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9 Key Metrics Every Entrepreneur Should Monitor

Posted: 11 Oct 2019 12:00 PM PDT

There is a mind-bending amount of metrics and data involved in even a young startup. You cannot afford to ignore the analytics or facts. Even if you are willing to gamble going forward blindfolded, you can't expect others to invest or come along for the ride without you knowing.

At best you won't be nearly as competitive and profitable as you could be. You certainly won't be taken seriously by angels and venture capitalists.

So, which metrics do you really need to know? Which are the musts that will ensure you stay in business and can sit down at an investor meeting without being dismissed in seconds? The metrics below are some of the ones I cover on my fundraising training. You will need to nail those if you want to land investors. 

1. Customer acquisition cost

How much does it cost you to get a new customer?

It's one of the top questions potential investors will want to know. It's also a vital number for entrepreneurs to know to understand their own finances, profits, marketing options and what they can afford to offer in return for loans.

This number is probably a lot higher than you think. Be sure you are doing all the math.

2. Churn rate

What's the difference between the number of new customers or users you are adding versus the number you are losing? That's important.

Adding new customers or users or visitors is great. Though if you are quickly losing them there is a problem. The content, service or product isn't living up to expectations. Or the customer service or delivery is letting them down. Or it could be that you are being undercut by a competitor or your pricing is simply too high to be sustainable. Whatever it is, you need to dig in and talk to those former customers to find out why they left.

3. Customer lifetime value

What's a customer worth to your business over their lifetime with you?

If you don't know this metric, you don't really know what a customer is worth at all. Without knowing this information, you can't make a good judgment on what reasonable acquisition costs are, or when you can afford to let them go versus fixing an issue. You can also bet your competition is using this figure to formulate their offerings, prices and what they are willing to giveaway. 

This number is usually far higher than you think. Potential customer lifetime can be very broad and long. In a simple SaaS B2B setting, you might have a few years with a client at a base rate. Though you may end up offering a large variety of upgrades and integrations over the years. You may acquire other companies that serve these same customers in different ways, compounding their value and revenue potential. In real estate, you may have customers that are worth over $5,000 per transaction. Some may be worth 10 transactions a month. Others once every several years, plus annual referrals and the opportunity to serve their extended family and heirs. That can add up to quite a bit.

4. Net profit

This metric appears to be quite often dismissed or overlooked in today's startup environment. Or at least booted down the runway. Neglecting net profit (along with cash flow) is, of course, the primary culprit behind the bankrupting of many, many companies, young and old when things tighten up. Some might argue that you don't really have a business without net profit. Or at least a goal and timeline for making it.

In addition to knowing your cost of goods sold and profit margins, you also need to know your true net profit, after all expenses, debt service and taxes.

5. Lead conversion rates

How many leads does it take to get to a sale?

This is more important than just knowing your customer acquisition cost. It will help calculate that. Though it goes even broader. Be wary of getting lost in traffic figures. Optimization is great, though many go off on too many detours if they are not online marketing specialists. There are many variables involved. You could go blind. Defer as much of this to an expert who can simplify the findings and take the lead on solutions by themselves.

However, specifically talking about sales leads to actual sales is a top metric to know. Firstly, because it shows you how amazing your sales team is. Or where there is room for significant improvement (in sales or lead quality). It's also a quick tool for evaluating marketing channels. If one channel costs you $150 dollars per lead and you are only converting 1 out of 4, you are paying $600 per sale. If your product only sells for $500, that may not be a viable channel. Not unless your lifetime value is far greater.

6. Burn rate

You can bet investors will want to know this metric. This is how much cash you are burning through each month. It determines how much investment capital will be burned on operating expenses, and how fast. It shows you how much time you have left before you run out of money. As well as how soon you need to begin raising money for your next round.

7. Customer satisfaction

How satisfied are your customers? You can detail this through online review ratings and in-house or independent surveys. Without a reasonable amount of customer happiness, your future is going to be pretty cloudy. It will have an immediate impact on sales and customer acquisition costs. Fortunately, this is also an opportunity to ensure you are connecting your product to the right customers, as well as finding ways to improve your product and customer service.

