How To Create a Business Plan

Starting a business is an exciting thing, and if done right, can be life-changing. But there are key steps that must be taken in order to give your potential business the best chance for success. At the top of this list is having a business plan.

What is a business plan?

Hubspot’s definition of a business plan is as follows: “A business plan is a living document that maps out the details of your business. It covers what your business will sell, how it will be structured, what the market looks like, how you plan to sell your product or service, what funding you’ll need, what your financial projections are, and which permits, leases, and other documentation will be required.”

Essentially, a business plan shows if your idea is worth putting in the continued effort to make it flourish. You are forced to look at the big picture and explain every detail that defines your holistic view.

Making a business plan

Building a  business plan may seem like an unwieldy task, but it doesn’t have to be. Keep it short and simple, as too much information or minute detail could confuse or distract anyone reading the plan such as shareholders, investors or any others involved in the inception of your business. The plan should also have a certain amount of flexibility built into it, and be able to grow and evolve as the vision for your business does. Finally, you’ll want to really dig into what makes your idea for a business unique within your space. Being able to stand out from a crown is a major prerequisite when starting a business.

Now you’re ready to put everything together and write your very own business plan. These templates organized by INC. are a great place to start and will help you organize all of the information you will need to present.

To fill out these templates, you’ll need to be ready with these sections of information:

1. An executive summary
2. A company description and business model
3. A market analysis
4. A description of your products and/or services
5. Outlines of operation and management roles
6. A basic sales and marketing strategy
7. A financial plan that includes costs, funding and profit/revenue projections
8. A summary of the above information

With that, you’re all set to start pitching your business and moving onto other tasks like choosing and registering a name, determining your legal structure and getting ready for a successful launch.

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How To Make Your Content Shareable

Anyone that works in marketing knows that shares on a post are a key component of determining its success;  shares organically generate attention, increase your reach and create an environment that is open for more likes. In a sort of domino effect,  a shared blog or social media post will be shared by one person, then another, and another yet after that continually. This sharing community can help build brand awareness organically, and all you have to do is create content that your audience wants to share.

To do this you must answer these questions: Who is your audience? Who is their audience? What type of content is being shared in this environment? Who do these audiences follow? Once you have the answers, you can begin to generate relevant content that your audience will want to share with theirs. Take some of the following points into consideration when creating content:

TITLE

There are mountains of digital content available. Close to two million blog posts are written every day. Social media user numbers are increasing every day. Writers and social media users are constantly creating, sharing and liking content. It’s a climb to get your content noticed. A key to getting noticed is having an eye-catching title. To do this, start small. Have your general topic flushed out. From that topic, you can come up with a few more specific title options. These titles can also act as a guide so that your blog post can move in a more specific direction.

Now cut apart those titles to build out the title you’ll use. Test titles with bold, strong language against more conservative and direct titles, and compare. Choose a title that works for you, your content and your audience.

SEO

SEO is important to get initial traction. But trying too hard to optimize can make your titles and posts sound awkward and often robotic (also, Google doesn’t reward over optimization, and in some cases punishes it by ranking your posts lower). Remember, many potential readers are scanning titles, so in order to get them to take the next step and click-through to the full article, the title needs to be short, succinct, and specific. Keywords work better in searches when they’re placed at the beginning of a title. To include keywords that will work in your titles and posts, do a little research on your potential customer base: What are they searching for? What problems do they have and how can you solve them? Use keywords that prove your expertise and are relevant to your content.

VISUALS

It takes more than an exciting title and hook for a post to be truly shareable. Images, infographics, videos, charts and block quotes can shake up a text-based post. Deliver content that offers solutions to your readers’ problems in a creative way that can lead to shares and valuable comments.

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How Your Business Can Celebrate Earth Day

Earth Day is coming up on April 22nd, and many cities, companies, and individuals are thinking of ways to be a little more environmentally friendly. You can use these simple ideas to save the planet (and some money) all year, not just on Earth Day, and they are easy to implement at work and at home.

Track your resources

Enroll in a utility management program that will track how much electricity, water, and gas your company uses and suggests ways you can drop your usage. This can help save the planet and your bottom line.

