6 Startup Mistakes You Can Fix: A Survival Guide

Self-employed, Small Business Marketing,

It is hard to believe that you are finally ready to get your startup business up and running. You have been planning and organizing for months, ensuring that every detail was perfect before the big launch.

Yet somehow, after just a few weeks in operation, it feels like things are not going according to plan. Could it be that you made one of these startup mistakes?

Now, it’s worth highlighting that every new startup is guaranteed to make mistakes. It’s how we handle them that matters.

Thus, you’ll find six avoidable mistakes startup owners make and advice on how to overcome them in this article.

Not Active on LinkedIn

Whether you’re serving businesses or consumers, having an online presence is crucial in this digital age. All successful small business owners have one thing in common: they’re adaptable and transform their businesses to match the times.

Some business owners may argue that there’s no reason for them to be active on LinkedIn. After all, other social media platforms may be more likely to have their target audience.

Nevertheless, many successful small business owners who won with LinkedIn would tell you that the platform should be part of your marketing strategy.

LinkedIn is where the professionals are. It helps you build connections and network with others in your industry. And with most people preferring to do their independent research before making a purchase, LinkedIn has become a reference point for trustworthiness and authority.

Other than your website, LinkedIn is often a stop for potential customers to learn about your startup. Therefore, write up a winning LinkedIn profile – both for yourself and your company – quickly so that you can see those leads coming in.

No Prioritization

It is easy to get sucked into a whirlwind of startup activities. But if you’re not careful, the priorities can get messed up, and it will take much longer to achieve your goal.

Try reorganizing your resources so that your efforts are directed towards specific channels with your target audience.

When you’re a startup owner, you’ll want to ensure that you’re not stretched thin. Instead of getting higher reach and visibility, these investments may only lead to greater costs and message dilution.

Besides LinkedIn, which other social media platforms do you think would give your business the best traction it needs?

Trying to Do Everything Yourself

If you’re starting up a business, there are high chances you’re wearing many hats to make sure you succeed. However, if you want to grow and scale your startup, it’s time for that “jack of all trades” mentality to go away.

You have the opportunity now in this startup phase to focus on what is most important: closing off your business deals. As such, it’s important to delegate tasks to your startup team.

For example, some things that you may delegate to others are:

  • answering phone calls
  • accounting and money management tasks
  • customer service
  • data entry
  • content writing
  • research
  • web design and development

A successful small business owner knows the strengths and weaknesses of their team members well. Hence, it would help if you tried taking more initiative in getting to know your team better.

Aside from their qualifications, they might have other handy skills you’d never know about unless you start asking. They’d likely be more than happy to bring them to the table as well!

Unrealistic Goals

If you want to build a startup, be realistic and have a good plan in place before you start.

While all startup owners should be ambitious, basing your startup on outlandish ambitions is not the way to go.

Instead, go with more realistic plans that match your current capabilities and what you want to achieve. Realistic goals will help ensure success in the present to grow your startup while making it sustainable for the future.

There’s nothing wrong with having lofty goals, but if they are unrealistic, you may make one of those startup mistakes where you end up wasting time and resources to get back on track.

To ensure that you’re planning the right milestones for your business to achieve, think about where your customers are in their buyer’s journey.

The buyer’s journey has four stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Loyalty.

Depending on where your customers are in their journey, you can tailor your startup strategy accordingly. 

Image Source: FILT Pod

Not Having an Exit Strategy

When designing your startup plan, think about what will happen next if things don’t work out as planned.

Will you still want to continue with this vision of yours even though there may be some bumps along the way? 

Or have you thought about possibly selling part of your company at certain milestones so that you could move onto new opportunities while also receiving cash from these shares that you sold?

Giving yourself an exit might sound like planning for failure, but it’s not. Instead, it’s simply a way to plan for everything and anything that might happen with your startup, big or small.

Not Having a Blog on Your Website

Websites with blogs are proven to have more leads compared to those without them. 67% more, in fact.

Reasons why having articles or other resources will help boost your business growth:

1) It gives your startup a more credible and authoritative voice

Google recognizes pages with content as being of higher quality, thus boosting search engine rankings.

