The interesting point to note here is that every other guy would answer "Social-Media" and recommend the company to embrace social-media, take advantage of the available platforms, to be a part of the community and connect with the influencers in your niche. 

The question here is not how much time will it take to reach that desired level of influential power which would help your brand mobilize your niche and dig out those potential customers/clients/users/whatever…

Here are 6 quick ways a start-up can use to market itself using Social-Media efficiently:

1. Engineering Your Presence: 

What is most important to understand is that Social-Media is more than just Facebook and Twitter. There a numerous other free social-media properties on the world wide web where you need to be looking for your audience. You need to go where you consumer lives online. If they are there, you should be there too, listening to them, engaging in their activities, sharing and helping them in that hemisphere.

2. Crafting a Brand Position:

From what I’ve seen, a lot of start-up companies do an awesome job of describing their product, its features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit like the giants do. Try expressing what your brand stands for or declaring its point of difference from that others in the market. This will help you being remembered.

3. Being Creative With Content:

Try, research and find new ways to provide content about your product and niche. For starters, add a blog to your products website. Add fresh blog posts, invite comments and link to a lot of multimedia. This will add to your online visibility. 

Blogging isn’t the toughest job. Blog about whatever you’re doing, report on your progress or post some insider updates about the team. Interact with the blog audience by adding a question or a small vote at the end of every post to gather their feedback. Network with other bloggers and place your product in front of people willing to blog, review, create videos or tell stories about it and then aggregate this content to your blog. You can later use this content in your regular press releases.

4. Connect With Right Bloggers:

Now who doesn’t likes free publicity and marketing? Every start-up in the world wants that dedicated article in NY Times or to get featured their national daily but the fact is, getting featured on Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com or other similar blogs might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers and mostly fitting in your market. The idea here is to bubble you up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press.

5. Start Crowdsourcing:

The reason I love crowdsourcing is that it let’s your customer to be a part in the creation and development of your brand. Of course there is no shortage of services/companies for crowdsourcing (Tongal, crowdSpring etc) to help you source content from writers, designers, devs or photographers but then creativity is what is required here.

6. Give Free Stuff:

Give away free stuff to your visitors. Everyone loves a free bite at your offering and this adds to your credibility sooner or later. There are hundreds of free ebooks, video courses, webinars etc for grabs online. You can give away something free in exchange of their email or use "Pay-with-Tweet". Free stuf generates awareness, builds loyalty and best of all spreads word-of-mouth.

Back in the stone ages, you need a trillion dollar marketing budget to get started with your brand promotion by posting ads on newpapers, magazines, covering trade shows with your oversized banners and what not. BUT today, you just might be able to get away with a laptop, an internet connection and a good social-media strategy.

Are you a start-up? I would be interesting in hearing what and how are you using the social-media to your marketing benefits.

There is something that has been bugging me ever since I got back from *unnamed* meet-up and I just had to write about this because, I’m so surprised at people’s [horribly wrong] interpretation of the word “Entrepreneur”. For those who don’t know, the word “Entrepreneur” comes from French words “entre” (to enter) and “prendre” (to take), which applies to a person starting a new project or trying out new opportunities and challenges. I remember reading someone’s tweet “Entrepreneurs are strugglers and leaders who eventually do what they want somehow.”

But the thing with people is that they are calling themselves entrepreneurs and yet are not ready to stand up to a challenge and take a simple risk. You can find a lot of such people touting around social networks, spamming about themselves or their new great product (which actually is a copy of something that already have been in market or worse, it is something that doesn’t even solves a problem) without even trying to take some time out introducing themselves or even completing their profile information or at least sounding social. The thing that I like about them is that they are always ready “to help your business”, even though the first business they need to help is their own and not go around screwing someone else who could just do a lot better without their assistance.

What you need to understand is that establishing yourself as a “Guru” or a “Leader” could be easy among a bunch of newbies but you are not a “Guru” or a “Leader” until you have contributed something that gave others a “ahh! This is good stuff” moment.     

To be a leader, and end up as an entrepreneur, you should:

1. Educate yourself in every aspect of your niche and learn to market effectively. You don’t get success by just getting online and posting on your facebook wall or tweeting random quotes by infamous people.