Make the switch from desktops to laptops

If you can, switching to a more energy efficient machine (laptops are generally more efficient) can help you lower your energy bill.

Increase sustainable efforts into your marketing strategies

Only use the paper marketing materials that are necessary to your campaign, printing more than you need increases waste, and takes up extra storage space. You may also consider converting from a traditionally print-based methodology to email, social media, and other digital tools.

Increase incentive to carpool, bike, or use public transportation

Make the jump to carpooling and ridesharing easier by setting up a matching program, this allows employees to find other commuters that share the same schedule and commute they may be unaware of. By offering perks like reduced rate parking, premium parking spots, subsidized metro passes and other incentives, you can garner more interest in the effort.

Adopt a highway or volunteer to clean up at a park

Increase community engagement while taking care of the environment and work to clean up in the neighborhood around your office. Whether you want to do this once as a volunteer opportunity or go the extra mile and committing to adopting a park or highway that you can maintain whenever you like or can.

Recycle

Recycling is easy to implement and takes relatively little effort to adjust to. Make sure that if you are not in charge of your office space custodial services that recycling is an available service. If it is, there is likely a protocol to follow, and if there is not, you can create your own, which may require you to make arrangements for what to do with your recyclable materials.

Go paperless

With all of the tools for communication and organization, it’s easy to cut paper use down to a fraction of where your usage is, if not completely. College paper limits are an example of paper rationing that has seen some success in the last few years, allotting students a certain amount of pages per semester. Cut down your spending, and cut down fewer trees.

Turn off the lights

If your building has good natural light and you can work without overhead lights, consider leaving them off. If more light is necessary, try using smaller lamps for more targeted lighting that cuts back your usage.

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Jaw-dropping Company Headquarters

Company benefits are reaching beyond insurance and vacation time and are moving into a revolution of the actual workspace. Everyone has the image of Google and Amazon’s headquarters in their mind; with dog parks, rainforests and nap pods galore, but that isn’t the only innovative space in the business world. From themed rooms to sustainability, these companies have some of the most exciting office spaces around.

Warby Parker

Glasses brand Warby Parker not only has a love for fashionable glasses but for books as well. Their Manhattan headquarters offers employees access to a library, a reading room, and of course, reading glasses. Read about the space and how employees like it here.

Dropbox

Cloud storage solution company Dropbox has worldwide offices, but their San Francisco headquarters, designed by Rapt Studio is an innovative space that allows for collaboration, quiet individual work, and a “neighborhood” set up to cater to the needs of each team. See a photo compilation of the office here.

Casper

New York City-based mattress company Casper was recently renovated and redesigned by FLOAT Studio, to create a workplace that fit in with the brand identity. The office includes sustainable construction, flexible meeting spaces and even nap pods. See the space here.

Sonos

Sonos’ Seattle headquarters bills itself as the “greenest commercial building in the world”, and based off of this GeekWire feature, it may be the most musical as well.  This modern and sleek office space make using the word headquarters the wrong descriptor though, as the company has a slew of conference rooms to meet with other Sonos “headquarters” around the world.

Squarespace

If you’ve built a website using Squarespace you know that the platform is simple but modern, and the company’s New York City offices follow the same formula. Built to be the most functional space for both collaborative and individual work, all without sacrificing design and comfort. See the office here and here.

Epic Systems Corporation

Medical software company Epic is aptly named, and the word epic can be used to describe almost everything about the company, especially when it comes to their headquarters. The Verona, Wisconsin campus is a grand adventure, with themed rooms, individual offices for every employee, a gorgeous view of the surrounding farmland, and an Indiana Jones styled hallway. See the campus here, and check out this video tour for a more in-depth look.

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Business Podcasts to Subscribe to in 2018

Continued education doesn’t have to come in the form of classrooms and textbooks, you can glean knowledge from many sources. One of the most popular ways to continue learning is listening to podcasts. Podcasts can cover a wide range of subjects from pop culture to politics to business practices. The following podcast recommendations cover topics from entrepreneurship, marketing, and business.