2) It provides a more personal connection to your startup

Image source: Demand Metric


Successful startup owners know that it’s crucial to engage with their startup community in an authentic and personal way. Blog writing can be a great way to humanize your startup and help build relationships with customers because you show that you’re willing to share your knowledge and expertise and not always focused on selling.

3) Other websites, blogs, or social media channels may cite your content

These editorial backlinks will bolster your brand visibility and drive even more traffic to your website.

4) You’ll be able to establish your startup’s niche or industry expertise

This will allow you to become a recognized expert in this field, leading to more opportunities and partnerships.

Conclusion

If you’re a startup owner, there are many things to consider when setting up your business. These six startup mistakes provide insight into what you should be looking out for and what you can do to rectify them.

All the best in your startup journey!

Buyer Persona: Cater Your Content to the Right Audience

Buyer Persona, content marketing, ,

Around 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content a day. We all know content marketing brings success to businesses. However, new challenges have arisen with content marketing. With around 5 billion internet users today,  how to produce personalized content that reaches exactly the right audience? 

Not only does your business need to find a unique brand voice, but you also need to make sure your content is attracting the right audience. What’s more, if you’re a small business owner, you may need a LinkedIn engagement marketing tool to help boost your content reach effectively on LinkedIn. 

For right now, the very first thing to discover is: Who is your audience? There is one classic method to profile your ideal customer, which never ceases to go old, that is building a buyer persona.

Here, we will guide you through creating a perfect buyer persona in 4 simple steps. Take a piece of pen and paper, your laptop, or anything to get ready for brainstorming.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a holistic profile combining the most common traits of your ideal customer group including their background, demographics, goals, motivations, and more.

How can a buyer persona help you?

  • Understand your ideal customers’ challenges and goals
  • Understand what should be the topics, writing style, and focus of your content
  • Capture your ideal customers’ attention 
  • Produce quality leads for your business

Preparation

You need to have a solid knowledge of who your existing customers are. Open your Google Analytics, website statistics, customer database, or even Facebook audience insights. Remember to keep referring back to these places and collect information to answer the following four sections.

1. Demographic information

  • What is your persona’s name? Use the formula [adjective] + [first name] like “Work-driven Anna” so it’s simple and memorable.
  • What is their gender?
  • Which age group do they belong to?
  • Which country do they live in? Do they live in the suburbs or the urban areas? 
  • What industry do they work in and what is their job title?
  • What is their annual salary?
  • Are they married? Do they have children?

2. Psychographic information

Psychographic information via Adioma
Via Adioma
  • Think of 4 adjectives that best describe their personality. Use the image on the left as a reference. 
  • What motivates them to do their everyday work? 
  • What are their current short-term business objectives for this year or quarter?
  • What are the long-term business goals they wish to achieve?
  • What serves as a roadblock for their success? 
  • What are their biggest fears? 

3. Behavioral information

  • What are their hobbies and interests? 
  • What do they enjoy doing in their spare time?
  • Where do they search for information and seek help?
  • How do they prefer to interact with business? 
  • Which social media platforms do they use the most? 
  • Do they have a device preference?

4. Switch back to your perspective

Now that you’ve gotten every information you need, it’s time to uncover the content you should produce and the channels your business can utilise to reach out and help your buyers.

The demographic information allows you to niche down your content. The more niche your content is, the better it is going to resonate with your prospects. If you are targeting small business owners based in London, talk about the local business trends that small business owners in London should be aware of. If you are targeting married small business owners, talk about ways to balance family and business. 

The psychographic information determines your writing style and the various problems your content should solve. Some prefer to read about how-to articles with actionable examples, while others enjoy in-depth articles that provide food-for-thought for them to ponder on. Don’t forget to address how your business can lead them to success by overcoming their roadblocks and biggest fears. 

Create a simple marketing message using the information you have and include them in your articles and posts following a simple formula of [Call to action] + [Their challenges or goals] + [Time range to achieve the ideal results]”. If your ideal customer faces the challenges of generating engagement, an example would be “Download our free resource now to multiply engagement by 5x in 1 week”.

The behavioral information determines the platforms and channels you should be distributing your content as well as the touchpoints you should target. For mapping out your touchpoints, you can follow the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

There we have it, all the steps for creating a simple yet comprehensive buyer persona. Some businesses need multiple personas to understand the various types of customers they deal with, but for now, it’s okay to start small and choose one group of customers based on what you already know. 

