Great question! My name is Humberto Valle, I'm the CEO and Competitive Strategist for Unthink Digital Marketing. Your question has very simple answer: Copy writing is the artistic use of words within advertising and or landing pages for example. Figuring out a simple and clever way to make your point across is copywriting. Catchphrases are copy, calls to action words are copy, Red Bull's "Vitalizes body and mind" at the bottom of their cans is copy. Content Writing is just as complex or simple as copywriting but is actual writing of sentences and paragraphs or how tos, etc. Used primarily by inbound marketing agencies such as our www.Unthink.me; content writing is a way to help consumers find answers to their questions, provide them with solutions, etc as they move through their Buyer's Journey which goes from Awareness to Consideration to Decision - content writing should be written for each phase of the journey and each phase can have its own best type of content that is created for a certain persona at a specific phase in the journey. -Consider me writing this answer for you if I had written this in a blog post and promoted it as an "Easy Comparison Between Copywriting and Content Writing" and my response was the article content - someone reading this would be within the Awareness phase. - Copy was used in the title and possibly my call to action at the bottom of my blog offering you a "FREE eBook on blogging best practices" - this would take you a landing page that has more copywriting (clever wording to convince you give me your contact info exchange of the eBook) and the eBook itself is another way of content writing. www.Unthink.me is known as the most helpful marketing agency in the world, for a low monthly subscription we help smart business owners with all inclusive inbound marketing and advertising campaigns.

Exciting times. When I read between the lines having faced a similar decision on more than one occasion, I see all the missed opportunities from having been too busy personally to be as effective as needed. The good news, there is but one weakest link in any system and that includes your business. Is it the lack of a talented partner? Perhaps. Is it a failure to delegate? More likely but not a given. Hiring is the most complex function in business and a wrong or misstep could be very expensive in time and money. I have hired over 500 people and helped organizations hire even more. It may not be obvious that I spent years in retail, most in men's fashion and in another life built several online businesses. I would be happy to learn more about your unique challenges and offer some insights from my more than 10,000 hours of experience at the front lines in each industry. Schedule 30 to 60 minutes at your convenience, but as you point out, the clock is ticking.

Your question is very thin on details. You will have a greater success of experts answering if you share a bit more about what you're looking to learn.

Great question, I hope I can be of help to you. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been working under my Agency, www.Unthink.me for about 10 years doing inbound marketing and advertising - a huge % of that is on SEO itself. With that said, I have actually worked with an European travel agency on this matter before. First off, I want to clarify that I don't think Google 'likes' long rich text per page for example, their approach is much more complex than that - have you ever visited pages with minimal content but their ranking is impressive? In my experience the quantity is not as important as the quality. In SEO - quality = targeted. As far as your on-page SEO, my biggest concern is just how good is your targeted key wording? Are you using the right verbiage, language and jargon or descriptions for these areas and attractions as your would be visitors? You can have a lot of text but lack visibility if you don't use the same words as your consumers. With that said, the way your sentences are 'read/structured' has a lot to do with SEO as well. Are your sentences clear enough that a robot computer could read and easily understand the definition? Google can now determine if you are referring about speed if you write the word fast and have the word car in the same sentence so with enough links and keywords your page could show up for the search "speed" even if you never include that word in your content. Talking about long tail keywords - make sure to have strategic out links to other reliable, well established websites (not your own) that can also add value to the consumer... such as if you refer to a statistic about a certain region, make sure you write that sentence well and link it to the source of that data. Make sure that your META includes 1-5 of your primary keywords (you should have anywhere from 5-15 keywords for a structure like yours) on top of your obvious targeted areas and attractions you are writing about. Your URL extension should include the same title as the title of your page, i.e: Best Travel Destinations in Lisbon For Families With Small Children should have an url like : www.mytravelwebsite.com/best-travel-destinations-in-lisbon-for-families-with... Also try to break down the title through your sub categories (H2 titles) - this reiterates your topic to the search engines as well as remind your readers why they initially opened your link. So a category could be : Most Child Friendly Restaurant In X City <-- includes keyword 'child' and 'friendly' for example if they were part of my keywords. Another thing you could consider is having something like: " Related Article: www.mynextarticlelink.com " somewhere towards the bottom of your pages... this yields more visit duration time which improves your SEO as well (the longer the visits the more trustworthy and valuable your site is) Overall, Google maps everything in and out of your site and credits you for the value to create for the visitors. The more value to your targeted audience the higher your ranking and visibility will be. And just like in business, you can't please everyone at once, with SEO you shouldn't try to be found by everyone all the time or your SEO work will dilute. If you would like some help, please don't hesitate to contact me or my team. We are known as the most helpful and affordable digital marketing agency in the world and we use Hubspot for ourselves and our clients.