School of Greatness

Host Lewis Howes has overcome his share of adversity. This podcast launched in 2013 and has grown to be one of iTunes’ top-rated Business and Self-Development podcasts. The mission on ‘School of Greatness’ is to empowerer listeners to achieve success in the face of adversity, and he shares not only his story but the stories of the guests that come on the show.

Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do

Thom Singer started this podcast hoping to enable a new generation of leaders to use his knowledge of business relationships, sales, networking and more, including fitness, trends, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Product Hunt Radio

Product Hunt is great for the B2C business person, and those interested in current product trends. It focuses on physical products and how they’re created, the marketing behind them that turns them into global brands, and guests’ takes on productivity, management and investment.

Rocketship.fm

With big-name guests, this weekly podcast covers everything about building a startup from developing a product to finding and converting a customer base. This show is great for anyone in the B2B or B2C world.

The Influencer Podcast

Julie Solomon, marketing strategist, publisher and influencer hosts this show and brings in guests to talk about their experiences in the world of influencer marketing, as well as sharing insights into how to grow, engage with and persuade an audience.

Smart Passive Income

Learn how Pat Flynn author of The Smart Passive Income Blog uses all of his online blog and business strategies, as well as marketing tips and income sources which will help you take the next steps forward with your online businesses, blogs and more.

Copyblogger FM

In a world where content is king, it never hurts to strive for an improved approach to writing and content marketing. Host Sonia Simone and a rotating panel of experts discuss news, trends, and updates in copywriting, email marketing, conversion, content marketing and more.

The Science of Social Media

Buffer has a great blog, and the podcast they produce is just as influential. The content presented covers everything from the state of social media marketing, new algorithms, and third-party tools to maximize your social media management. This is a great podcast for everyone from beginners to the well seasoned social media practitioner.

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Marketing Trend: Data Driven Content

Looking to make your marketing efforts a little more streamlined? Or just trying to create content that is easy to scale, right for your audience and optimized for search purposes? Data-driven content is the way to go. The biggest hurdle for most marketers is leaving the creative brain behind and getting into a quantitative mindset that allows you to look at your metrics and analyze how to improve those numbers and statistics.

It may sound scary, but using data can really improve your content, SEO and more. Try these tips and tricks from JBH: The Content Agency to get started!

If you still aren’t convinced that data is changing the way marketers think and execute their strategies, take a look at these examples that prove that data-driven marketing and content can work in any industry.

Fitness Tracking: Jawbone

Because fitness tracker Jawbone’s purpose is to collect data for consumer use, it makes sense that their marketing efforts are also highly data-driven. By collecting the data from their customers, the content that is produced is much more relevant to the lifestyles of the entire user base.

Music: Spotify

Spotify users see curated playlists and song suggestions based on their listening history, and via this post from 2013, it’s clear to see that Spotify doesn’t take their analytics lightly. Spotify also has a “Found Them First” feature, that lets you know if you were an early listener of emerging artists that are now big.

Home Search: Trulia, Zillow

Zillow and Trulia are two giants when it comes to online house hunting, but also when it comes to using data to improve customer experience. From amassing crime data to pricing and neighborhood demographics, the data compiled on these sites and individually compiled from users’ browsing sessions can help homebuyers find the perfect place.

Ridesharing: Uber

Ridesharing app Uber does the typical promotional posts and company updates but also uses the data they compile to create great human interest pieces, like this article. The data Uber uses to create content used for both societal and human nature research.

Data drives the world. How will you use it to create better content?  

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Marketing Trend: Interactive Content

Content marketing is the bread and butter of any marketing strategy today, but with a huge influx of content, audiences are getting overwhelmed, with the average adult coming to an average of about 8 hours of screen time a day.

For successful content marketing you must break through the clutter of too much content so you can reach your target audience, but how? The answer comes in a not-so-simple answer: multiple types of content. In a recent post about User Generated Content (UGC), you learned about one form of content you can add to your arsenal, interactive content will be yet another added.

Defining Interactive Content

Interactive content is a cut and dry name for this trend, as it is defined as any type of content that the audience can interact with. This can be in any number of ways, but the key is that it forces the audience to do more than simply look at the content. These are some examples of interactive content that you can use for upcoming marketing campaigns.