2. Try and hang out with the leaders in your niche. They usually are fun loving people who love to network and this is where you could effectivly use the social networking thingy. Go ahead, follow them, add them and/or send them a message (make sure it doesn’t sounds stupid)…trust me, they won’t bite.

3. Make mistakes and most importantly, learn from them. You need to understand that risk is the part of the game when you take that chair. Go ahead, try crazy ideas, research things and see what works the best instead of sitting ideally and wondering about it.

4. Share what you know, and that includes your expertise in your niche or market. Go ahead and help people in some real manner that leaves of mark of your efforts and you on them. Sharing will not only help you test your skill but add to your credibility.

5. NEVER BE A SHEEP. Leaders always stands out of the crowd with their own opinion about the issue. If you have a point, talk about it and stick to it if you feel it’s correct.

Finally, look, talk, speak, learn, share, lead and act like an entrepreneur before calling yourself one. Go ahead and do what other haven’t even though of, do what you love to do and are good at doing it, establish yourself…

What are your interpretation of “Entrepreneur”?

So today I saw this irritated girl making notes of something (yea right, something) and I asked her, “why you doing this?” and her reply was “because the professor said it’ll help” and I was like #facepalm! She was doing something she didn’t like but was doing it because someone told her that “it’ll help”. She was living the life of someone else, someone who she wasn’t and not even bothered about what else she could do, how better she could be. I could tell that from her appearance and the way she talked – I know these kind of people…so much of potential and so little fearlessness.

I do things that I love to do. I have a business online because that is my passion and I enjoy doing that, I joined a college because I wanted to experience it and I could drop out of it the day I’m done with it. Think about what you are doing and is this what you really are and is this where you can really pour in your potential properly? If not, go though these 5 points:

1) Find Your Passion & Dig Out That Idea

Take some time out for yourself and think about what you are exactly doing. Roll back to the high school days and recall what you loved to do and think about it. Write it down! Try to bring back that excitement and energy in you because this is going to help you a lot. Try and turn your passion into a product or a service that you can offer to people. Make sure that your product or your service does solves a real life problem and people would be interested in at least trying it. 

2) Start Small But START

I often come across a lot of interviews or a stories about young entrepreneurs who just made their first million dollar and how much the world is happy for them. Everyone gets so inspired that they quit everything and start pushing themselves into something they don’t even know about. You need to stop seeing the ‘AFTER’ version of their life. There is this one this which is common in all these success stories of young entrepreneurs, they all started small. Start small and focus on the primary aspects of your business such as customer support, product improvement and social media buzz.

3) Create a Journal & Have a Plan

It doesn’t really matters if you have your journals are written on McD napkins or on a neat notebook with silky pages or on your blog, the point is to write it. It keeps you focused and lets you keep track of what you are doing. Also, have a plan – a business plan that is. A business plan, no matter how newbie-ish it is, lets you focus on the key pieces of your business instead of learning them the hard way. This isn’t a time consuming process. You can have both of this done in 30 minutes and that would be the best 30 minutes of your life.

4) Network With People Like You

And the word of the decade is “Social” and if you are good at it, you have almost everything you would ever need to get going. Being able to socialize, network and get along with others is the key to your business. If you are with a bunch of probable clients, it’s all about your persuasion skills. Persuade them to try your product/service and leave the rest on the product/service. From my personal experience of the people, there are some people who are born with this talent but then there are those people who hire these people to get their stuff done, that kinda out-of-the-box working.

5) Take That Risk

Get up, get going…take that one small decision that has been holding you back. I attended a seminar on “Entrepreneurship” and some defined an entrepreneur as, “a person who takes risks, makes decisions that others can’t and is a survivor”. You need to be THIS person if you ever dream of being anything big. The key to a proper risk is to recognize the right time to take it…it’s all about how well and how timely you hit it.

Are you a college dropout or plan to drop? Share your views with us…

Following is a list of top 6 trends for Entrepreneurs in 2011:

1. “Smaller” is the new “Better”

Now there is a thing about being small that I really like and that is, it keeps you focused on your customer who are the backbone of your business. It lets you to customize your business to suit customers need better, it lets you to establish a quality customer service desk and lets you to bring the best of you to the deal. The good thing about all this is that everyone appreciates it and lets the business get the mouth-to-mouth promotion.

