How to Get More Twitter Followers
Sunday, February 7, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Social Media for Entrepreneurs |
Tags: getting more followers on twitter, increasing followers, twitter |
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- Be famous in the first place! Nine of the ten most followed Tweeters were famous before Twitter originated.
- Treat your Twitter profile just like your web page. You must promote it in speeches, at the end of emails, on your business cards, on your promotional material, on your website, on your forehead, everywhere!
- Let other Twitter followers know you exist. See someone tweeting, tell them about your profile.
- Follow lots and lots of people. Tweeters tend to follow those that follow them.
- Buy an ad, announce your specialty, and link it to your profile.
- Answer users questions, be an expert.
- Blog about your tweets and tweet about your blog.
- Use forums in your interest area to promote your profile.
- Pitch Twitter influencers with good article and comments that you make.
- Exchange recommendations and have others promote you.
- Use Find People and befriend people in your area of expertise.
- Use a program like Tweet Adder to automate much of the work and maintenance.
- Create a cool avatar that stands out.
- Send @ messages to the smores, or social media whores. They might not answer you, but you just want to appear to have a relationship with them.
- Link to funny videos, interesting stories, or sexy pictures.
- Be friendly!
- Incorporate videos and pictures into tweets.
- Repeat tweets 8 hours later. Users will be different.
Non Disclosure Agreements
Saturday, February 6, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Business Partners, Consulting, General Thoughts |
Tags: NDAs, Non Disclosure Agreements |
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I was asked yesterday to sign a non-compete, no disclosure agreement (NDA). A friend of mine, someone that I have known for several years, asked for help with financing for a product that I think is really cool. My friend sent some supporting documents, but no financials for the company, just standard promotional or press materials. I wrote back expressing my interest to help and for more, real details. Especially the financial details that will be needed to get financing. My friend indicated I needed to sign a non-compete agreement.
Over the years, I have probably been asked to sign 250 NDAs, and I have signed exactly zero of them. I have asked around too, and no one I know is willing to sign one either.
What does it say when you ask someone to sign a NDA? It sends such a mixed message. On one hand, you want my help and trust me enough to ask for my advice. On the other hand, it yells, “I don’t trust you!” The simple process of asking for the NDA announces that you are not trusted and that someone is already planning for the worst. It is just like demanding a prenuptial agreement. “I love you but not forever!”
The request for a NDA also announces self-doubt and makes me doubt the abilities of the asker. If I had a new product, had invested a year in writing and developing software, I would hope I had enough confidence in the product to know that I could beat all the competition. But by asking for a NDA, it says, “I am concerned that you could catch up with us and bet us at our own game, even though I have a year head start.” Are you that insecure about your talents and product?
Finally, in Georgia and many other states, the NDA is not enforceable. They simply get thrown out in court. So why ask for it? It makes you look like an amateur.
Health Insurance for Entrepreneurs
Thursday, February 4, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Health Insurance |
Tags: health insurance entrepreneurs |
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I met my downstairs neighbor yesterday. He and his wife are from South Africa and moved here to be near their 3 children and several grandkids. As an international lawyer, he is still able to work, but at 71, considers himself largely retired. Nice guy, great neighbor.
He told me the story of getting health care when he moved to the States several months back. Upon arriving, he applied for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, but due to his age and a very small pre-existing condition, was denied. Of course.
His comment was classic, “But in America, you must learn to never accept ‘No’ and to keep trying until you get what you want!” So, true. Especially for us entrepreneurs. When denied, you find a different way to skin the cat. My neighbor set about a search for all the organizations that offer health insurance as a benefit of membership. He found several chambers of commerce that did indeed offer it, and shop which plan was better, which membership was cheaper, etc. He created a business in upstate New York that serves as a corporate shell for his ongoing legal work and joined the chamber. And now, lo and behold, he gets insurance for a “great, cheap rate.” I love this story. I love his entrepreneurial attitude of never giving up.
What do you think of that Nancy and Harry?
Automatic Invoices
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 | Written by Erik Rostad
Posted under: Entrepreneurship Tools, General Thoughts |
Tags: automatic email invoices, time saving tools for the entrepreneur, vowcher |
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I have a business set up where I have monthly maintenance agreements set up with a number of my clients. On the 1st of each month, I go into Microsoft Word, create and invoice, save it as a PDF, email my client, and wait for the check. I do this for each client. As I add more clients, this has become a task that has consumed more and more time.
I began looking for a solution that would automatically send invoices by email to my clients on the first of each month. I found a service called Vowcher that does just that for a very nominal fee. For just $0.05 an email, Vowcher will send an email invoice to your clients on the date specified. You just set up the invoice once, and they will send the email out automatically. I purchased 100 credits (100 emails) for $5.60. That’s $0.05 per email and a $0.60 credit card transaction fee for payment. Very cheap to save a considerable amount of time.
This service is very nice for property owners collecting rent, for service providers collecting maintenance fees, or basically anyone collecting a monthly fee from your clients. If you no longer want to take the time to create invoice reminders each month, then I would recommend Vowcher to all Entrepreneurs looking to save some time at a very nominal cost.
The Entrepreneur School is in no way affiliated with Vowcher and will not receive any compensation from this blog posting.