8. Employee satisfaction

Even a lot of entrepreneurs who nail the above completely overlook the vital importance of employee satisfaction. With sites like Glassdoor, everything is far more transparent than it used to be. Word spreads fast, is highly visible and stays up there. Everyone from potential hires to prospective customers, vendors and investors can instantly see what your current and past employees have to say about the culture and CEO. It will impact who you can hire, the vendors you can use and how others see the future of your venture. It's not worth shorting a contractor $25 to wreck your reputation. 

9. TAM

Your Total Addressable Market should be a key metric in your business plan and pitch deck. It's one of the most basic numbers for your business. That is how many real potential customers do you have?

Realistically, no startup should or can expect to gain a 100% market share. Trying to capture an entire market, without first targeting several niches, price points, customer sizes or geographical areas for roll-out, is going to be financial suicide for the vast majority of entrepreneurs.

 

Building a Business Plan: 18 Methods and Tools to Help You

Posted: 11 Oct 2019 11:00 AM PDT

One of the most important tasks any new entrepreneur has on their plates is drafting a business plan. This essential document lays out all the basics of a company, including financial projections, short- and long-term goals, and more.

And while writing a business plan can seem like a daunting task, there are plenty of tech tools, templates and approaches available that can help you streamline the process. To learn more, we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) about their favorite ways to easily build or maintain a business plan. Here is what they said.

1. Evernote

"I really like the flexibility that Evernote offers when it comes to jotting down ideas and just plain old throwing paint up on the wall. You can quickly compile assets like spreadsheets, images and even video to help make your plan incredibly detailed." – Nick Ponte, Offline Sharks

2. Business Model Canvas

"The Business Model Canvas is a straightforward and visual way of mapping out a business plan, without the need to write long paragraphs in a long-form traditional word document. It ensures you think of the core limitations, customers and value propositions of what you're looking to accomplish, which is the core benefit of business planning." – Keith Shields, Designli

3. An online business plan template

"Instead of starting from scratch, I prefer using a business plan template. Using a template helps you ensure your business plan has everything it needs, and it helps speed up the business plan creation process. You can find a ton of quality business plan templates online. Or, if you've created a business plan before, turn it into a template to save time." – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

4. SCORE

"The website SCORE has a plethora of business plan templates you can take advantage of for free. They're geared toward startups and mature businesses. It works well, because additional resources are available, in addition to easy-to-understand templates, like financial planning and sales projections. Plus, you can schedule a meeting with a mentor, who can offer suggestions." – Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

5. Weekly meetings about the business plan

"We use weekly meetings as a way to improve communication and plan our business goals. Every person at our meeting is responsible for relaying their numbers, progress on goals and roadblocks. The information we gain from our meetings helps us make better judgments." – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

6. Creating a measured approach at key intervals

"I like to look ahead five years into the future to determine what my business should look like. I then use a five-year, 90-day and 30-day measured approach, meaning I write out our five-year goals and then focus on the areas that will drive those goals in the next 30 to 90 days. Then, I measure every 30 days and set new objectives. This measured approach has grown my business over 35% every year." – Justin Nassie, Brandastic.com

7. Spreadsheet templates

"Finding a good spreadsheet template and using Excel or Sheets is the way to go. Look for ones with robust formulas that allow you to customize various inputs and outputs to align with your plan. Any specialized tool is going to be overkill." – Ryan D. Matzner, Fueled

8. Conducting research beforehand

"The most important part of developing a successful business plan is the research done beforehand. You must know your product, business and competition intimately. Read and research everything about your industry so you fully understand any pitfalls. After you know your business, defining your purpose, objectives and strategies in writing is much easier. Spend more time researching than writing." – Shaun Conrad, My Accounting Course

9. Having a system of organization

"One way to achieve a perfectly written business plan is to be as organized as possible. This means you are also clear on what you want to achieve as early as next week. Having software that helps you manage tasks, schedules, each team member's goals, etc., guides you with larger, critical elements of your plan, such as setting goals, envisioning your plan for new products or services, and establishing your marketing strategies." – Kyle Goguen, Pawstruck

