Remember newspapers? There were lots of them, weeklies, dailies, community, local shoppers, etc. Some are still around. Do you think these little individual media outlets had a strategy or sales force going after large Fortune 500 advertisers? Nope. They used a system of brokers and representatives. This is who you are. A media outlet. You need to make your 'ad space' available to people who spend all their day trying to sell space and earn commissions. Start looking for a 'rep house' (terminologies may vary) with whom you can 'list' your available ad space. Cheers and let me know if you'd ever like to arrange a call. David Barnett

The first thing I recommend is understanding that more advertising is not the best idea. You can quickly waste a lot of money on mis-targeted advertising. Better focus will produce better results. Second, learn the problems of fast growth. These are: > loss of focus > a struggle with communication > shock from increasing cash flow. It's very easy to get off track and start trying to be a bunch of different things to different people...leading to trying to produce too many things. Internally, with fast growth, communication can fail as departments spin off and start doing things that split resources or even conflict with one another. And while low cash flow is a commonly known problem, quickly increasing cash flow can lead to a number of problems in supply chain & vendor management, WIP, and more. Getting more sales is not necessarily the recipe for success--you can literally sell your way into oblivion if your margins are out of whack. Beware of a single panacea for success. More marketing, more sales, more production in isolation and without analysis can drive the company into extinction. You really need to understand the conditions you're operating under now, and then the target for where you want to be. Just wanting to grow is not enough. The target needs to be specific. I was a plant manager at 25 and have turned companies around. Let's book a call if you'd like to dig further into your business.

First to your question. No, unless there is a law in place, nothing is mandatory. That said, not liking your industry will make it more difficult to succeed. Those who love what they do will work harder and longer to achieve success. But success means different things to different people. Do you need to be rich, or just make a decent living? The lower your threshold of success is, the less you have to invest. Many business owners will choose to make less in order to work less. Others choose to work more to make more. It's all about what your personal goals are. Finally, there are aspects of every job that people don't like. Those are the things that the business owner can and should hire others to do. There is nothing wrong with that. Again, there are trade-offs. The less you do the less money you, personally make. But it can also help the business run better which can contribute to it's success. Better to have someone better suited for a role performing that role, so long as you can afford it.

I'm not the right guy to evaluate your project as a business model. If, however, you do decide it's viable and want to give it a whirl, let's talk about naming, branding, and explaining your startup. That's where I come in.

I think a better question would be to understand why people are cancelling after making a booking? Are you catering to business travelers whose schedules may change? (no amount of cuddling will save all sales) Are you catering to vacationers who might find better deals elsewhere? (appeal to their frugality with special non-flexible offers) Take a page from the airline industry, perhaps simply offer different rates with different options. Cheaper rate is pre-paid and non-cancellable, higher rate has full flexibility. Then you can more narrowly focus your efforts on cementing the 'flexible bookers' while you've already collected on the more frugal folks. Cheers Feel free to book a call if you'd like to chat. David Barnett

First of all, it's a 'prospect meeting', not a 'client meeting', if you haven't closed them yet. Any system is better than no system. "Flying by the seat of the pants" is a recipe for disaster. Have a qualifying system. Do they need or want what you offer? Do they have a problem big enough to warrant your involvement in solving it (that's Budget)? Do they have a personality that you can work with? That's qualifying. That's what you should be doing in your prospect meeting. If you limit yourself to a list of questions on a sheet of paper, you'll never cover everything. Have a consistent sales process. That'll guide you on what questions to ask in the meeting. If your plan is to present your solution right away, you've goofed up. Your system needs to give you feedback: why the sale advanced or died. And it's perfectly OK if it died--you just need to know why (not a fit on budget, for instance). I teach a proven, ethical, consistent sales process. If you want to learn it, let's book a call.

Even if your competitor continuously capitalizes on your ideas, by imitating your product features, etc., and even if he grows exponentially faster than you, it shouldn't intimidate you. Similar product, less money, whatever else, doesn't matter. Get awesomely creative with your marketing. Focus on the user experience and forget the competition. That's one thing no competitor can ever take away from you. And, the only thing you've got to mediate risk. I'd love to share more with you over a 15 minute call. I can guide you through getting a better understanding of your customers, and developing an awesome user experience, by moving beyond conventional marketing. Looking forward to it. Adrian

Use YouTube and Google to search for beginner tutorials!