2. Tighten Your Niches

Specialize in what you do. Entrepreneur’s are the people who are known and to get to know you, people need to see your product, your service and how it solves their real life problem and you will need to show it to them. You will need to take yourself to the discussion the pop out your product or your service where your niche comes in. You need to establish yourself as the “Go To” person in your niche because you can market narrowly but deliver broadly.

3. Multiple Profit Steams

Like they say: “don’t keep all your eggs in one basket”, make sure you have a couple of other things to work for while you have this biggy idea/project you are working at. Having multiple profit streams can help you buffer up in any economic condition and more over, you get to have an almost ready business at your backend disposal if the primary one doesn’t works out for you that well.

4. Social Media is your Queen

The social media has been here with us for a while now and it has always expanded the entrepreneur’s universe and will continue to do so and even better in 2011. Entrepreneur’s with Brick and mortar business are smart enough to effectively use Facebook and Twitter. Social Media can be the most effective tool to create a better brand, collaborate with people in your niche and build better business relationships.

5. More Discounts, More Giveaway

There are customers who will blindly throw their money at you and there are customers who will stick to your payment page for that last bargain they can make. The problem with these kind of customers is that they just might not buy and this is why you need to give them what they’re exactly looking for: “The Shinny New Discount COUPON”. It’s just a smart way of winning their loyalty and having them come again.

6. Personalization Leads to Profits

You have to agree that everyone loves to feel special and doing a little to make sure they do, can really boost your stats. Send personalized emails, b’day cards with discount coupons (people do shop a lot of their b’days) or just send them a personalized offer. I’ve personally seen it for myself that doing this does improves your stats and has given me great results.

So this is for now. Did you like the post? Please do share with us if you have any entrepreneur trend for 2011 in your mind.

There are some important key points that are pretty crucial to the success of you online ventures, that includes the all-boring Relationship and Trust thingy. An average customer today tends to rely more on the word-of-mouth (mouth-to-mouth marketing) from friends, family or colleagues instead of the old fashioned ‘Business Trust’ and this is exactly where the SOCIAL element of the marketing kicks in. So, it really gets very important for an online business to have a good grasp over the social media to have a better grasp at their targeted market.

In this post, I’m going to discuss a couple of important steps that’ll help you build a strong online business relationship with your new and coming customers.

1. Your Brand Needs a Face! Give it one

There is this one thing I really loved about Microsoft Xbox 360 promotion in India and that is they have a FACE I can talk to when dealing with my queries, feedbacks or issues regarding their product. It gives a very personal feel to the whole thing of promotion, sort of a real community feeling. The Kung Fu Pandit (aka KFP) is the guy rep from Microsoft for the online community promotion of Xbox 360 India. My point here is that customers feel more confident when dealing face-to-face (in online social sense) with professionals they can trust. Having a face for your brand only makes it better.

2. Manage Expectations

Here comes the big thing, you need to learn to manage what your targeted audience expects from your brand and you need to deliver it. You need to have a swift plan idea on your audiences expectations. It’s really important to have enough technical knowledge of the things that are being discussed with your audience. There could be nothing disastrous than not being able to get your customers queries sorted out and getting them pissed. For example: Airtel’s twitter avatar did an awesome job pissing their customers off #airtelsucks

3. Establish Friendship, Trust & deal with Local Businesses

You need to a little extra careful when portraying your ideas online. Since you are communication on a written platform, everything gets recorded and you do not want your prospect to have a wrong understanding of your products or services. Just try to be friendly and cautious. And like I said in the beginning of this post, never doubt the effectiveness of the mouth-to-mouth marketing. Try and establish a relationship with professionals that maintain a website and can allow you to work together to mutually help each other.

4. Get in Touch & Join Professional Groups 

It is very important to keep in constant contact with your prospects. Spend enough time reading and replying to their emails, tweets, instant messages, wall posts and comments. Try and promote discussion, because it always leads to the mouth-to-mouth advertisement if all goes positive. Also, try and get listed in various professional organizations or groups to add that little extra legitimacy to your business. This will definitely help boost your reputation as a professional.

5. Provide a Guarantee & Back it up

I understand this is the real hard part but it should be from a customers point of view. Ensure your potential customers that your business is committed highest standards in product/service deliver and customer support. Let them know that one standard that you use to measure your success: The Customer Satisfaction (or whatever you want) and do your best to make them believe that it’s true.