10. Asana plus Slack

"This helps us plan our projects in detail, making sure everyone knows about the updates through tags. Asana is very easy to learn and understand, and we can vote, comment, and attach files easily for each plan. I also love how we can chat using Slack, and have channels and groups depending on the project. It's so easy to have apps like this to keep my remote staff in sync all the time." – Daisy Jing, Banish

11. Creating a story

"All too often, I see extensive, in-depth business plans written that are almost never looked at or actually executed upon. The reason is simple: Most business plans are far too dry for everyone to read and get on board with. Even in the business world, you need to keep people engaged and interested. I use design tools to turn the plan into a story." – Frederik Bussler, bitgrit Inc.

12. Google Docs

"There are many business plan software programs out there, and though I'm sure those are great, I would recommend starting in Google Docs. It's a free collaboration tool. Sketch out an outlined business plan, and add in key team members to the Google Doc to contribute ideas, comment and make changes. The more people can take ownership of a plan, the more likely they are to support and follow the plan!" – Diego Orjuela, Cables & Sensors

13. Being flexible and adaptable

"The most important approach to crafting a business plan is flexibility. You should be comfortable changing just about every aspect of your current business plan; this way, you can adapt to unpredictable changes in the market. Additionally, allowing every aspect to change means that those parts of your plan that stay the same are time-tested for reliability." – Bryce Welker, The Big 4 Accounting Firms

14. Quarterly planning

"I've found that quarterly planning gives our team the insight and flexibility we need to make our business work. At the halfway point of every quarter, we sit down and plan what we are going to do for the following quarter, and possibly establish goals beyond that time. This helps us figure out where we stand, how we can improve and how we should plan moving forward." – Blair Williams, MemberPress

15. Creating a short and long list

"We create both a long and short list. The long list consists of things we want to accomplish over the next year. The short list consists of things we want to accomplish by the next planning session. This helps us stay organized and break our larger goals into smaller, manageable tasks." – David Henzel, LTVPlus

16. Post-project and post-goal reviews

"Every time a project is completed or a goal is met, we have a retrospective meeting to talk about what worked and didn't. These meetings are open-ended and can cover topics like which of our procedures were an asset and which ones gave us trouble. The goal is to compare our results to what we hope our business plan will achieve." – Matt Doyle, Excel Builders

17. Constant refinement

"A business plan shouldn't be a static document. The market and the world change constantly, and the business plan must evolve to keep up. It doesn't take long for a plan to become obsolete, and when it does, the goals and processes it describes become useless. Our business plan is a living document that is frequently updated based on changing conditions and feedback from my team." - Corey Northcutt, Northcutt Enterprise SEO

18. Starting with the end in mind

"To build a business plan easily, start at the end. What I mean by that is write a couple of sentences about where you want your business to be in five years and work backward. After writing the end goal,  go back and determine the steps you'll need to take to get there. When you have the end goal in mind, it's easier to figure out what you need to do to make it happen." - John Turner, SeedProd LLC

Social Selling Adoption Trends for the B2B Enterprises

Posted: 11 Oct 2019 07:00 AM PDT

Social selling is the technique of persuading the leads through the social media platforms. As, the number of people using the social media platforms is increasing day by day. Therefore, the companies are also focusing more on marketing through the social media portals. Though, the competition in the social media space is also rising, thus, the businesses have to come up with some of the most innovative social media marketing techniques to catch the fancy of the audiences. But, when it comes to specifically the B2B space, then in that case, the businesses will have to put in a lot more efforts.

As your B2B business enters a supported development stage, it presents you with fantastic chances to utilize your assets to reach an extended pool of clients. You're in a superior position to convey your offer to purchasers and decision makers who were already outside of your hover of impact, and your business efforts during this stage can lead you to exponential development that can change the course of your whole association.