Quizzes

One look at Buzzfeed and it is clear that there is a difference between the way that this “jack of all trades” site functions and similar sites like Mashable and Upworthy. Buzzfeed’s content ranges from pop culture to serious political news, but one of the top categories they have become renowned for is quizzes. A quiz can be funny, serious, or even an advertisement for a line of products. See an example of this here.

Video

Video might be already the considered the most engaging form of content, but interactive video can put your video engagement on a different level. Think of interactive video as a “choose your own adventure” type of content. Check out this post for more about interactive video and other types of video to use in social media posts, and this post to see some examples of interactive videos for marketing.

Games

Gamification in marketing has taken off in the last few years with huge companies taking note of successful campaigns and releasing their own gamified campaigns to promote their products. From offering “free” services for social shares, to actually creating a game; for example, Chipotle did this with the memory game launched with their “A Love Story” short film advertisement for real, healthy ingredients.

Content is key, so how will you break through the noise? Share your favorite content marketing techniques in a comment, on Twitter or on Facebook.

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Build a Better Team: Team Building Activities For An Improved Team Dynamic

Do you want to improve office morale and employee motivation as well as build teams that function more productively, with active communication and trust? Team building may be the way to go. Gone are the days of goofy games that were designed to foster “natural” strengthening of a team, and in their place are activities that can actively change how your teams work together.

Escape Room

Work together to solve a puzzle, beat a timer and escape a situation, whether it’s a zombie, a nuclear bomb or stealing a priceless painting. These rooms are all the rage right now for families, friends and corporate events.

Ropes Courses

Face your fears and overcome these obstacle courses! From ziplining to climbing, these courses are often physically and mentally challenging.

Battle of the Bands (or Air Bands)

If you have a lot of musical talent in your team host a battle of the bands. Break into small groups and host a performance for the rest of the company or even for family and friends.

If you have a lack of musicians, host a battle of the air bands! Break into groups and lipsync, play air instruments and put on your dream concert. For both options, costumes and props can be encouraged.

Mini Golf

Challenge your team to a game of mini golf and foster some friendly competition. This is something that can be done year-round, at either an indoor and outdoor course, and many courses also feature other activities that can make for a whole day of entertainment.

Trivia Night

Trivia is a great way to learn about different non work related knowledge your co-workers have. Many restaurants are now offering weekly trivia nights, so if your team is up for evening activities this is a great option, but if this isn’t a possibility, set-up office trivia in a way that works for your team. Whether it’s one weekly question that gets posted on a whiteboard, or lunchtime trivial pursuit games, this is a great break and lets everyone’s talents shine.

Community Service

Do some good in the neighborhood and get involved with volunteering. From working with organizations like Feed My Starving Children, or Habitat for Humanity to adopting a roadway and doing a monthly garbage pickup, volunteering makes you feel good and brings your team together.

Canoeing or Kayaking

Physical activity and working towards a mutual goal are all ways that you can build a functional team. Try placing some competition in with a race and see how well team members function together.

One Night a Werewolf

This strategy based card game is app moderated, so everyone can participate. For groups of 3 to 10 people, you must work together in your secretly given roles to discover who the werewolf terrorizing your fictional village is.  No game is ever the same, so each round makes everyone work to be heard, and even more importantly: believed innocent.

Mealtime

Perhaps the easiest way to foster positive team relationships is simply to host a lunch, dinner or happy hour event. Food and drinks are a natural way to encourage conversation, bonding and learning about the people you work with.

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Adding Entrepreneurial Aspects To Your Business

Entrepreneurs are business owners that are not tied to their service or product, but rather, innovation in and of itself. If you are a business owner that is looking for a breakthrough in your business here are some entrepreneurial traits to add to your roster.

Experiment 
Arguably the most important characteristic for an entrepreneur is innovation. Being able to take calculated risks, and being willing to work through the consequences with positive outcomes as well as setbacks is a cornerstone for progress.

Equal Footing
One of the best ways to foster inclusion and a positive company culture is through a simple and easy to maneuver company structure. A looser organization style encourages independence and builds clout between seniority levels. Forgo the rigid company hierarchy for a system that allows employees to feel important, valued and well supported.

