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Quirky Toy Company
Reading about Fat Brain's openness to innnovation and innovators reminded me of trying to sell my magnetic word game, Poetryslam, to Milton Bradley.
Every major toy company DOESN'T WANT (or didn't want) to talk to innovators. So sure where they your pitch would be something they already had in their files.
Stupid is as stupid does and this post about Fat Brian shows what a nimble competitor can do against such petrified thinking. Post reminded us of Quiryk.com. Our company, Curagami, is about to pitch several major clients on why they need a Quirky-like playground where innovators share, talk and receive the legitimacy they need.
If that sounds like we will be hatching a handful of mini-Milton Bradley's powered by ideas, smartphones, laptops and cool ideas you got it right. And why not? Fat Brain may get it, but they are still in the miniority in the less digitally innovative than they need to be toy biz.
Training Your Mind
The hardest thing we teach our clients and anyone who will listen is becoming a great web marketer means letting go of a lot of preconceived notions about how things work. Here are the 5 secrets we share in our must recent Curagami post on learning how to think like a pro:
* Start with Why
* Gamify and Diversify * Double Down * Become A Nowist * Baseball not Football
http://www.curagami.com/think-online-marketer/?v=7516fd43adaa
How Crowdfunding Can Work
Great Josef Holm post on Krowdster about why crowdfunding campaigns fail also shows why and how they can work. Easy? Not even a little bit, but crowdfunding is an important new marketing channel.
Marty Note Startups are so pressed for time they often ignore or make a C priority developing content marketing. That is a huge mistake when it comes time to close a round of funding.
Startups with following have leverage and so may survive. In this excellent two part series Andrian Leighton shares tips on how to blog and how to recycle old blog posts into new content. With these tips every startup has the time to develop the most overlooked but important thing almost all startups overlook - effective content marketing.
We are emotional people on a spiritual journey. Why is logic the most common approach to online selling? 5 Tips so your digital marketing makes less sense.
Startups BELIEVE in the widget. Talk to any Venture Capitalists and they will tell you they invest in teams not ideas. Ideas change. Teams capable of making the many pivots any new idea needs are worth their weight in gold.
Go to 100 startup websites and teams, if they are there, are pushed to the background as the WIDGET takes center stage. This is because we believe the way to "make a sale:" is to use logic.
Logic is tyranny when what we seek is emotional connection . This post shares 5 tips to avoid logic's tyranny:
* Listen More. * Control Less, Collaborate More. * As community forms listen and curate. * Empower your advocates and Sherpas. * MOVEMENTS not campaigns.
Startups need to forget the widget and remember we are spiritual beings having a human experience not the other way around.
Lessons by Marcus Lemonis of CNBC's hit show, "The Profit", for small business owners. We take a close look at lessons learned from all Season 1 episodes.
Content Marketing For Startups
Content marketing authority is something everyone wants yet few realize the fastest way to achieve what they want is to share, share, share. The 4 Sharing Tips:
* Give Expertise Away, but not 100% (find a way to create ROI too). * Following Is Currency, So SPEND IT.
* Presence Makes you REAL.
* Trust in KARMA of the SHARE.
Post is trending on Curatti after going live on Tuesday. This "bean stalk" is an important content marketing one for startups to climb. Being a startup is solipsistic and self referential when it needs to be open kimono authentic and all about sharing. Share EVERYTHING.
Getting your tech startup covered in press isn't easy. Nonetheless, it's one of the most valuable activities which provides your endeavor with links and
What time of year, week, day is best? This is a question I am often asked at workshops. There is of course no one answer but here are some questions you should ask yourself. When do you need the mo...
Creating A Revoltion is HARD
May be hard, but MOVEMENTS are powerful ideas. Campaigns are not movements. Campaigns are more about YOU than THEM. My advice is learn secrets for revolutionaries and remove US vs. THEM makreting in favor of Save The World Marketing.
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When we read about content marketing successes, we so often hear stories from glamorous industries with substantial budgets, but YNAB is not one of these stories. In fact, it couldn’t be farther from that reality. It is however, a success story of David vs Goliath proportions, building a thriving community of users in a highly
Adding Scoopit Magazines
This post shares the easy how and why of adding @Scoop.it "magazines" to your blog or websties. We work with and around a lot of startups. Every startup is so widget focused they have a hard time creating the content marketing needed.