Over the most recent five years the idea of social deals has changed significantly with the reception of Web 2.0 and online networking. First of all, internet-based life has enormously expanded the scale and reach of our relationship systems (individuals with whom we keep up some level of balanced contact) and friend systems (individuals we don't have the foggiest idea however whom we see as "individuals like me.") Web 2.0 advancements have additionally changed the manner by which we work together on the web, with most B2B purchasing choices beginning, advancing, and frequently notwithstanding shutting on the web with no face to face gatherings.

Is B2B space drifting toward social selling?

B2B industry is now readily accepting the new sales and marketing techniques. The industry is moving toward the digital means of sales and marketing because of the increased use of the online or digital mediums. But, selling on the social platform is not only restricted to increasing the count of the followers or getting more likes. The B2B space is much more competitive, therefore, the companies will have to go an extra mile in order to get the eyeballs of the audience. But, the returns that the business can get from effective social media campaigns can be unbelievable. Also, as per some of the latest reports and stats, the number of people using the social platforms, and the number of companies available on the social platforms both are increasing rapidly. Thus, the businesses which deal with other businesses have to ensure that they use the best of marketing and sales techniques to attract other businesses.

At the same time, more utilization of the digital space will help the B2B businesses to gather more data. Accessibility to a larger volume of big data will help the businesses to collect more information and find out more and more insights for the betterment of their business. Therefore, the B2B space has happily accepted digitalization.

How different is B2B social selling from B2C social selling?

B2B social selling is vastly different from B2C social selling because of a host of reasons. For the B2B businesses, just attracting the audience or getting shares and likes is not enough. Also, they have to rely on more than just generic campaigns or simple conversations. The B2B audience has to specifically find out their target audience. Only they can curate campaigns for the businesses. The B2B sales campaigns have to find out innovative ways to nurture prospects. They will have to also gather a lot of information about their industry, like the user interests, and based on that the campaigns have to be curated. Also, the campaigns have to be more industry specific, and the level of interaction has to be different. The communication has to be more professional. But, at the end of the day, the businesses will need a latest corporate solution that helps them manage their sales operations as well as the social media marketing activities. And, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Integration is surely one of the best solutions.

Perhaps the hardest piece of social selling is having the option to focus on posting articles on a standard enough basis. All things considered, you're a salesman, not a social-based representative. Luckily, there are various administrations accessible that can enable you to post a constant flow of substance over different social stages. Take, for example, Buffer. They are doing a great job by constantly upgrading their posts to make them apt for the B2B audience.

Impressing a business is not as easy as easy as impressing a customer. But, the benefits that can be reaped from impressing a business are also far greater. Therefore, the B2B social champions have to have the best social marketing strategies to attract the right category of the audience. And, the social media planning and strategy is definitely very different from the one created by the B2C businesses. Rather, B2B business have to convince the other business that the collaboration will eventually help the business to perform better. Some of the key touch points can be related to how the collaboration can help the businesses to boost their revenue or grow. As, the businesses are more keen to know the business benefits that they will get by partnering with your business.

Give them a reason to do business with you

The best way to attract other businesses is to give them a valid reason to do business with you. The businesses should find it useful and valuable for them to get associated with you. Thus, your posts and social media communications should focus on letting the other companies know how they can be benefitted by joining your hand. Your social selling marketing and sales strategy should be aimed to persuade the other companies to get associated with you. But, you should add some decent and genuine reasons. At the same time, it is imperative to not go over the board.

Offer them an incentive plan

'Giving' is surely one of the main aspects of successful B2C marketing campaigns, but it doesn't go that well in the B2B space. The B2B space is not very engaging and transactional. Therefore, offering promotions and offers won't work that much in the B2B space. Hence, for the B2B environment, the companies will have to come up with something more sustainable and long term. Therefore, it is important to focus on incentive plans for the B2B space and that may have more chances to catch the fancy of the other businesses. And, the companies should use their CRM solutions, like Dynamics CRM to follow up about the campaigns.

Social selling is becoming more and more popular in the B2B space as well. There are many reasons that have led to the popularity of social selling. And, one of the key factors is the ease of accessibility of more and more people through the social platforms. Also, digitalization and social selling techniques make it easy to collect and use the data and the insights as well. Therefore, it is recommended to adopt one of the latest corporate solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 services to manage sales, social media marketing and even customer relations.