Subtle Selling
Everyone is a salesperson. All employees from top to bottom should be so deeply committed to the business’ products or services and be singing its praises if and when given the opportunity. It’s essentially free commercials and endorsements.  

Give Equity
Ownership adds a new layer of participation for employees that is often overlooked by many business owners. Giving equity incentives is an amazing way to create clout and trust, adding a deeper sense of responsibility and investment.

Trust
Properly trained employees by virtue should have the ability to make decisions regarding their work. Micromanagement and lack of trust can very quickly deteriorate relationships in the workplace. Set your employees for success and then give them the opportunities to grow and learn at their own pace.

Communication
Open door policies are one of the pillars of successful entrepreneurial endeavors. Set an example for giving and receiving feedback with positive communication styles.

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7 Tips For Time Management

Time management: The ability to use one’s time effectively or productively, especially at work.
We might all know what time management means by definition, but still can’t seem to implement it in our day to day lives. These seven tips give you concrete advice on how to manage your time like a pro!

Declutter
Make a plan. Start small. Take breaks. Decluttering doesn’t have to be done all at once. Feel free to take your time and work your way up. Take it a desk drawer, or shoebox at a time.

Stay Organized
This is a two-pronged approach. Getting organized and then staying organized. Always easier said than done, but it can be done. Recognize that it’s an ongoing continuum and keep at it.

Prioritize
List out all tasks and obligations and rank them. Be it by time restrictions, career demands, or personal goals, knowing what and when things need to be done is key. Create a calendar and work your way through tasks in order of priority.

Plan
Plan. Plan. Stick with the plan. Having a plan doesn’t mean you have to stick to it on every detail. Having a plan gives you the ability to break down your time in segments, allowing you to track the things that are done, in progress and yet to be completed. It gives you to opportunity properly prepare for things down the pipeline and gives the small victory of being able to check things off as they are completed.

Be Effective
Life and work aren’t a race. Being the most efficient is overrated, strive for being the most effective. It’s not about how many singular tasks get finished, although that is important, it’s about how much progress has been made to meet goals you’ve set for yourself. Quality over quantity, but quantity is still important.

Stop Procrastinating
We have all fallen victim to putting things off, especially those things we deem difficult or time-consuming. Avoid this trap at all costs. Start tasks as soon as you need to. Consult your plan, make sure to stick with it, taking breaks if you need to. Just start!

Finish The Job
Starting and never finishing tasks is a killer of great time management. Unfinished tasks can quickly pile up, and sometimes even impede the process of other tasks and projects. All started tasks need to be completed unless canceled altogether.

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Insider Secrets For Great SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most used tools for anyone in marketing, but how many marketers actually understand it? Or go back and learn how to adapt to changes made in search behavior? The last few years have brought up some major changes to the way SEO works, and how to use it to its full potential. The changes made to Google’s algorithm, more use of anchor text within posts and increased security measures are all things that need to be taken into consideration for anyone looking to up their searchability, increase organic traffic, or even just have a better ranking on Google.  Here’s what you need to know to become an SEO expert.

Just Starting Out

If you are just beginning your journey into the world of SEO the task at hand can seem daunting.  Building a sitemap? Submitting a sitemap to Google? Where do you even begin? First things first, the sitemap is important to the general start of good SEO. You don’t necessarily have to update and resubmit your sitemap every time you publish new content, but it is a good measure if you ever put out any important updates or major changes.

The next change to think about is Mobile-First Indexing. In a mobile facing world, the importance of having a mobile friendly site is something you can’t ignore. Google prefers mobile responsive designs, so if you’re building out or re-designing your site, take that knowledge into consideration, especially due to the change that Google announced in November:  the search results index will be prioritizing mobile results first. This change is still being tested, but the update is likely to happen.  Another important thing to keep in mind is that AMP-enabled pages are treated as mobile pages as well, which will get them indexed first.