SMITH – What’s it about, and How Does it Compare to BERT?

SEO, , , , , ,

In the ever-changing digital landscape, Google is a friend we all turn to for all our queries. From searching for a doctor nearby to getting answers to our problems, we chat directly with Google, even without realizing it. But Google is made of algorithms, and algorithms are not people.  Advancements in technology made it feasible for algorithms to accurately understand slang, language expression, meaning of different words, and synonyms to deliver the right search query.  But, have you ever wondered how Google differentiates ‘business relation’ with ‘correlation’ when both have the word ‘relation’ in common? That’s where natural language processing (NLP) comes into the picture. And, this is what gave birth to the concept of BERT and now SMITH! Using these algorithms, Google displays the top stories and features snippets every time you hit the search button. Let’s understand what SMITH is, why it has become the new buzzword, how it differs from its elder brother (BERT), and what SEO experts can do to improve their SERP results with SMITH in town!

Decoding SMITH

According to Google, SMITH stands for Siamese Multi-depth Transformer-based Hierarchical Encoder. Sounds alien? Don’t worry because you don’t have to remember the full-form; no one does! In simple terms, SMITH is the brainchild of Google’s never-ending quest to provide the best and relevant search results. bert-algorithm
It achieves what Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) couldn’t achieve – it compares sentences before, after, and even away from the passage to improve the search results.  SMITH tries to comprehend the entire document and can accurately predict what the next sentence can be. It helps Google puzzle out blocks of sentences, passages, long-form documents, and content – thereby ensuring Google fetches quality search results.

Features of SMITH

  • Improves recommendation of news, articles, and document clustering
  • It gives importance to information architecture
  • Helps with long-tail queries
  • Functions as a text-predictor
  • Works in conjugation with BERT

How SMITH Works?

Let’s understand how SMITH works and helps in fetching the best results. As artificial intelligence is the backbone of the NLP programs, the first step involves algorithm pre-training on specific data set.

For example, if you feed the algorithm with an idiom, “Once in a blue____.” The algorithm is trained to understand that the word ‘moon’ comes next.  When you repeat the above process numerous times with different phrases and sentences, the algorithm becomes smart and predicts the right words. Here, the word ‘moon’ is masked. But, what happens when a user masks an entire sentence from a block of content? How will Google ensure the accuracy of the search results? That’s what SMITH handles! It helps Google unmask the sentence prediction. But, how is it different from its elder brother BERT? Read on to understand

SMITH Vs. BERT – Two sides of the same coin

Though in 2019, BERT was the talk of the tinsel town due to its breakthrough search capabilities, it had some limitations. From understanding long-form paperwork to handling larger input text – the search results were tremendous but restricted to the algorithm’s ability to unmask only words instead of sentences.  Enter SMITH. Though SMITH is not live yet, it outperforms BERT by a whopping 400% – a mindboggling statistic, which could change the landscape of search results.

Pre-training

SMITH: The model was trained using the masked sentence block language modeling task.

BERT: The model was trained using the masked word language modeling task.

The change in the training model made all the difference as SMITH can identify the next paragraphs and block of text in a long-form document.

Understanding long and complicated documents

SMITH: It’s capable of understanding and processing complex documents and queries

BERT: Its use is limited to short sentences.

SMITH was trained to overcome BERT’s shortcomings and inability to understand and process long-form queries and complex documents. In the coming years, SMITH is likely to throw light on why the quality of links is necessary for search results and enhance the understanding of content pages related to one another.

Input text length

SMITH: Maximum input text length is 2048

BERT: Maximum input text length is 512

As SMITH is more efficient with longer documents, it’s likely to change how Google displays the search results.

Cost

SMITH: Splits 2,248 tokens for every document

BERT: Splits 256 tokens for every document

The text requires more speed and memory optimization capability of the NLP algorithm for processing eight times. Building a connection between a few words in a sentence is easier for the algorithm to remember than long-form content. As a result, SMITH is likely to be way more costly than BERT in performing complex jobs. But less expensive than BERT when performing the same job. So, will BERT fall prey to digital Darwinism or work in conjugation with BERT? BERT is the building block of SMITH and will help the new algorithm understand and process short queries.