6. Ask Favors! And do it as a Friend

Remember the relationship and trust thingy we talked earlier? This is where it pays off! Ask your customers, followers or prospects for a favor and do it like you’re asking  a friend to do it for you. Strike it when you have gained their confidence and the trust meter is all green. CAUTION: Don’t even thing of doing it too quickly or too often because it can kill you brand immediately.

7. “WOW Factor” does the thing

Once you have something to deliver, do it with confidence. Add a little bit of originality and a personal touch to whatever you do online because it makes the thing easy to understand and quicker to get responded. Add some extra efforts and do it with the “WOW Factor”, only to gain more trust and a better brand.

So, here we are with the 7 most important steps to building a strong Online Business Relationship. Got a tip regarding Online Business Relationships? Do share it in your comments…

Now we all have to admit that Video’s are a crucial element of Social Media and promotion now. The days are gone when article marketing was enough to get the word out, besides article marketing has a lot of downs too (will discuss that later). Video marketing is the next step now and it’s been giving out pretty good results. Now I understand that creation and submission of videos isn’t exactly an easy job and that’s where Article Video Robot comes in to make it all easier and automated.

I had a little chit-chat with Jyoti Sharma, the Affiliate Manager with Article Video Robot, about the product and this is what he had to say:

“In the most simple words: It is a software to turn an article to a LIVE TALKING VIDEO with animation, background music, graphics, and a full voice-over… all by pressing just ONE button! We really think it is a breakthrough in article/video marketing.”

What all does AVR do?

Article Video Robot simply converts your pain text article into a video with animation, voice over, music etc etc and let’s you submit this video to over 50 video submission websites including YouTube, Metacafe & MegaVideos. The wizard takes you through the complete process step by step in a no-rocket-science approach, which is something I really like because I see a lot of technically retarded bloggers out there (no offence). You get to select from a wide option of backgrounds, music and voice over or you could just upload your custom stuff. The accents include American and British and could be a guy or girls voice depending on your requirements.

What’s new if I buy now?

It’s cheaper and I’ve got you a 50% OFF deal! Just use the coupon “abhi150”. Besides the discount, there are bonus worth $2500 waiting for you inside the members area. And to top it all, Article Video Robot comes with an SEO optimization tool called ArticleReel, which can generate hundreds of backlinks and improve traffic to a website manifold. The best part is that ArticleReel keeps working in the background to generate traffic to the website and it doesn’t stop there- It keeps generating backlinks 24×7 every other day.

What I didn’t like about AVR?

The software is sluggish and kinda slow sometimes when you’re extensively using it but that’s just it. The support is tremendously awesome and the tutorials are great. It was fairly easy for me to get into the AVR and make the most out of it. It’s a fun piece of software which is a must have…

Got a query? Did you try Article Video Robot for yourself? I’d love to here your words and/or experience with AVR in the comments.

I knew this was coming and it came with a little surprise to me.

Shrtn.co – A URL Shortening Service that makes you money via affiliate sales, or at least that’s what people are calling it. And in a more cooler way, we could just say “Shorten, Share, Profit” and it definitely looks promising to me.

I got an email from Tom Layfield, who’s the Director of Product at Shrtn.co (and happens to be the co-founder of AcquisitionEngine.com also) introducing me to this new startup. Frankly speaking, at first I was a little bit skeptical about this whole idea of mixing affiliate leads with URL shortening but soon after my first trial of the service, it all seemed meaningful…and fun! In Tom’s own words:

“Our product, shrtn.co, is a new, unobtrusive way to generate revenue whilst sharing links. It works by seamlessly adding affiliate codes to URL’s that we support, then sharing any revenue generated via that URL with the user. We think this concept is unique – from the research we’ve done, there’s nothing quite like it on the market. The only thing that comes close are URL shorteners which add pesky popup/frame advertisements to the target link.”

What Exactly Does Shrtn.co do?

The Shrtn.co works pretty much like any other URL shortening service except every time someone buys something via the link that is featured as part of your shortened URL, you get a commission. The thing I really liked about this service was that it completely eliminates the need of signing up with various affiliate programs/vendors and lets you promote the relevant product automatically.

How Good are they?

They’re good! With over 160 merchants registered and more coming everyday, these folks are doing a pretty decent job. There’s an affiliate section if you wish to promote the service and a pre-version of the API you can you with your blog/site. They seem to have a couple more of features rolling out later this year.