Cross-platform frameworks are just now becoming robust and stable enough to be a real concern. The most popular frameworks include React Native, Xamarin, and Ionic. The trade-offs are typically speed of development vs. flexibility and complexity. If you use a lot of platform-specific integrations like HealthKit or Google Fit, your best bet is React Native, as it spits out real native Java or Objective-C that you can further tweak or integrate. Xamarin or Ionic basically put wrappers around C# or HTML5, so your deep integrations are limited. As far as the architect is involved, you're looking for someone who has experience in both Objective-C and Java, as well as the cross-platform language, whether it be Javascript or C#. This is because once you've built your cross-platform app, you still may have to write native libraries to integrate to the platform-specific features like HealthKit. I can't speak for the education industry itself. You can post listings on Angelist or StackOverflow, but also scour LinkedIn to attempt to poach people. You have to assume a good architect is already well employed and isn't looking for work, so you're going to have to go out and find them. I've ran into this problem before, in that good architects are really hard to find. It may be easier to hire a good mid-level developer, and train them in architecture. That basically means carving out 40-50% of their time to spend on architecture and research. They will then grow into that role in 6-12 months. Hope this helps.

This is an awesome question! As a fellow entrepreneur and strategist I can tell you that this is way more common than you may expect. I think social media and public figures like Gary V and the like have built sense of quick scalability by simply getting going and that is simply not the case. In fact many tech startups aren't founded by programmers they are ideated by entrepreneurial minded individuals who through trial and error find their CTO and manage to build MVPs to promote and validate. With that said, the startups that do find themselves pitching to investors, aside from being lucky, are in the driver seat when it comes to validating your own efforts - even if that decision was to outsource to India. As long as you have an ability to make quick adjustments to your code and pivot as needed, launch test campaigns and measure everything as far as the product itself - you should be fine with angel investors and some VCs. I decided to respond to your question here, because through our team, BetaBulls has been helping startups for several years now with MVPs, mobile apps and custom software solutions for medium sized businesses. In fact it has gotten to the point where 3 out of 10 startups founded in the U.S. by non-techy founders hire Beta Bulls as their interim CTO. If you're interested in more information please message me or visit www.betabulls.com :)

Probably not enough information to answer this question here, but... 1. the new pricing models sounds like the monthly charge will be variable and unknown. Some buyers won't like this (eg if you're B2B, they won't be able to budget for your costs) 2. Have customers asked for this? Therein, may lie the answer to your conversion rate question 3. There is no rule that says you have to have one pricing model. Launch a secondary model and let the customer choose. You could even consider framing one as a decoy? Have to chat further if you're interested Jon Manning

Alessandro Daliana's comments are bang-on. It seems you were also asking about how to get your elder's to accept your ideas about change. It's difficult, especially when your boss always wants to see you as their child. How do you earn their respect and get them to listen to you the way they would listen to an outsider who seems qualified. I've witnessed a couple of strategies from next-generation people that you may wish to consider. 1. Leave the family business and prove yourself 'outside.' You can go work in another company to prove your abilities and then come back to the family business at a later date. When your parents see that others respect and value you, it's easier for them to listen. 2. Case-studies. Look for similar companies that are not local direct competitors. Demonstrate the strategies that they're implementing and why you should do them as well... as long as they make sense (See Alessandro's answer) 3. Experiment with other people's businesses. You probably have friends who own or run their own business. Help this person implement change and then demonstrate the results to your parents. If they see that you're capable of seeing valuable opportunities and others respect you for it, it can be easier for them to accept. Being a next-generation in a family business can be difficult. Your parents probably see the business as an extension of themselves and probably haven't put the effort and thought into a proper succession plan. Most entrepreneurs that I meet have the 'I'll just live forever' succession plan, until the day comes that they decide they need to sell. Cheers and good luck. David C Barnett

Market to your niche, talking about the same problems your beta clients signed on to get fixed. These are called "pain points" and are valuable language. Anyone in the situation will instantly pay attention to you. Note that I am saying you should talk about the problem(s), not the features of your software. People want to get out of bad situations, not buy features. Yes, retain equity. Once given away, it's difficult to recover. And it can easily be worth much more than the capital raised...which is meant for operating expenses anyway, not your personal use. If the beta clients have paid you for their involvement, then it would seem you've proven the economic viability of the solution. Either way, your next job is to filter for people having the same problem the software solved for your beta clients, and get new clients to pay for the solution.

