According to the latest studies, only 10% of the new start-ups will still be in business in five years. This is scary. However, I think that most start-ups that fail do it for the same reason and this mistake could definitely be avoided.

The Reason
Inexperienced entrepreneurs think they can predict their business models beforehand. They think something like, “I’m going to sell my chocolate cakes to people who enjoy great food and I’m going to advertise in the newspaper to find my customers.”  A few months later, they’ll probably find out that the chocolate cakes don’t sell as much as the lemon cakes. They’ll discover that it’s almost impossible to sell to end consumers but selling to restaurants and coffee shops really works. They’ll realize that newspaper ads don’t work but visiting restaurant owners in person and leaving them a free sample works great.

My point is that it takes time to figure out your business model. Now, one out of two things can happen:

• you either have enough money to cover your fixed costs until you figure out your business model
• or you run out of money before figuring out your business model.

The math is simple: let’s say you starting capital is $10,000 and it costs you $1,000 per month to run your business. That gives you 10 months to figure out your business model. If it takes you longer, you’ll need more money or you’ll have to shut down your business.

What You Can Do to Avoid This
There are a few ways you can greatly maximize your chances of success:

• Be humble and understand that you don’t know your business model. The market will show you what business you’re in, how you can reach that market and what the market wants.
• Partner with someone who knows your industry very well. This person will have a much better idea about what works and what doesn’t work in your market. If you’re the industry expert but have never run a business in your life, consider partnering with a seasoned entrepreneur who masters marketing and finances.
• Start your business with enough cash to run your business for at least one year until you can figure out what works in your market.
• Keep your costs down as much as you can. The longer your money goes, the more time you have to make your business work. Try to do as much as you can yourself.
• Test things before investing a lot of money in them. For example, if you want to print flyers, instead of doing 5,000, do 100 and see the response you get. If they work, get the other 4,900.
• Don’t quit your job yet. I can tell you from experience that owning your own business is a lot of fun but when you can’t pay the bills or buy food, all the fun goes away. A job will provide you with enough income to pay for your living expenses and it will give you some money to run your business. This is a slower route to growing your business but it’s way less scary and I’ve found that most first-time business owners find this route to be a much happier path than putting all your eggs in just one basket.

Now that you know why most companies fail, get out there and make yours succeed!

Do you get depressed every time you see how few Twitter followers you have? Well, don’t! There are plenty of things you can do to grow your followers base.

Before we get started, let’s make something clear: QUALITY matters more than QUANTITY. But, what if you could have a lot of qualified followers? Then you would have quality AND quantity!

Ask Your Followers to Re-Tweet Your Tweets
Teach your followers what re-tweeting is (basically, it’s the Twitter equivalent to email forwarding) and ask them to re-tweet your tweets so their followers can see them and follow you.

Add Your Twitter Link to Your Site, Blog and Email Signature
This is easy to do and will get you a lot of new followers.


Use HashTags
A HashTag is basically a keyword preceded by the pound sign. For example, people talking about Obama might include “#obama” in their tweets so other people talking about Obama can find them. On this website you can find the most popular HashTags. Using HashTags is a great way to ensure your tweets get found and people can follow you.


Be Part of the Conversation
Be active in the Twitter community. Following people isn’t enough. Share tips and cool stuff you find. Help your followers.

Follow the Authorities in Your Field
Make a list of the people in your industry you look up to. Follow them on Twitter, re-tweet their tweets and follow people who follow them. Some of them will follow you back if you’re sharing great content on the same topic.

Go Multimedia
People love photos, videos and music; include them in your tweets.

Follow People Talking About the Things You Talk About
Use the Twitter search to find people talking about your field of expertise. Follow them. Most of them will follow you back.

Last week I got a call from a girl I’m helping start her own business. “I’m stuck”, she said; “I don’t know what to do next.”

“OK, don’t freak out. We’ll work it out”, I said. I asked her to tell me what she was stuck with. She said that she needed vendors for her business but didn’t know how to go about it and she was losing it. “Calm down. You’re trying to accomplish a big task. Break it down into actionable steps”, I asked.

She then listed these steps:

1. Search the Yellow Pages for coffee mugs wholesalers.
2. Do the same search on Google.
3. Gather 30 email addresses.
4. Send an email to all these vendors with what she wanted and ask for quotes.
5. Set up meetings with the three vendors with the most attractive proposals.
6. Negotiate terms during the meeting.