What Your Business Can Learn From Peter Drucker

Posted: 11 Oct 2019 05:20 AM PDT

Peter Drucker was a world-famous management consultant whose visionary management theories form the bedrock on which corporate America was built. Knowledge work, corporate social responsibility and organizational culture are just a few of the modern management concepts he conceived or propagated in the pages of his 39 beloved books.

To be clear, Drucker did not invent managers. By most accounts, however, he did invent management. When he began developing and disseminating his famous ideas in the 1940s, the "father of modern management theory" commenced a decadeslong journey during which he orchestrated a fundamental transformation of business leadership from a reactive to a proactive stance. Before Drucker, managers' highest priority was supervising. Now, thanks to him, it's strategizing.

"Drucker felt that all businesses need and deserve to be managed well," said Drucker disciple Bruce Rosenstein, author of two books about the management guru and his theories: Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way and Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker's Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. "Part of that, he believed, was thinking about the future … He recognized that even if you're really successful now, you will fail later if you're not thinking about the future."

In Drucker's own words: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

It's just one of many insights Drucker left behind for businesses of all sizes, in all sectors. For business owners and managers who take the time to learn about them, his life and work can yield many more.

Who was Peter Drucker?

Peter Drucker was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909. He attended college and graduate school in Germany in the early 1930s, where he witnessed – and vocally opposed – the Nazis' ascent to power. He subsequently fled to England in 1933, and to the United States in 1937. During this period, he worked at various times as a financial journalist and an investment analyst. In 1939, he published his first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, which chronicled the rise of fascism.

Drucker believed that the only way to prevent a second coming of fascism was to create a "functioning society," the cornerstone of which, he said, was strong institutions – including corporations, which he believed had a duty to be as virtuous as they were profitable.

"Management, practiced well, was Drucker's bulwark against evil," explains the Drucker Institute, a social enterprise established by Drucker to advance his ideas and ideals, on its website.

Drucker laid out his theory – that corporations are as much social entities as they are economic ones – in his second book, The Future of Industrial Man, which caught the attention of General Motors. In 1943, the company invited Drucker to study its internal operations, the result of which was Drucker's third book, Concept of the Corporation, in which he introduced many of his most influential management theories.

And so commenced Drucker's prolific career as a management consultant, teacher and author, which spanned more than 60 years until his death of natural causes in 2005.

For what ideas is Peter Drucker best known?

Drucker's management theory embodies many modern concepts, including the following:

  • Decentralization: Rosenstein said Drucker was focused on decentralizing – or democratizing – management in the workplace. He wanted all employees to feel valued and empowered, as if their contributions and voices mattered. He believed in assigning tasks that inspire workers, rewarding front-line workers with responsibility and accountability, and uniting supervisors and their subordinates to achieve shared organizational goals.

  • Knowledge work: Knowledge workers are white-collar employees whose jobs require handling or using information, such as engineers and analysts. Drucker – who foresaw the knowledge-based economy years before the rise of computing and the internet – placed high value on workers who solved problems and thought creatively, according to Rosenstein. He wanted to foster a culture of employees who could provide not just labor, but also insight and ideas.

  • Workforce development: Drucker felt strongly that managers should improve and develop both themselves and their team members, according to Rosenstein, who said that ongoing training and education are hallmarks of Drucker's philosophy. He believed external development – via participation in industry trade groups and conferences, for example – to be especially valuable.

  • Corporate social responsibility: Rosenstein said Drucker was a holistic thinker. Instead of looking at businesses as discrete entities, he looked at them as components of a larger social system. In that context, he argued that businesses should see themselves as part of a community and make decisions in that regard – with as much respect for their external as for their internal impact. Drucker even viewed profits through a social lens: A company has a responsibility to be profitable, he argued, so that it can create jobs and wealth for society at large.

  • Organizational culture: Be they positive or negative, helpful or harmful, companies have always had cultures. But Drucker was among the first to suggest that managers could – and should – shape them. "The spirit of an organization is created from the top," he said in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. "If an organization is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top people is great. If it decays, it does so because the top rots … No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as a model for subordinates."