Hi, I've got years of experience in sales and small business management. While not travel-focused, I may be able to help. Why are you so focused on a direct-sales approach? I know travel agents that frequently sell adventure travel products for operators. Have you properly analyzed all the sales channels available to you? Agents have relationships with frequent adventurers who rely on their input when making travel decisions. If agents aren't part of your sales efforts, is it because your margins aren't correct? Are you trying to fix a sales problem with a marketing solution? Let me know if you'd like to book a call. Dave.

Talent management companies will bill the client for their services including the salaries of the temp workers. They keep the employees on their payrolls and then send them at client side. This reduces the risk of the client, however the client shells out more money. In case of Talent agent, they will find the right talent for the client and will charge a service fee/commission. The employees will join at the payrolls of the client creating direct accountability of the client.

Hi, I work for a FinTech saas company and we A/B all over our website. Not sure if you have done this already, but do you have a clearly defined ideal customer (buyer persona)? I mean a vivid picture of what your ideal client is like? where they are located (if that's relevant), their buying pattern, what are the most come pain points/issues they need assistance with (i.e. how your product/service helps them), age group, social demographics... This alone will give you a lot of information on who to target, and how they would find your services in the first place. You can then start to create content around these audiences (compeling headlines, relevant lead magnet, ...) and serve these content to different segment of your visitors based on traffic source, or key demographics as explained above. Hope this helps - Loic

Realize you're trying to make a sale here. Meaning that your first job is to Stand Out. If you don't stand out, you don't sell. Every competitor of yours has a portfolio. It sure helps if you have several prospects, but even if you only have one that's OK. I once had a company create a custom production management role for me...one target, one customer, and a four-day turnaround. Suddenly I had 150 people and six supervisors reporting to me. They weren't "hiring", by the way. So go at this from your customer's perspective: what is it that would make THEM want to hire YOU? How can you Stand Out to them? I've had employers create custom roles for me four times, with zero competition. Throwing your application package in with the blizzard chasing Want Ads is a bad way to go about this. Targeting specific firms you'd like to work for, and knowing why, is much better. If I was in your shoes, I'd talk with Michael to get your strategy together. Tighten up on your message: who you want to work with, and why. How you can Stand Out. Then, if you want some unorthodox expertise on getting in front of the right people who have the power to hire you, talk to me.

I own a digital marketing firm. We have 8 strategists each focusing on a specific vertical. This allows us to bring in multiple areas of expertise to a single project with varying ideas and strategies. I don't believe in jack of all trades. I prefer to have people who can learn everything they need about a specific area in order to master it.

Three good starting points for you: To connect with corporate communications professionals, check out the 2017 International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Washington, DC, in June: http://wc.iabc.com/ To connect with CSR professionals, check out the 2017 International Corporate Citizenship Conference in Boston in March: http://ccc.bc.edu/index.cfm?pageId=476 To connect with public relations professionals, check out the Public Relations Society of America 2017 International Conference in Boston in October: http://apps.prsa.org/Conferences/InternationalConference/index.html Good luck and please let me know if you need more assistance.