Hi! Great question! My name is Humberto Valle, I'm a global competitive strategist and run a hybrid agency out Texas. A lot of our own clients come to us with existing notions about how SEO didn't do anything for them, etc. only to find out that they were previously sold link farming and junk that is obviously all just fluff and ego boosting but creates no real investment. Good PR backlinks are a management level effort, we for example develop an overall strategy for the use of the links, where these links will point to, what will be offered on these landings, etc. we then craft content and write it and find channels that can get us to prospects' eyes. If you try to hire someone off craigslist for example, you will have a difficult time trying to get them to provide you with samples of previous work, if you go to a typical marketing agency they will charge you thousands of dollars for this services. Good PR links are hard to build and require getting other people involved such as bloggers, influencers, high traffic online mags, etc. If you are interested, feel free to contact me and let's see if we can be of help - for us our SEO and back linking is dependent on the service or product.

Have a look at similarweb.com Put your competitor's websites in there.

When there's low search volume for your particular niche, it does make sense to see if you can attract traffic from peripheral niches and interests (which it sounds like you've been doing). Sounds to me like your goal, from an SEO perspective, should be focused on long-tail traffic acquisition, though. The way to focus on the right type of questions is to think solution focused. e.g. what solution is your problem looking to solve. Maybe you can look to answer questions like "how can I stop yo-yo dieting" etc. Any questions that your potential customers are likely to be asking. Some good ways to find ideas for the types of questions people are asking: 1. Take a look at your Google Search Console queries, see what you're getting the most impressions for, double down on that type of content. 2. Reverse engineer popular websites related to your topic or closely related to your topic. You can do this using tools like semrush.com, searchmetrics.com, Spyfu. 3. Look at the types of questions being asked in forums related to your topic. Take those forum questions and start answering them in detailed blog posts. 4. Look at questions being asked on Quora. Again, take the question and turn it into a blog post. Answer it in detail on your own site. 5. Collect feedback from your website visitors on the types of content they'd like to see you write next. You can survey them using tools like Google Surveys or HotJar. 6. In some industries, it might be that the offline content (e.g. industry magazines, medical journals) take off before the topics become popular online. If this is the case in your space, take everything you're seeing offline or in close circles and start writing about it more publicly. Feel free to send me a message if you want me to take a look at the content you've been writing to start with. Thanks, Scott

2 quick and simple ideas come to mind. 1. Open up iTunes, open the podcast section, open up your relevant categories and subcategories. e.g. business/business and marketing. Contact the podcasts that are in the "New and Noteworthy" sections or in the lower half of the top 200 podcasts sections. 2. Open Twitter or Tweetdeck and use Twitter search for people using phrases like "marketing podcast" or "marketing podcast guests" etc. Try a few different types of query and see if you can use Twitter to narrow down some of the marketing podcasters that are looking for guests. Good luck with your new book! Scott

I would start with google analytics. If you configure it correctly you can get quite far down the line for free. Once you start seeing revenue and need more detail you can move over to one of the more premium or paid for systems.

You'll need to learn more about, and better define your two personas: A) The type of company willing to pay for t-shirt based advertising B) The type of person that will to wear it. To do this you'll need to access communities where you think those personas would hang out (either online, or in person), and ask them questions (via an online questionnaire, or in an in person interview) that will allow you to characterize the types of people / companies that would be interested. Once you have your two well defined personas you can better design and test your initial service around them. For instance, maybe you've realized through your research that only bars are interested in your service, and maybe they're only interested in women wearing their advertisements. Meanwhile you might have also found that only men would be interested in wearing the advertisement shirts. In this case the idea would not be viable. However if you find personas that do match, and there are enough of them in existance (big enough market), and/or they're interested in paying enough $ (enough to pay for the t-shirts, and your rent, and cleaning, and occasional lost shirts, etc.), then it would be viable. Not _necessarily_ the next big thing, but definitely viable. Let me know if you'd like more detailed advice with regard to conducting interviews, designing questionnaires, how to access potential customers, or even if you'd just like to brainstorm on it some more. It's a fun idea, best, Lee

In general the highest converting direct messaging campaigns I have seen have very direct and simple messages. If you can achieve that with your target audience then you will see a good conversation rate. If you have the right message and already have the contacts, then go for it!

Hi, I used to work in the corporate payments industry. What you're looking for is a 'Purchasing Card' with higher order data transmission (sometimes referred to as 'level 3.') Card issuers with this kind of technology usually offer it to large organizations and the 'what was purchased' data only appears if the merchant has integrated their checkout data. There are very few of these merchants.