  • Customer experience: According to the Drucker Society of Austria, steward of Drucker's philosophy in his native country, Drucker insisted that businesses have only one real purpose: to create customers. By viewing business operations and opportunities through that lens – the customer, not the business, decides what's important – he established a predicate for customer-focused companies like Apple, Zappos and countless others.

What is management by objectives?

One of Drucker's most enduring ideas is that of "management by objectives," or MBO. Although it has come to mean different things to different people, the definition most agree on is management in pursuit of shared organizational goals.

The idea is simple: Employees at all levels work together to advance the business toward an agreed-upon destination. Each worker has an equal say, sharing their own opinions on what the destination should be. From there, teams establish goals and delegate specific tasks according to skill sets and interests.

The process comprises five basic steps:

  1. Managers and team members review and set organizational goals together.
  2. Team members distill organizational goals into individual objectives.
  3. Managers and team members monitor progress toward individual and shared goals.
  4. Managers and team members evaluate performance based on measurable milestones.
  5. Team members receive feedback and rewards relative to progress.

For organizations and individuals alike, Drucker believed in fellow management consultant George T. Doran's concept of "SMART" goals – goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound.

"It's the idea that you have to have a sense of where you're going, what good results look like and how you're going to achieve them," Rosenstein said. "You have to think in a very concrete way about what you want to accomplish so that you can get there, and help other people get there."

Is Peter Drucker still relevant?

Although Drucker's ideas are decades old, they feel as fresh today as they ever did. Consider, for example, one of his most famous pieces of advice: "Look out the window and see what's visible but not yet seen."

"Drucker wrote about 'the future that has already happened,'" Rosenstein said. "Think about self-driving cars, or blockchain, or artificial intelligence. These are things that have already happened but whose full social impact hasn't yet been realized. Drucker would have argued that your business needs to be thinking now about what those things are going to mean for your business down the road … His advice is timeless. It will still apply years from now – whatever the current trends and technologies are."

9 SEO Tactics Your Start-Up Needs to Employ

Posted: 11 Oct 2019 05:00 AM PDT

The saying "if your business is not on Google, it might as well not exist" was already valid 10 years ago, and it's even truer today. For start-ups, there's a lot to gain from developing a good online presence for your business, no matter what its scale may be, and there are various ways to achieve that too. Some of them require the use of advanced techniques that not everyone is immediately familiar with.

Others are more straightforward to implement but will take some time before they show any results. You also have the option of contracting a professional to get the job done properly if you can afford it. In general, as long as you want to improve your startup's SEO, there are lots of options available to you.

Here are a few SEO techniques you should consider employing in order to build an online presence your start-up can benefit from. 

Guest blogging

Despite some people predicting its death for many years now, guest blogging is still popular. There are various ways to draw traffic through the use of guest posts, but if you play your cards right, you can even use something more generic like standard health and fashion posts.

Technology is also a popular field if you want to build backlinks fast, and it offers a much wider range of blogs to post to as well. Keep in mind that you might need to hire a dedicated content producer if you want to see good results though, as it may take a significant amount of posting to generate good traffic. In some cases, you might be able to get the job done with a smaller volume of high-quality posts too. Maintaining a schedule is a good way to get predictable results, but it might be a bit difficult to accomplish that when working with some specific sites. Make sure you can define your posting frequency to your own liking when picking sites to post on.

Outreach

Outreach marketing is also something that has to be used carefully, as its viability in current times is disputed. But when done right, it can do a great job of attracting new visitors to your site and allowing you to expand your reach even more. What's better, outreach marketing can allow you to realize some opportunities which would normally be out of your grasp. That's because some people only respond to email marketing and similar approaches due to being more used to them. That's not to say that you should ignore other options though – but combining them with outreach marketing can work wonders.

Professional services

Don't underestimate the potential of hiring a professional to do the job for you either. There's a lot to gain from working with a competent SEO specialist, and there are plenty of them to pick from on the modern market as well. Sometimes, you might be able to get a particularly good deal if you hire someone who's not only experienced in SEO but also understands your own specific market in detail. This comes down to doing lots of research though. The market is full of great opportunities for partners in this field. 