I would storngly suggest you to consider a 4th optinion which is much cheaper and with a higher chance of giving you return. I've personally used this strategy to start my consulting business from 0 to 12 clients in the first 3 months. Here's exactly what you can do. How You Can Generate 5 to 10 extra Trial Customers per week using Linkedin It is NOW the moment to leverage Linkedin’s full potential. In the future, this social network will start to get overcrowded (see Instagram and other ones that in the past were money-printers for the first ones who fully understood them.) How to leverage Linkedin to generate leads? 1- Use your personal account to post relevant content. Don’t put external links (if you really have to, write them in the first comment and tell people to look at it) as the post which includes them are penalized by the Linkedin algorithm that tends to make people remain in their platform. Use Quuu.co. if you want contents related to your niche posted every day on your account, but don’t expect an engagement from those. The best posts come from your stories, what you’d learned, and they give the hell out of value to your audience. 2- Select your target audience. Just hit the search button and look for the location, title/position, etc. where your leads are. 3- Optimize your profile. Treat it like a sales letter, but more related to your person. Firstly, write something eye-catching on your headline, for instance, “Contact me if you want to generate more leads for your B2B Business.” Then the first paragraph should be customer oriented (explaining the benefits of working with you/your company.) After you can tell more about yourself, and of your story if you’d like to. You can check my profile to have some inspiration. 4- Start with the automation. Download “Linkedhelper” (better) or “GPZWeb” (still good) to automate the following actions: - Profile Views. People will visit-back and see your “optimized profile” (see point 3.) And many times they’ll contact you. - Connect with 1,000 People, including a 1 line message (less-salesy messages get a higher-acceptance rate.) - Send a Direct message with an intro summary & calendly/ web/email link to everyone who accepts (better if you wait one day after they accepted your connection request.) ** MAJOR KEY ALERT** A high-quality copy of the message is KEY to succeeding. Try to stand out with humor or creative ways (thanks, Jon Buchan). I get five messages per day from people pitching me SEO services which go straight to the trash bin, while my messages, not to brag, get a very high response rate Reply to your messages, and watch the leads roll in! I repeat! Linkedin (and his automation) will soon get less effective as more and more people are starting to do it. So, do it now (the same applies to Facebook groups, see the third paragraph) and you’ll be ahead of 99,9%. Another thing, stick to the limits, check the Linkedhelper knowledge base for that. -- If you want support in implementing this strategy, just call me here on Clarity :-)

There are plenty of solutions for starting an eCommerce site with WordPress. However, the best solution for you will depend on what exactly you are selling. If you are selling physical goods that will be shipped, it's hard to beat WooCommerce. If it is overkill for your needs, you can customize it and reduce it to only the features you want. If you are looking for something much simpler, take a look at WP Simple Pay Pro. Easy way to integrate Stripe checkout with your site. Another simple plugin I would recommend is Plasso, https://plasso.com/wordpress. Although Plasso is new to the WordPress game, their payment solutions have been around for a couple of years. They offer hosted pages for your products or services which look awesome. If you are going to have subscription-based billing, I would recommend Zoho Subscriptions or Chargebee. They both offer hosted payment/checkout pages. If you have any questions regarding these or other eCommerce solutions, or need help implementing them into your site, give me a call and I would be glad to help :) -Matt Maker

You have limit time and resources so you need to think what I call "FIRST DOLLAR" approach. If you look across different modes to sell and target there has to be a few that would be the optimal. Focus only on those first don't look elsewhere - put each next dollar of effort into these (or this one) until it's optimal then target the next bucket to attack until you get momentum to broaden. There has to be a few or one area that would harvest better or best results w you time. The idea here is to get the sales/revenue flywheel turning w focus or richest buckets of opportunity to create revenue momentum to allow you to scale. 1. Partnerships with those who sell into doctors - preferably similar Catagory (tech. IT. Time optimization. Software). 2. Work your customers and fuel the flames of referrals with those Dr using your product. Ask them "is there some one you can suggest that might also benefit from this?" A warm referral is sales gold. "Dr xxx suggested I show this to you". 3. hire college interns. Congrats on "going after it

Hiring is fine if you can afford the cash flow outlay now. Remember, no one will ever care as much about your business as you do. At this stage, a combination of base plus commission is likely to work best. You want that base to be just not quite enough for the hire to pay their monthly bills; ideally, you want them motivated to go get the sales. If you pay them enough to be comfortable, they will stay comfortable. So the base shows you are serious. However, it does not let them wallow in complacency...which they will be tempted to if you let them because it's not their business. You will attract better candidates because of the base. Make the commission hefty, say 30% of the project revenue. Perhaps 50% if the numbers work. The risk tolerance of commission-based salespeople is very close to entrepreneurs. This is important to keep in mind, because if the reward system doesn't keep them hooked, they will realize they could eliminate you as the middle man and keep all the money themselves--which accounts for high turnover in many commission salesperson-based operations. Also note that once you set a remuneration structure, it is dangerous to change it. Even alterations that result in the salesperson making more money than they were prior will cause some experienced staff to get angry and quit.If and when you do want to look at changing commission structure, have the salesperson/people participate fully in the process with you. So do your best to get it right this first time. Next time you touch it, there will be consequences. Develop a sales plan with your hire. The numbers need to support the revenue you and the salesperson have in mind. These numbers need to be believable and achievable, not pie in the sky. Each person has their own money tolerance, which is your belief of what is "a lot of money". Check for this: there's no point in hiring an individual who has a low money tolerance and thinks $500 is "a lot of money" if the deal sizes are $10K+ and on-target annual revenue for the salesperson is $200K. If you want to discuss your situation further and set up a specific plan that avoids the pitfalls and gives you the best chance of success, you know where to find me.