She knew exactly what she needed to do. Her problem is that she had never negotiated anything in her life and she was terrified of it. I told her that she could read a book on negotiation if she wanted to but that she was going to get good at it by doing it again and again.

She wasn’t comfortable negotiating with vendors and I can understand why: she had never done it before. Doing something for the first time will require for you to get out of your comfort zone. When a boss tells you to do something for the first time, you’ll most likely do it, because you have no choice. But, what if you are your own boss? How can you avoid procrastinating and get things done?

This is what I told the girl I’m helping:

• Comfort and success are opposites. If you want to always be comfortable, you’ll never succeed. If you want to succeed, you need to get out of your comfort zone and be prepared to feel uncomfortable.
• Failure means different things to different people. In my opinion, trying to negotiate with vendors for the first time and making several mistakes isn’t failure. To me, failure is not wanting to put yourself in the line and risk making a fool of yourself to get what you want in life. Failure is not giving it a shot. Old people never regret the shots they missed; they regret the shots they didn’t take.

About two months ago I went to visit my grandma. She asked me if I was still running “that Internet business that you have”. I laughed and I told her that I was still running my Internet marketing agency. For the first time ever she asked me what exactly we do and I explained to her that we help companies increase their sales using the Internet to promote their businesses.

Grandma then said something that I’ll never forget: “I don’t understand why people buy online or hire companies they know over the Internet. How can you trust someone you don’t know?” I tried to explain that things have changed and that you could put some testimonials on your site so your prospects could see that you have several satisfied clients.

A couple of hours later, when I went back home, I started thinking about what Grandma said. I thought she might be right. I started thinking about all those times we sent proposals to prospects that decided to go with local companies. In most cases we offered a lot more at a much better price but we didn’t land the accounts because we weren’t local. I’m not saying that everybody needs to meet in person with you before hiring you, but a large percentage of people won’t give you a penny unless they know you in person. This is even more true if you sell high-ticket items (that cost over $200).

I decided to start a little experiment and fly out to meet with companies that expressed real interest in our services and had products I really wanted to promote for them. The results blew my mind: we’ve gotten more clients in one month of meeting with people in person than we had gotten in the last four months communicating via phone and email.

I still think that social media, email and phone are essential tools and I couldn’t work without them. We use social media marketing to drive people to our site. Once they contact us, we email them back asking them some questions. If they are interested in our services and we’re interested in promoting them, we arrange for a phone call. If the phone call is good, then in most cases we meet in person to work out the some details and create a plan of action together with our client. Adding this last step (meeting with them in person) has made all the difference.

Can you learn something from my story? Do you communicate with your prospects always by email? Try calling them. Do you deal with them over the phone? Meet them in person. You need to earn their trust before you get their business, and a real, old-school meeting is worth 1,000 emails and at least 100 phone calls.

A couple of weeks ago Google announced that they were going to start considering site speed as a search engine ranking factor. That’s the second most important reason to have a fast website. The top reason is showing your visitors the information they want fast so they don’t leave your website.

These are 10 things you can do to speed up your site.

1. Use External CSS and Script Files
   Don’t include CSS or JavaScript code in your HTML documents. Create separate files and call out to them when necessary.
2. Use DIVs for Layout
   Avoid using tables.
3. More Is Less
   Remove elements you don’t really need.
4. Optimize Your Images
   Use this software to reduce the size of your images.
5. Don’t Use Images to Display Text
   With CSS styles you can make text look pretty much any way you want.
6. Use Clean Code
   Get rid of unnecessary code.
7. Use Trailing Slashes When Linking to Directories
   If you have your blog in a folder called “blog”, link to www.yoursite.com/blog/ (with a trailing slash at the end) as opposed to www.yoursite.com/blog.
8. Use the Height and Width Tags
   Don’t forget to use these tags for images and other elements.
9. Avoid the Excessive Use of Flash
   Flash animations can really slow your website down; avoid them if possible.
   
10. Speed Up Your WordPress Site
    If you have a WordPress site, use the WP Super Cache plugin.

When you ask people what WordPress is, most of them tell you it’s a blogging platform. I don’t blame them because that’s what it used to be. However, WordPress has evolved into the strongest, most flexible content management system and it allows you to do literally whatever you want out of your website.

These are five really cool things you can do with WordPress.

E-Commerce Site
Do you want to sell your products online? WordPress can become a fully-featured e-commerce site with this plugin.

Social Network Site
Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. BuddyPress will let users register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more.