Why is content marketing so NEEDED for startups? Well let's see. Want to get funded? Want to scale? Content marketing can help, but virtually no startup thinks that way.
Every startup we know is so widget focused they can't see forest for trees. Widget focus isn't unimportant, but at some point soon you will need to sell that widget to someone for money. Content is the magic key in that "sell to someone for money" door.
The best return on any startup's content marketing time is to curate content - i.e. leverage brand relevant content from experts. When you don't have time or inclination to create great content you can get more reach and return from finding highly relevant sources (for your business content) and curating them.
Be sure to follow and contribute to those who you curate from too (or your curation can feel like stealing). This Curagami post explains how easy it is to curate content with Scoop.it and then add the magazines you create to your startup's blog or site.
Interesting, funny & sad watching car dealers create web & social marketing. Getting better is easy, fun and CHEAP as Web Marketing For Car Dealers shares.
We think of car dealers as "startups" because they need to start over and pivot their THINKING. Many of the tips shared in this Curagami post (http://www.curagami.com/magical-thinking/web-marketing-101-for-car-dealers/ ) such as:
* People not THINGS Sell.
* Stories and People, People and Stories...matter. * Humanize your approach and thinking. * Let THEM (customers and brand advocates) HELP.
apply to stsrtups too so killing a pair of birds with a single blog post today. Picture is of me (left) and Travis Lunsford in front of a ROGUE (seemed appropriate lol).
Two years ago, we published a two-part post on social media marketing safety with Internet marketer, curator, cancer survivor, entrepreneur and Friend of Paper.li, Marty Smith.
Well, guess what? Marty is back. And this time, he will share his journey and thoughts on entrepreneurship, e-commerce, social media and how his battle against cancer has shaped his thinking.
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Suggested by
Marius Fermi
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It’s time we take a step back, away from all of the ideas and best practices of sales and the art that is selling and consider what the simple, indisputable truths are of selling.
Last month, 14% of our website visitors AND new contacts came from Pinterest. Pretty good, right?
Well, for one of our clients, 48 percent of his traffic 57% of new contacts came from Pinterest.
...This example of the smoothie recipes is almost too easy. I know. But that doesn’t mean your landscaping company has no choice but to create ebooks about smoothies! Let’s say you created an ebook on starting a vegetable garden. The planning process may be broken down into a few steps. Then there is preparation, a trip to the nursery or hardware store, etc. Each of those steps could use its own pinnable image. You could either create one template and change out the text. Or, you could use colorful images of vegetables and gardens with some text outlining a specific tip or step in the process.
And that, my friends, is my #1 tip for how to get massive numbers of leads from Pinterest.
Via Jeff Domansky
Pinterest & Startups
This image of Batgirl staring out of a doorway is one of Scenttrail's most popular pins (http://www.pinterest.com/scenttrail/ ). Pinterest is important for startups because:
* Marketing is becoming VISUAL & Pinterest excels at visual marketing. * Pinterest is asynchronous to other social nets.
* Pinterest is EASY and doesn't require much time.
* Pinterest creates community faster than other social nets.
That last bullet should have a caveat. Pintererst builds community FAST once you figure out the secret handshake. I was frustrated with how long it was taking to develop a following.
I would share content on Pinterest and I could never understand what seemed to matter, so I shared LOTS more content (one key to success). I also Repinned from others and commented on pins.
All of those tactics helped, but the real dam breaker was creating the King and Queen of Pinterest boards:
http://www.pinterest.com/scenttrail/queen-of-pinterest/
http://www.pinterest.com/scenttrail/king-of-pinterest/
The real winner is the Queen of Pinterest with over 400 pinners now and a great daily rhythm. Community boards do get spammed so I developed some simple guidelines, pinned those guidelines (and do so again and again when the board starts to get spammy).
The victory with King and Queen of Pinterest shares an important secret. Pinterest is a tad solipsistic. People who love to pin really LOVE to pin. There are cult-like moments (lol). So one way to connect is to have a board that shares obsession with Pinterest.
Your startup may not be obsessed with Pinterest, but bet you need to develop a following. When I started the King and Queen of Pinterest boards I had 114 followers. Now, about six months later, Scenttrail has more than 5,000 followers.