Podcast

Podcasts are very hot right now, and they are relevant to multiple industries as well. It's not that difficult to set one up, especially if you already have some audio equipment available from your other operations. And if you have something interesting to say (and know how to say it), a good podcast can be a huge source of extra traffic to your main site. Many companies have taken up this approach in recent years, which is why we've seen so many new podcasts cropping up.

Keep in mind that it can be a bit of a crowded field though, so you have to make sure you can really stand out with your content. A good podcast is more than just talking into a microphone for a half hour. You should think about a long-term schedule and some surprises along the way if you want to keep things exciting for your listeners.

Influencers

Influencers are another great way to get help from professionals who know what they are doing. A good influencer can completely turn the tides in your favor and make it seem like child's play. But in reality, a lot of work goes into being a good influencer, even if some people underestimate the job and look down on it. Find a good influencer, treat them with respect, and they will be able to do a lot for you in terms of boosting your popularity.

Make sure to do your research before committing to anyone in this field though. There are many influencers on the market today, and some of them will give you a much better return on your investment than others. Scout out the market and look for someone with a proven track record, instead of committing to the first one you come across.

Technical improvements

There are various technical improvements you can make to your website to ensure that it's more seen in the best possible light by search engines. SEO on the technical level comes down to knowing your way around HTML, particularly with regards to how search engines interact with your website. Things like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be important as well. Many search engines measure the rendering performance of your website as a factor in their ranking.

This means that a poorly designed website that uses lots of resources for no good reason is going to rank worse in most popular search engines compared to one with a carefully optimized design. The latter is not very easy to create if you don't have a lot of technical experience though, which makes this another area where it's a good idea to take some time and search for professional services.

Local searches

Don't underestimate the power of local searches. Many search engines prioritize these results by default nowadays. Depending on where you live and what kind of business you are running, you might be able to benefit a lot from boosting your local search popularity instead of focusing your efforts on your global rankings.

This is especially true for start-ups that rely on physical customer interaction. You probably won't gain much from showing up in the search results of someone on the other end of the globe. But for anyone in your local area, that link could be a very enticing one. And if you do things right, you can easily outrank the majority of your local competition without having to put too much effort into it. Of course, if some of them are also paying attention to this, that's a different story. But at least you know you're facing some healthy competition in a viable market in that case.

Focus on the important details

Details matter in SEO – but not all of them. Sometimes you can gain a lot from focusing on one area instead of another, but this is highly individual for the different types of businesses that exist out there. For example, if you're running a start-up related to cryptocurrencies, people are likely going to have a lot of interest in the technical side of things. Focus your efforts on providing quality content and link building in the areas that actually matter to your audience. Not everyone is going to pay attention to your e-mails, for example, even though they're a great marketing strategy in some cases as we described above.

The point is, when prioritizing your efforts, make sure to hit hard in areas that are going to give you the best return on your investments. You have limited time and resources at your disposal, and when it comes to SEO you can't really cover all your bases. But you can do a lot to utilize more resources on areas where they truly matter.

Focus on UX

User experience (UX) matters more than you might think. It's essential to building proper navigation and ensuring that your customers don't get stuck in an endless loop trying to find some piece of information. It's not a straightforward field though, and it can actually take a lot of experience to get things done right in this area. Because of this, it can be a good idea to pay a professional to go over your design and point out any flaws if you can afford it. The good thing is that you'll only have to do this once for each major redesign of your website.

A good UX lift is not just about letting your users navigate your content better, either. It will also aid search engines in indexing it properly. And with that, you'll be able to ensure that people can find exactly what they're looking for with a minimal number of clicks. This can be a very powerful tool when combined with good search engine exposure, local rankings and all the other features we mentioned above.

There are many ways to boost the performance of your start-up's website if you want to get better exposure to your potential clients. And it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with them from early on. Since SEO is a constantly evolving field, if you don't start learning it in detail now, you're going to get left behind very fast in the future.
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