Image Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

Email Autoresponder System
With GravityForms you can create forms for your website to capture people’s contact information and market to them via email. It has a lot of very cool features.

Message Board
Do you want to have your own message board on your site? With BBPress you can!

These are five Internet marketing tools that I constantly use and wanted to share with you.

WhatTheFont
Have you ever seen a beautiful font on a website and wanted to know what font it was? Now you can! Capture a screenshot of some text, upload it to this site and it’ll tell you what font it is so you can use it for your own site.

PopURLs
The surest way to attract visitors using content is to create the content around hot topics. The question then is, “how do I know what’s hot NOW?” PopURLs features the “hottest” news online. Find out what people are talking about and use that to your advantage.

Google Docs Drawing Feature
Google Docs launched a new feature last week. Now you can share drawings and mind-maps with your co-workers. In my opinion, this is one of the fastest and most effective ways to get an idea across and share it with your team.

NameStation
Do you want a tool that allows you to enter your keywords and get a list of available domain names containing those keywords? You got it! NameStation is a crucial tool for SEO people. NXdom is another tool that allows you to search by suffix and prefix and sort the results by popularity, readability and length.

LinkBait Generator
This tool allows you to come up with amazing titles for your blog posts, and we all know that great titles are what get people to click on your posts.

MyBlogGuest
Do you want to become a guest blogger? Are you looking for bloggers to contribute content for your blog? MyBlogGuest is the place where bloggers meet to work out guest blogging arrangements.

Learning from mistakes is the most effective way to learn. These are seven of the biggest screw-ups in my career as a marketer. I hope you learn from my mistakes. I sure have.

You Can Be as Big as You Believe You Can Be
When I was 20, my goal was to make $5,000/month and that’s how much I started making two months after I set the goal for myself. About three years later, I found a mentor who told me I wasn’t making more because I didn’t want to. “That’s ridiculous,”  I said. “Of course I want to make more.”  But he was right. I was setting my own limits. I needed to dream bigger. My mentor recommended a book called The Magic of Thinking Big. Read it; it’ll change your life. It sure changed mine.

Integrity Doesn’t Have Grey Areas
You either do the right thing or you don’t. There aren’t grey areas. Your reputation is the only asset you can’t recover once you’ve lost it, so think twice before you do something that could compromise your integrity.

I know what you’re thinking, “I never cheat.”  But, integrity is a lot more than not cheating. One time, when I was 17, a guy called me and wanted to buy a product I knew wasn’t right for him. But he wanted it so I sold it to him anyway. I shouldn’t have. I should have told him that the product he wanted wasn’t going to help him. Sure, I would’ve made $50 less but I would have earned his respect, he would have trusted me and recommended me to his friends. And, even if none of that had happened, it was the right thing to do. This is the most valuable lesson I learned in my life.

Systems Are Everything
My first companies were a big mess. We didn’t have any systems. We just took care of stuff as it came along and we put out fires as they appeared. Now we have systems for everything and our company is a much better place to work. Everybody is happier, things get managed and done, and the best part is that because we have systems in place, we can grow our business without having to work harder.

If you still don’t see value in creating systems, think about how McDonalds works like a Swiss clock with-low qualified, minimum-wage employees. That wouldn’t be possible without the most effective systems in the world.

Breaking Even Is Good
We’re all in business to make money. But, there’s a lot more you can get from your business:

• An education you couldn’t get anywhere else (not even in the best business school in the world).
• Life skills that you can’t learn any other way (persistence, communication, empathy, etc.)
• Connections (that you’ll be able to leverage later in your life).

Keep working on making more money but if you aren’t profitable yet, appreciate all the other great things you’re getting from your business.

Happiness Is More Important than Profits
Last week I read a book from a guy who claimed that profits are everything and you should be willing to sacrifice everything, including your own happiness, to increase profits as much as possible. I feel sorry for that guy. I really do. There’s so much more to life than profits!

A few years ago I was making a lot of money doing something that I hated. I was miserable. I used to wake up sad and was always stressed. Then a friend of mine said something interesting: “you should follow your passion.”  My passion was marketing, so I opened a marketing agency and I now love my work so much that I would do it for free. Seriously.

I was lucky, though, because passion is not the only factor you need to consider. There are two more very important factors:

• Skills: are you great at what you do?
• Demand: do people want what you have to offer?

If you love what you do, are great at it and people want what you have, then you have a winning formula.

These are the seven deadliest mistakes of blogging and what you should do about them:

Mistake #1: Not Using Your Own Domain
If you have a typepad.com or blogspot.com domain, migrate to your own domain as soon as possible.