Cool thing about community boards is people begin to tell their friends. I invited about half the people pinning on Queen of Pinterest. Interesting I invited 90% of the men (lol). Women understand the core of social media better. They are more naturally social about topics that people love to pin about such as culture, art, celebrity, travel, weight loss, etc...
If you are a startup you should be using Pinterest if only because it builds community, once you figure out a secret or two, faster than any other social net. The other reason Pinterest is important for startups is its focus on asynchronous visual marketing. Learn "asynchronous marketing" even a little and your startup will rock.
Creating CrowdFunde's new logo includes our rough drafts along with a short description of why the graphic design ended up where it did.
As I share in this post about the process of creating a logo any graphical communication should lead, follow or get out of the way (lol). In this case WTE.net's designer Rachelle Leath suggested something I didn't see - she made Funde green.
That may seem like a small thing, but it isn't. I've been working on this logo for months and felt like I had it close. I needed another pair of eyes, a pro graphic designer to supplement my amateur efforts (lol).l
Once I saw Funde i green my immediate reaction was, "That tells a better story". Every element needs to tell a story especially a logo. Sometimes I have the logo creation story all worked out. Not this time.
This time I had a good design, but I missed Rachelle's idea to emphasize CROWD and Funde. This emphasis helps tell CrowdFunde's brand story. The positioning of crowdsourcing and content marketing FUNDED by crowds is easier to SEE now. This new logo begins to tell that story right off.
When you create a hook like Funde in green the minute you explain it your visitors will have a V8 moment. They will smack their head and your story and graphic will feel easy, understandable and fun.
Great job by Rachelle and WTE team helping to create a new CrowdFunde logo. Now our job, as the marketing team, is to craft a brand story consistent with the new logo. I like to write a short story ABOUT the logo. Why?
A good logo prompts curiosity, so answer the unstated but prevalent question of why we crafted the logo the way we did provides another brand positioning and storytelling opportunity.
The Lean Startup
Every entrepreneur and wannabe entrepreneur should read Eric Ries' The Lean Startup. Here are 6 Tips from the book:
* Build an "Innovation Factory" Using Lean Startup techniques. * Validated Learning most important "product" in any startup.
* Find what assumptions are BRILLIANT & which ones are CRAZY.
* Create a testing & experimentation culture & experiment based on vision, core values and feedback. * You don't know what "quality" is yet, so go early, ugly and fast and refine from feedback. * Get Out of the Building meaning get your ideas in front of real customers as soon as possible.
Highly recommend The Lean Startup and not JUST for startups. Great book for intrepreneurs, people trying to innovate within Fortune 1,000 companies, too.
Without revenue a small business is just a hobby. So, how does a typical small business go about getting clients and revenue?
All startups need money, unless the owners are loaded. Where does that money come from? From fundraising efforts, both offline and online. Online fundraising is a lot more effective because of its sheer reach. Here are several tips for startups on how to obtain crowd funding for their projects.
Via The Fish Firm II
SHARE First & Worry About Everything Else Second
This Business 2 Community post is written for "business" but certainly applicable to startups. Startups must realize that "process is product".
Process is product means everything you are doing right NOW is a product.
The soon a startup begins publishing, broadcasting and sharing the easier it gets, the richer the fast feedback loops become and the more chances for success they create.
Many startups think what they have is so amazing that it can't be shared. With few exceptions (biotech) it is NEVER the case that your thoughts are unique or so unknown that your share will quake the world.
Any business is created in the execution developed for the idea. To worry about someone stealing your idea is to worry about the tide. Focus your energy on getting as much information out and in as many hands as you can as fast as you can. SHARE.
Realize that the most important "product" you build is the team capable of building something, pivoting on a dime and responding to what they hear with meaningful and amazing results.
If you don't have a way to capture your journey find one (write, video, infographics, animation, stories). Your goal should be to create the means of production - the framework where you can easily harvest UGC (User Generated Content) anytime needed.
UGC is more important to a startup than oxygen. UGC helps gauge reaction, shape your product and determine a startup's future.
Related Reading
Process Is Product on ScentTrail Marketing
http://scenttrail.blogspot.fr/2009/11/process-is-product.html
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