrations Starts: 14:00hrs
* Event Starts: 15:00hrs
* In conjunction with University College London

Who should attend?

• Owners & managers of growing businesses
• Marketing and media professionals
• Business, Marketing and MA students

What’s included?

• 5 hours of business tuition with one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs
• Access to online resources and materials, including membership of VentureNavigator (see details below)
• 12 month’s free subscription to Doug’s monthly newsletter
• Accreditation as a Graduate of School for Startups (web-badge)

TICKET INFORMATION

* Online bookings policy – We only accept online bookings with a credit or debit card. Unfortunately we do not issue invoices for future payment or allow attendees to pay on the day. Anyone who has not paid for their ticket in full before the event will not be granted access.
* Refunds and changes to ticket details policy – Unfortunately we cannot offer refunds or change the name on the booking once tickets have been booked.

For more information see our full Terms and Conditions

MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

We are confident that you will be completely satisfied by this event. If you are not completely satisfied with the event, we will issue a 100% refund, no questions asked. Requests for refunds must be made via email within 24hrs of the event taking place.

Related posts:

1. Low Cost Fast Growth Marketing Roundup
2. Start Here! STARTING & GROWING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS
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(Press Release) – Oct 20, 2009 – Doug Richard, Dragons’ Den investor, serial entrepreneur and founder of School for Startups (S4S), will lecture small businesses and startups on 13 November 2009 at a free one day “Six Rules for Startups” event in Colchester. The course, a £95 value, will be delivered free through the University of Essex with funding from the Government’s Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF). Entrepreneurs can reserve a seat at www.schoolforstartups.co.uk.

(London, England) — Doug Richard, Dragons’ Den investor and serial entrepreneur will deliver his “Six Rules for Startups” course to new entrepreneurs and small business owners on 13 November 2009 at  The Weston Homes Community Stadium,  Essex.

Attendees will receive practical instruction in how to develop great products and services, identify paying customers efficiently, market their offerings well at very low cost, effectively eliminate their competition, and build a great team.

The Six Rules for Startups course has a normal value of £95, but will be offered free to anyone living or working in Essex or Suffolk via the University of Essex under a program funded by the Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF). Seating is limited.  To sign up, visit www.schoolforstartups.co.uk.

“As I’ve stated more than once, I intend to make everyone in the UK an Entrepreneur.” said Doug Richard, speaking about the event.  “Our research shows that the toughest thing for most entrepreneurs is just getting started.  They don’t know how to start a good business from the ground up. Our training addresses that issue directly.  Those who attend this event will leave with a very solid understanding of exactly how to build a profitable business fast.  Those entrepreneurs with existing businesses struggling in the new economy will master low-cost or no-cost marketing techniques that will increase their profit while reducing their cost.”

Students who attended the very successful October 10 “Six Rules for Startups” event, also hosted by the University of Essex, said:

• “I like Doug’s clear specific manner of assisting the audience’s questions and answers. He enabled me to see things clearer without the fluff. A great presenter with warm charisma. I have to add looks much younger and more handsome than on TV. Thanks for a great day.” –  Amanda Jane Dowsett
• “An excellent course, extremely well presented and very down to earth.  A most enjoyable day.” — Ian Kettlewell
• “Great course, enjoyable and information was well presented and genuinely helpful.” — Oliver Williams
• “I really enjoyed the style of presentation and the opportunity for interaction.” — Iain Allan
• “I thought the presentation was great just wanted to say thank you very much. It has helped me clarify a lot.” — Abilene Leach
• “Please keep this fantastic school going. The most practical, useful advice I have ever received. The Doug Richards’ combo of clever communication skills and entrepreneurial knowledge is very, very impressive…”  — Stephen Neale

Dr Janice Pittis, Director of the Research and Enterprise Office for the University of Essex says “Responding rapidly to the needs of employers and individuals (including graduates) during the economic downturn, the University of Essex has rolled out a programme of skills-related training across Essex and Suffolk. We are developing new online resources to help people maximise their skills and increase both profitability and employability. The programme runs until the end of September 2010 with funding from the Government’s Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF).”

About the University of Essex
The University of Essex is one of the UK’s leading academic institutions. Founded in 1964 when it opened its doors to a cohort of just 122 students at Wivenhoe Park in Colchester, the University has grown in both reputation and size, developing a worldwide reputation for top quality teaching and research.

About Doug Richard:
Doug Richard, an original Dragons’ Den investor, and successful serial entrepreneur, received an honorary Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion for his work promoting, developing and helping entrepreneurs in May 2006. In May 2008 Richard published his investigation into the British government’s support of small businesses, The Richard Report.  For more information on Doug Richard, visit School for Startups at  www.schoolforstartups.co.uk. You can follow Richard on Twitter at @s4startups, @s4tv and @DouglasRichard.

Contact:
Nicola Coleman
School for Startups
+44 (0) 7702 313 226

http://www.schoolforstartups.co.uk

info@www.schoolforstartups.co.uk

# # #

School for Startups was started by Doug Richard in 2008 to provide accelerated instruction to entrepreneurs. Visit our site at www.schoolforstartups.co.uk. Follow us on Twitter @s4startups.

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