Mistake #2: Not Promoting Your Posts
Are you one of those who think that if you build it they will come? Well, they won’t. You’ll need to promote your posts. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, forums, email and every tool you can think of to drive people to your posts.


Mistake #3: Faking It
Are you trying to impress people by using fancy words? Don’t. Just be yourself. People want to connect with you so open up to them.

Mistake #4: Using Boring Headlines
If you need inspiration for writing headlines, check out this blog.


Mistake #5: Not Asking for Help
Why would you want to do everything alone when having others help you is a lot easier and more fun? Ask experts in your industry to write for your blog, interview them and ask them to promote the posts you write about them.


Mistake #6: Not Making It Easy for Your Readers to Share and Subscribe
It should be obvious how to subscribe to your blogs by email and RSS. Don’t count on your visitors “figuring it out”. It’s your job to make it easy for them. Allow people to follow you on Twitter, Facebook and the rest of your social networks.

In addition, make sure you have links to share your content on the most popular social networks. I use the Sexy Bookmarks plugin and the TweetMeme plugin.


Mistake #7: Not Asking for Feedback or Not Learning from It
A blog is a two-way conversation. Don’t monopolize it. Ask your readers what they think; encourage the debate. And, when they give you feedback about your blog, listen and do your best to give them what they want.

Mistake #8: Posting Too Often or Not Often Enough
What is posting too often? What is not posting often enough? It depends… If you have a lot of information to share, posting once a day (or more) should be OK. Most people post two or three times a week. It’s important to be consistent; don’t post 20 times this week and only one next week.

And overall, pay attention. If too many people are unsubscribing, ask them why.

Mistake #9: Not Thinking About Search Engines
There is a lot written about making blogs SEO-friendly. In a nutshell, you want each post to have a keyword-rich link, a unique title and a unique meta description. I use the All-in-One SEO plugin for this.


Mistake #10: Not Linking to Others
Link to others as much as you can. You want to do this for two different reasons:

• Your readers will appreciate the resources you share with them.
• The people you link to will start paying attention to you and might even want to return the favor.

Idea #1: Teach What You Know
Are you very protective of your industry secrets? Try something different for once: share everything you know.

Share your secrets in forums, on Facebook and Twitter. Post it to your blog, email it to your contacts, prospects and clients. If you feel you’re giving away too much, you’re on the right track.

This is what you’re worried about: “if I give away all my secrets, then no one will want to hire me.” This is what actually happens: people will see you really know your stuff but won’t have the time or desire to do it themselves and they’ll hire you to do it for them.

Let’s say you prepare the taxes of small business owners. I hate doing my taxes. If I come across your post “7 Ways You Can Save Money in Taxes”, I’ll read it and then I’ll ask you to do my taxes because I know you can save me money; I don’t want to do this myself. Makes sense?

Idea #2: Think About Your Indirect Competition Too
Let’s go back to the tax specialist example. On your website you’ll want to tell me why you’re better than other tax specialists, and that’s really good. But you should talk to me not only about your direct competition, but also about your indirect competition, which is ways I can solve the same problem with a different approach. For example, you’ll want to tell me:

• Why working with you is better than having tax preparation software do the work for me.
• Why doing my taxes is better than not doing them (yes, for some people this is an option).
• Why working with you is better than doing it myself.

Remember, your direct competitors are not the only ones competing with you.

Idea #3: Learn From Your Own Blog
How often do you go through your all blog posts, see which ones got more re-tweets or comments and write down a few notes about what works and what doesn’t? I do this every week. If you don’t know what your audience liked in the past, you have little chances of creating something that they’ll like in the future.

Idea #4: Have a Facebook Page
I know, I know… you already have a Facebook profile. But, you should also have a Facebook page. Here’s why:

• You can only have 5,000 friends under your profile; you can have unlimited fans for your page.
• Facebook pages get indexed by the search engines and you can even get a link back to your site.
• On your page you can have an opt-in box so people can subscribe to your newsletter or get a free report.
• With a page, you can send an update to all your fans at once.

Idea #5: Partner with Group Administrators
Let’s go back to the tax specialist example again. It’s April 1st and people know they need to do their taxes by 4/15. Take a look at this Facebook group:

Do you think that from these 13,407 entrepreneurs at least a few of them will need their taxes done? And, did you know that the administrator of this group can email all his members? What if you offered him a commission for every person that hired you plus a small fee for sending the email?