I am not an attorney nor an accountant, and this is not "professional advice". Let me begin by saying that I agree completely with Mr. McGuire's response. At his very affordable rate, you should have that call with him. $200 is nothing, absolutely nothing, as a tax-deductible expense to protect yourself from this and future similar situations. Yes, I am advocating having a call with another expert. I haven't done this before. The quality of his statements here demonstrates to me that he has knowledge that you badly need. And it is better organized in this department and more affordable than my own. When you say "the investor", do you mean they have already invested money in your startup? If so, what % ownership do they have now? If you were on Shark Tank, and a Shark made this offer, they would be attempting to take full control. The valuation of the business they're stating with this figure is $2,666,667 ($2 million/0.75). Does that seem right to you? It doesn't to me. Does it seem right that they want to buy a non-liquid $2.67 million for a very liquid $2 million? And that's it? No, they're trying to get a deal on the company and full control out of you. They know it is worth far more than this. They can boot you once they have 51% of the shares, you know. Do you want to become an employee, and therefore be at risk of having your employment terminated? Then take this deal. NEVER give up even 1% of ownership if you can avoid it. Don't take my advice on this--read How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis. Mr. Dennis was richer than you and I together are likely to ever become, and did not need the money from sales of his book. My impression is that you've gotten excited by the prospect of $2 million. If that's your exit strategy and enough for you, then make sure the money isn't directed for investment into the company but rather for you directly. If this deal is structured correctly for you, I'd also secretly plan to sell 100% of the shares you own eventually to divest yourself entirely from the hassle. Speaking plainly, after the takeover I'd have nothing to do with the company unless they pay you dividends as a silent shareholder, or pay you consulting fees for your expertise. After the sale I wouldn't give them anything for free. I wouldn't take a job there. Too much potential for drama. But that's me.

Mediums are always evolving. However we are all witnessing more free information and support being given to people. The quality of free information has increased rapidly and many of the products that a market would have paid for last year are now available at no cost. It is also clear that as competition increases there is a deeper need for the "faces" behind info products to also build more credibility. Majority of them are doing this by creating and growing communities on Facebook and building YouTube channels with massive subscriber lists. All of this is created off the back of high quality content.

Wordpress is widely enough used that you can do almost anything with it! You can manage others sites in terms of cheap hosting and managing their backend; manage Wordpress security; Wordpress specific consulting; create plugins that generate revenue; give talks on Wordpress; the list goes on and on! If you become a Wordpress expert the sky is the limit!

Hi there, If you spend money with a service provider then your expense is their income. If you claim that your time over the years was an expense that added to the capital cost of your business, then who claimed that amount as income? If you try to do this, then a tax auditor may try to look to make sure you claimed these 'expense' amounts as income in those years. My guess is that you didn't. Capital gains are taxed at lower rates than income. I'm not a CPA or tax attorney. You may want to verify this advice with one: It's likely better to face the capital gains tax then implicate yourself potentially in a problem of undeclared income in prior years. Cheers Dave

This is a tricky question for anyone to answer - not due to its brevity, but rather because of how specific this will be to your company and your objectives. Early-stage companies are deeply personal. A good place to start is to figure out just how important the benefits of this accelerator would be for you - and I'd challenge you think about the average case and worst case, like a programmer would. How truly important is ____ (benefit of accelerator) for your company? How invaluable is it for the office space, connections, and referrals they may give you? If it's funding that you need, how much do you have to give up? Accelerators are certainly what you make of it. My personal suggestion would be to have a serious heart-to-heart with your cofounders and team about just how valuable you all think this accelerator will be. Much like Paul Graham says, don't get sidetracked by things that don't matter. There are only a few things that truly matter for your company: - Revenue - Product - Growth/Sales You should be able to objectively answer how the accelerator would be able to concretely help you on these fronts. Focus on the things that matter.

I would say you have a few options, message me if you want to chat about it in detail.

It's always better to be great at 1 thing, then average at everything. You can still offer multiple services, but you REALLY want to push 1 as what you are best at. There are a couple factors that go into which one specifically you should choose. Message me if you want to go into more detail.

It's not entirely clear what your situation is, but there are a few possibilities. If you have only a prototype, but the ability (including capital) to manufacture it and you are seeking to be on their shelves, then you'd be dealing with the appropriate category buyer. But your odds are quite low. Why is your product better than others on the shelf? What kind of price point and sales velocity can be expected? Do you have the capital and capacity to fill an opening order and orders after that (the faster you grow, the more financing you need, because your working capital will never be sufficient based on the pay terms of the vendors). Is your prototype full working and ready for production? Or is it just an idea, because buyers want products to put on the shelves, not ideas that might or might not ever be able to be manufactured. If you are looking to have someone else manufacture your product, then you probably don't want to go to a retailer at all. They sell products. They're not in the manufacturing business. You'd need instead to deal with manufacturers in your product space, but with one whom you don't compete with or where your idea would advance the state of the art. Then there are question as to whether you have an IP protection or whether you product is fundamentally different than others in the same space. Hence, you perhaps need to be talking either to pharma companies like Merck or to medical device companies like Medtronic (depending, of course, on what your product does). There may be other possibilities. But there's not enough information in your question to be more specific. Should you have any specific questions, message me to request a call and we can get into this in more detail. Steve