You don’t have to hire an expensive firm to have a Public Relations (PR) strategy as a startup. The beauty of today’s internet is that anybody has the power to reach tens of thousands, even millions, with a properly timed tweet, hacker news mention, or mention on an influential blog. You don’t have to make it onto a cover story in Inc. or Entrepreneur in order to achieve your PR goals, in fact...
The first step in developing a marketing plan is to become obsessed with knowing your audience. That’s right, obsessed. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on Google Adwords, or how many conference booths you rent out if you are off-course with knowing who your audience is.
Startups spend a great deal of time and money getting people to visit their marketing site (aka, their website). A startup’s marketing site typically exists to establish brand awareness, promote a sense of reliability, generate leads, and sell products or services.
Analytics helps your business determine what is working well, and what needs to be improved. We can always go off of a hunch, but the real power comes when we know the hard data behind our marketing efforts, and can make informed decisions that improve our business over and over.
Why do 3 out of 4 venture-backed startups fail? I mean, these aren’t stupid ideas. Someone has to come up with an idea, validate it’s market demand, create a plan for execution, and articulate this via presentation to venture capitalists, who reject approximately 99% of the ideas they agree to sit down and listen to. The few that make it through this process must have a pretty good chance of...
Previously I had the pleasure of attending the MicroConf Conference in Las Vegas. Whether discussed during the talks on stage, in the hallway, or on a walk to dinner–these are the key takeaways that made the nearly $2,000 trip worth every penny (and led to me being a speaker at the same event the next year).
Most entrepreneurs would love to have a secret sauce for growing their audience. For many, content marketing is a great, but slow, way to attract new customers. The question is, does this copy/paste trick onto other sites hurt your SEO rankings? Though it only takes a couple extra minutes per post, will this strategy lead to growth or penalties?
entertaining video will capture the attention of the viewer, giving you much needed time to explain how your app can help make their lives easier. While some explainer videos produced by top web agencies can cost over $30,000, there are many ways a bootstrapped entrepreneur can put together a high-quality explainer video for well under a grand.
Have you ever wondered which direction to take your content marketing? After finishing up my most recent series of blog posts, I had to make a decision on which direction to take my next series. In addition, it was time to perform an analysis of my overall strategy during the past year. I needed a method of digging up answers to the following questions: Which posts of mine have done well in the...
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the BaconBiz conference in Philadelphia. The conference overall was a mind grenade of great advice and inspiration. One of the key concepts that kept coming up was the idea of focusing on benefits when writing about your product, and not just the features. For example, which is the more compelling reason to continue checking out a product?:
HI, I'M RYAN. I believe the best way to learn and remember is by writing things down and sharing them with others. This blog exists to help me synthesize and process my journey towards self-improvement.