How SMITH will impact SEO experts and web designer

Even with uncertainty hovering around the launch of SMITH – Google is likely to release it in the coming months. And, when this happens, it’s likely to bring a paradigm shift in the way Google ranks the webpages. To stay abreast with the technological advancement and ensure your efforts yield a higher ranking, follow these four tips for 2021.

1.     Focus on user intent

Like BERT, SMITH uses NLP and machine learning (ML) to know what the user is trying to search – making user or search intent the top priority. Search intent is the results that you get when you search something on Google. For example, when searching for a cardiologist in Texas, a user expects Google to show a list of heart doctors in Texas.

With the tech giant now being able to interpret the user intent like a human brain, a content-intent mismatch could jeopardize your business. Whether you’re an SEO expert or a web-designer, it’s imperative to provide results matching the search intention. The rule here is simple, The better your page matches the search intent, = Higher the page will rank.

2.     Create long-form content

According to a 2019 report, a content of 3000+ words receives:

  • Four times more share
  • Three times more traffic

This was before the SMITH era! If long reads had such a significant impact on the SEO strategy, imagine its amplification after Google rolls out SMITH. Long-form content is your goldfish to a successful SEO strategy as it engagingly provides information.

As SMITH checks the content of paragraphs and blocks of sentences, SEO experts should back your website with content that answers the searcher’s specific questions. You can no longer fool this intelligent algorithm by stuffing keywords in your long-form content. The need of the hour is to create quality content that follows the Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) principle of Google. The EAT helps Google decide the usefulness of the content on a website for the searcher. If your content cannot provide what your customer is looking for, it’s not SMITH friendly and will not rank for that keyword. That’s why sharing and publishing high-quality long-form content is no longer an option.

3.     Use content formatting or structuring

With SMITH capable of searching long queries, using header tags such as H1, H2, H3, etc., would only help the algorithm match the user intent with your content. Furthermore, header tags break up the text into small paragraphs, lending a helping hand to the SMITH algorithms. For example, the absence of a single H1 tag ensures that Google misses out on your web page’s key theme. When you use more than the H1 tag in your content, it confuses the algorithm as it cannot interpret which H1 is of prime importance. Having a single H1 in your webpage or long-form content could be the difference between failure and success. Structured data provides an additional description to your webpage on the SERP in the form of reviews and ratings. This helps Google crawler’s index website more comprehensively and ensures a perfect match between the search intent and content.

4.     Give importance to voice search technology

Voice-search-SEOWith 55% of U.S. households likely to own a smart speaker by 2022 and 27% of the global population using voice search on mobile – voice search technology could change the SEO game in the SMITH era. From Apple’s Siri to Amazon’s Alexa, your digital customers use voice searches to search on Google. Interestingly, a majority of the voice search queries are long-tail. For example, a user is likely to say, “What are the best digital marketing strategies for 2021?” using a voice search. Your customer may limit it to “best digital marketing strategies 2021” when typing. As voice searches best perform with long-form phrases, you need to identify these phrases to attract organic web traffic. With SMITH capable of processing long-form queries, voice search is likely to help you rank better in the SERP.

Conclusion

The mantra for 2021: Focus on long-form content, focus on providing meaningful and high-quality content. If you’re still planning to optimize content for keyword and Meta titles, you’re probably living in the dinosaur age. With current trends, SEO is only going to get more complex. A business that keeps track of these changes is the one that ranks higher on the SERP. The degree to which Google decides to implement SMITH remains to be seen, but websites delivering high-quality content are the ones that are likely to reap benefits from the change.

6 Ways to Design a WordPress Site

SEO, Web Design, Wordpress,

Some designers are hesitant to use WordPress. They say WordPress limits creativity, is not as easy to figure out as some people think, and can be confusing for many clients.

They say it’s difficult to convert a modern design into a feasible theme.

This is partially true.

WordPress is the go-to platform for those working with clients but it is far from perfect. That’s why, if your goal is to impress your clients, we need to adopt a new approach.

Various elements and processes make some WordPress builds way simpler, and more effective than the others, as putting a WordPress site together is not that difficult once you understand the working processes.

So here we list the approaches you can take to build a great WordPress site in a way that will impress your clients.

1) Brainstorm

Note. Don’t ever copy the results of anyone’s work such as code, graphics, brand identity or names but get inspired by it.