Why You Should Use Shrtn.co?

This is a very natural question and it was the first that came to my mind when I was firstly introduced with the service. From my most basic point of view, using this service has two benefits. Firstly, you get to make money, period. You share your links and get a small commission if you make a sale. The second and my favorite being, you can donate the revenue you generated from your sales to Support Charities directly from your dashboard. Imagine, you sharing link could help a child? Even the though of it is beautiful…praiseworthy!

What I didn’t like about them?

The websites interface. I’m not exactly a UI specialist or a design consultant but there are a couple of features that seem to be missing from the homepage (including a merchant signup page). This is a very blog-ish layout which is kinda outdated for the new decade. The landing page also doesn’t exactly do any justice to the service but leaves it to the viewer to understand everything. Apart from the UI and layout, I don’t really see a lot of issues with this service, it’s a go green for me.

Did you try Shrtn.co for yourself? Do let us know what you though about it in your comments.

1. Get A Domain

The very first step is to get a top level domain like a .com, .net or .org. You can buy one from either NameCheap.com or Godaddy.com. NameCheap.com is cheaper and gives a free WhoIs Guard with every new domain registration but I enjoy GoDaddy’s user interface. GoDaddy.com is more professional and secure though. Cost: $9-$12 ($0.99 using Coupon Code: FALL99)

Get Hosting

I’d recommend HostGator.com. They are the best in market and have the cheapest quality hosting as low as $7.78 per month and they include cPanel and 24/7 live technical support. You get unlimited space & unlimited bandwidth & get to host as many sites you wish to host. You also get free adword & facebook ads coupons to market your new site online. Cost: $7.78/Month ($0.00 using Coupon HOSTINGCOUPONS)

Get WordPress

You then need to download the WordPress Blogging & CMS web software from WordPress.org. The latest version of WordPress a.k.a. WP is version 3.0.1, and that’s the one you want to get. You can also install WordPress using Fantastico Installer from your cPanel hosting. And the best thing is that WordPress is free… Installing WP is the trickiest part but it’s not exactly rocket science. Most hosting services use cPanel, and you’ll need to follow these instructions on installing WordPress: First go over these instructions from WordPress.org: Installing WordPress Then carefully go over these instructionns for cPanel: Using cPanel If you still face problem installing it, you can always contact the HostGator.com Live Support. Cost: $0

Get A Theme

The key to having a professional looking website is having a professional theme. I usually most of my WordPress themes from Themeforest.net. They offer high quality Premium WordPress themes for great prices. You could also use one of 100′s of free premium & magazine layout themes available everywhere on the web. Cost: $0

Secure Your WordPress

WordPress uses a databases and a lot PHP files and hence there’s a slight chance that your WordPress site can get infected (as in hacked) but that is very rare.. There are two ways that I know that your site can be attacked: 1) They break into your login account, and 2) they break into your FTP server and install crap. I always keep my password saved in secured location and if I lose it, the hosting company can help you recover your password or reset your account. Bellow are other other resources that have strategies and necessary plugins you’ll need to secure your site like a fortress

• 11 Ways To Secure Your WordPress Blog
• 5 Plugins to Keep WordPress Secure
• How to Secure Your WordPress Blog

That is all you need to do and you’re done! You now have a Pro Website for almost no money…

• My 10 Second Technique – Find out how you can stay 30 Days ahead & kill your competitors (page 5)

• 5 Step Prefect-Presentation: – Skip everything & just follow the action plan & you’ll have a perfect report ready in two hours (page 12)

• The SnowFlake Method For Reports: — Follow the simple 10 step process of creating a report almost instantly (page 28)

• The “C.P.P.P.” Technique: — Learn my secret CPPP technique that makes my readers go crazy about my reports(page 18)

• Sell For $10 But Make $67: — Copy my exact sales system that will let you make 6 times the price of you report (page 34)

• My EXACT Step-by-Step Action Plan: — Copy my action plan step-by-step and learn how you can conceptualize the idea in the morning and finish a report by the noon. (page 39)

• And Much More than you can’t actually imagine

It’s great report and you’ll love it. There’s a lot more about the report in the WSO thread. CLICK HERE to go to the WSO thread. See you on the inside.