I've managed digital products (apps) from concept to maturity. My experience is with SaaS and apps, so it may or may not be relevant to your situation. I think the best tool for prioritizing features is to create a features scorecard in a spreadsheet and use that tool to get alignment with your team as to what features get what priority. Start with defining your business goals (e.g., get more revenue, increase word of mouth, reduce churn, increase retention, etc.). Then assess the resources you have (e.g., number of developers, designers, writers, customer support, sales, whatever your company has to "spend" to create any feature.) In your spreadsheet, create a row for each potential feature and a column for each goal and each broad category of resource (engineering, marketing, support, for example). Use a small numeric scale (0 - 3) to "score" each feature in each column. For example, a feature may not move you toward goal #1, so you would put "0" in goal #1 column. For the resources, do the same. To the right of all these add a column that subtracts the sum of the resource or "effort" scores from the sum of all the goal column scores. You can multiply these scores by a confidence factor as well. If you have a team, it's important to get their input on the scoring. This is not something you just show them and ask for approval. You have to involve them in a meaningful way. I can show you how to do that and point you to some examples you can use, if you'd like to give me a call.

There is certainly value in starting customer discovery interviews. And no reason to wait for the delay that creating a landing page and waiting to collect emails would take. I would just advise that you get clear on your hypotheses about who your target customer is so you talk to the right kind of people. Personas can be a good tool for capturing your assumptions about target customer. A key concept is the different between problem space (understanding customer needs and pain points with how they're getting their needs met now) and solution space (evaluating your idea for how to better solve those problems). You can go pretty far with customer discovery to understand the problem space. At some point, though, you will want to transition to soliciting feedback on some solution space artifact that represents your solution. A landing page is good for testing your value proposition and messaging. At some point, though, you'll want to transition to testing a prototype of your product (e.g., tappable or clickable mockups using InVision). I'm a big believer in testing with prototypes before you actually build your product. I've actually created a 6-step process for defining and testing a new product idea, which I describe in my book The Lean Product Playbook: http://amzn.to/1EYCUdP I've also given several talks that you can check out at http://dan-olsen.com/speaking/ Good luck! Dan http://dan-olsen.com

Interesting question, but I don't really see it as a "chicken and egg" type challenge. For a service startup business, you will still need an online presence. In the Lean Startup method we talk about MVP, the minimal viable product you can build to both test the waters and get paid. Why build a business that no one wants and therefore, no one will pay to use? So, a better approach would be to test the waters first with a few phone calls. Is there a need? Want to be sure? Make one hundred calls. Then let's talk. There are affordable ways to build a MVP.

I would make sure to have a "one sheet" for your pricing already created. If you're okay with a discount rate and equity then have that as an option. When you pivot to discussing compensation it becomes as easy as " for compensation for this projects here's a link to our page/PDF for startups. As we outline there we take pride in our work and like to pay our staff on time so we don't work for just equity but do have special rates for startups who designate a portion of equity."

I founded one of the first independent app development studios just as App Store went live in 2008. In addition to building this successful indie studio, I've helped dozens of companies launch successful apps on App Store and Play Store. Congratulations! Ten thousand downloads a day is a great start. It shows that you've found a sweet spot in the market that has a sizable potential user base. Unless it's a paid app, however, there's nothing monetizable in downloads themselves. App engagement after download, on the other hand has inherent value. If users are indeed engaging with your app, there are dozens of ways to generate revenues from that. Also, you can use that engagement to create content that is shared socially to increase downloads, return visits and longer usage. I've work with app owners like you to make enhancements that ensure engagement, user content creation and sharing. Call me if you want to discuss how to do that.