Guest Post – “What Social Media Marketing Gurus Don’t Want You to Know”
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Social Media for Entrepreneurs |
Tags: social media |
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From Zeke Camusio:
Do you know why most people fail miserably at Social Media Marketing? Because they don’t really get what it’s all about. They think it’s about promoting their companies. It’s not; it’s about MAKING FRIENDS.
“Really? Making friends?”
“Yes, really.”
See, people like doing business with their friends. If your toilet breaks and one of your friends is a janitor, you’ll ask him to fix it. If you don’t have any janitor friend, then you might ask your friends if they know a janitor they trust. People do business with their friends for two reasons:
1. They get a better service, price, deal, etc.
2. They give money to people they care about.
So, how can you apply this principle to Social Media Marketing?
1. Make sure your social media profiles say what you do and have links to your site.
2. Make friends. Discover your target market and start talking to those people. Don’t sell them anything; just make friends with them and check out their status updates. What are they doing? Is there anything you can help with? Are they asking questions you can answer or looking for something you can give them?
3. After a few interactions, something very interesting will happen. They’re going to ask you the BIG QUESTION: “so, what do you do for a living?”. Just tell them what you do but don’t make it sound like you’re trying to sell them something. This is where your elevator speech will come into play. In case you want to know what an elevator speech looks like, this is mine: “I help companies get thousands of qualified visitors for their websites.” Create an elevator speech and be ready to share it when people ask you what you do for a living.
4. People will add you to their “mental Rolodex”. It works something like this: “Joan P. – High-end catering services”, “Marty K. – Real estate agent”, etc.
5. When they need a real estate agent, they’ll call Marty. And, they’ll also recommend Marty to anyone who needs a real estate agent (assuming that Marty took the time to build strong relationships with his contacts instead of trying to sell them his services).
I can’t emphasize this enough: Social Media Marketing is about MAKING FRIENDS, not about selling your stuff. But remember: making friends is a great way to sell your stuff!
I believe that if we all understood the concept in this article, the Social Media Marketing world would be a lot more fun and efficient, so let me ask you a favor: spread the word. Send this to your contacts, re-tweet it, share it on Facebook, or share it any way you want. Thank you!
Zeke Camusio
Get Internet Marketing Tips to Grow Your Company:
http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog
Free Social Media Speaking Event
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Social Media for Entrepreneurs |
Tags: social media, speaking gig |
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I am speaking at the Buckhead UGA campus this Thursday, February 4th, 6:30 to 8. Free parking!! The Buckhead campus is next door to the Chubb Insurance building, across the street from Lenox Mall. The address is 3475 Lenox Rd and “Terry Business College” is written on the side of the building. The lobby is on the 4th floor of the building and the room is just off the lobby.
The topic will be the importance of Social Media in your marketing campaign, and how to achieve sales using Social Media.
Hope to see you there!
Must See Video from TED
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Creativity and Ideation |
Tags: TED video |
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http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html
TED is a tech conference for big-wigs, supposedly the self-described smartest people in the world. Usually they are pretty full of themselves. But this video above is a must-see…..
Entrepreneurship in Angola! TES Tie-In
Saturday, January 30, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Entrepreneurship Stories |
Tags: entrepreneur success story, entrepreneurship in angola |
1 Comment
Global Atlanta (click here) published an article today about Randy Pires and all his entrepreneurial efforts in Angola. Randy is the son of one of my good friends, so I have met him many times, and we go to dinner occassionally to talk about his businesses. Read the article in Global Atlanta to see how much a brave 25 year old can accomplish!
Yet Another Success Story
Friday, January 29, 2010 | Written by Jim Beach
Posted under: Entrepreneurship Stories |
Tags: start-up successes, success story |
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I wanted to introduce another great Entrepreneur School success story. Craig and John started a really cool company recently. Craig is one of our corporate videographers and has listened to our shtick many times. He was already self-employed before we met him, so he has entrepreneurial roots and tendencies from the beginning.
Their new company is called Your Legacy Video, and they make TV show-like documentary videos about your loved ones. I love this idea. I make videos for my kids documenting big vacations, their first year of life, and things like that. They love them. My dad is currently taking all the old 8 mm videos from the 60s and 70s and making DVDs out of them. There is obviously a huge demand for products like Your Legacy
Video’s. They offer a true value-added service,
however. They do all the standard stuff like digitizing your videos and pictures. But they also interview the major family players, put together a script and storyline, add music, and edit the whole thing into a coherent TV quality video about your loved ones. Great, great stuff.
There are several reasons why The Entrepreneur School loves this company:
- it’s a trendy, cool product with a huge, growing demand,
- they are experts in this field already and are leveraging years of skills,
- they spent very little to create this new company,
- awesome website,
- they have been marketing creatively to a clear target audience,
- they seek and listen to advice about growing their company,
- and they have reduced risk to the point where they can’t fail!
Congrats and good luck to you two. Check out www.YourLegacyVideo.com
Innovation Quote
Friday, January 29, 2010 | Written by Erik Rostad
Posted under: Entrepreneurship Quotes |
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1 Comment
Dissent and debate are the only way to improve and drive innovation. If we surround ourselves with people that agree with us -> stagnation.
- Mark Staples