Again, this is about gaining ideas only. Let me say that taking ideas is the most common design practice off all, so do your research, surf the web and get inspired.

The fact is that an idea is nothing without execution, that’s what matters. You can easily have half a dozen designers start with the same idea, and they will inevitably end up with twelve different results.

Don’t be afraid to copy and enhance. If you see something that hits home to you, take it and make it your own.

2) Build the foundation

It is important to condition your clients to care more about the results the website brings rather than how pretty it looks.

Always make sure that you understand what the client wants to achieve with their site and subsequently focus on money generation.

Once you understand what you need to achieve, which you should try to narrow down to one or two primary objectives, then you can build the whole website around it.

Most clients will be looking for lead generation, selling products, and seek to improve brand awareness.

3) Equip yourself with the right tools

I am going to leave the very basic tools out like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Photoshop. I would rather show you a different set of tools that are not that well known yet, but they still deliver the results and make a WordPress designer’s life easier.

Let’s start with these:

Unsplash

Provides a premium source of high-quality photos with no copyright; meaning they are suitable for commercial use.

PixelDropr

A convenient way to create your pixel collections with buttons, icons, UI kits for example and then use them in Photoshop through drag and drop.

IcoMoon

Is one of the better icon font providers available in today’s market, you also get an app you can use for building your custom fonts.

4) Design and modify along the way

Commonly there are two main ways of building a WordPress site: You can roll with a ready-made theme and modify it as you go along (you can also modify the PSD files) or you can build the structure from the ground up, this is not as complicated as it sounds.

To keep this simple, I am a big fan of the former. When you take an existing theme or a theme framework, then you get a lot of functionality straight off the bat. And this functionality has been tested and proven to be effective for your client. On top of that you will often get support, and even if you don’t, you can engage in a forum of some kind. There is always someone you can ask for help, but this is not the case when you are building your design from scratch.

Themeisle

This is very handy for a designer, a new player in the market.  They work alongside you to help create a theme to improve conversion rates and lead building for your client, the theme is just a part of the process, but this will get you off to a good start.

Here I’d like to list some free alternatives that are still good as a starting point:

The themes at http://wordpress.org/themes/ – this is the official directory. The themes there are generally safe and analysed for common security problems.

Underscores

This is a starter theme with not much design on it, only a solid structure. It requires more work to turn it into a finished site though.

5) Get Some Non-Obvious Plugins

My primary goal in this article is to give you a starting and finishing point of building a site quickly and in a way that clients will love the functionality and results from it.

Again, I am going to brush over the obvious plugins you already know of, like WordPress SEO or Contact Form 7 for example. Instead, I am going to focus on less obvious ones, yet still extremely important for your clients.

User Admin Simplifier

If you’re dealing with someone that is not that web-savvy, it’s highly unlikely that they are interested in (or even should be) seeing the whole WP admin panel.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

This keeps the site safe in case the server crashes or any other unforeseen event occurs.

Tweet Old Post

These days, less and less people have the time to tweet their posts out manually on a daily basis. A plugin does this for you, or for your clients, meaning one less thing on their daily to-do-list.

Advanced Custom Fields

The plugin allows you to customise the user interface even further, and give your clients some extra types of content and further elements for them to use in their posts. This is not a one-click wonder plugin though as it does require work.

6) Create and Market Your Content

If it’s your site that you’re building then this step will be apparent, on the other side of the coin, for a client, you should still step in and offer your help with creating the initial content and maybe approach them with an after sales service and continue with a new deal.

A common mistake among designers is leaving the client behind after they have paid you for the site. And this overlooked point can have a significant impact on your future earnings.

Make sure your client does not fail due to them being unable to figure out what and how to publish, then they are very unlikely to come back or refer your services.

7) Time to Get Moving

Taking into consideration the steps covered above. I would say the last one has the most impact on your client’s happiness levels in the long run. In reality, even if you make a mistake on the site, but stay proactive and in contact to do everything you can do to fix it, providing tips and advice, then the client will come back as you now have a bond that comes from trust and understanding.

About the Author

Lancey Clemons is an experienced digital marketer and content curation specialists. He currently works with an SEO company in Canberra. In his free time, he likes to read thriller novels or write in his journal.