Once your site itself is optimized and submitted, you can start creating your content on the site. Anchor text, Some people argue that keywords are becoming less and less important, as in the very first days of SEO you could put as many keywords as you could possibly fit into a title or a post and still make it onto the front page of Google with that as your only SEO technique. That is a strategy unlikely to work today, as the technology has advanced far beyond where it once was. Now it is likely you will see top ranked pages all without targeted keywords anywhere in the content.

This is not to say that keywords are not important! Whether they are in a custom URL, in anchor text links, in a title of a post, or just located in your content anywhere, keywords can get your content to show up on a page that may or may not even be an exact match. Using a keyword research tool can help you find and utilize the most effective and relevant keywords for your content. But remember: top search terms only make up for about 30% of web searches, while unique searches that usually don’t contain popular keywords make up that remaining 70% of search traffic. Because of that large differential, it’s important that you use keywords from both ends of the spectrum, regardless of the diminished value of “Exact Match Domains” (EDMs). Branded keywords (keywords in the brand names of companies) can still be highly ranked even with the 2012 Google update against EMDs.

Sound Familiar?

If you’re already well versed in SEO you probably already know that keywords, backlinks, submitting your site to a search engine, and having a fully mobile responsive site are the first steps to higher ranking and increased traffic. What else can you do to keep ranking higher to a bigger audience? With every year and with every update to the parameters of the search, what can marketers do to continue the process of establishing great SEO? As of 2017, what will make a difference is going to be increased security measures, post content and user experience optimization.

Security and SEO

In a world full of online fraud and theft, Google gives a slightly better standing to those who use higher security settings on their pages, for example: using HTTPS versus HTTP links. When you obtain a certificate to verify the extra security of an HTTPS page, you become a “trusted third party”. Essentially, with this verification you get three types of security: encryption, data integrity and authentication. The process to switching from an HTTP address to an HTTPS address can be tricky for someone without an IT background, but this Ahrefs blog gives a great and simple explanation of how to get started, covers more SEO benefits and explains how to avoid any SEO concerns that may arise during a transition.

Post Content

The ideal content length used to be a short and sweet 500 words, but today, posts that are longer (around 2,000 to 2,500 words), and contain in-depth, comprehensive information are getting ranked higher and seeing increased traffic. The SEO trend Forbes says to watch for this year is dense content or posts that don’t have a specific optimized length, giving the most information in the smallest space needed, packing in the knowledge into a piece completely different than the small snippets or the huge novels of information we are familiar with. Remember also, as we shift into a mobile focused world that mobile content is usually shorter, and to be an authority on a topic does not always mean the need for long-form content. Consider using video and audio along with a transcript as a means to great SEO and mobile optimization.

User Experience

The amount of time a user spends on your site is a vital sign of your site’s engagement rate and can indicate to a search engine as to how highly the site should rank. Important factors in getting visitors to stay on and interact with your site are loading speed, appealing content, and, once again, mobile optimization. If there is no traffic to your site it may not matter how good the rest of your SEO is, so make sure to keep your audience in mind as you move forward.

Ideas of what the future of SEO will hold will continue to change as the world we live in changes. Be sure to keep checking in to learn about what you can do to ensure your business’ success.

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Entrepreneur vs. Business Owner

Popular culture has really taken a liking to business and entrepreneurship lately and it’s shining a light on the diverse career options. Along the lines of my blog “Small Business vs. Startup” the next logical step would be to look into the two types of leaders in each type of business venture.

Entrepreneur

Definition: A person who brings his unique idea to run a startup company, a market leader the first to start such a kind of enterprise.

Key Characteristics:

• Rapid Growth
• Passion
• Innovation
• Market disruption

Business Owner

Definition: A person who starts a business on an old concept or idea, a market player.

Key Characteristics:

• Profit
• Existing
• Longevity
• Market share

Entrepreneur vs Business Owner

In layman’s terms, an entrepreneur is an evolved form of a business owner. Generally, entrepreneurs are much more interested in the actual business side and market disruption as they are looking at the big picture, whereas a business owner tends to have more of an emotional attachment to not only the business but what the business provides to them (work/life balance, freedom to choose the work they find important). The ideas coming from business owners tend to be specialized, very to the point and highly specific.

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