Cynergise - Social Media Consultancy by Chandesh Parekh » Generating Revenue

Gary Vaynerchuk interview

Chandesh Parekh — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:39:56 +0000

Raj Kotecha of Creative Content Agency interviews Gary Vaynerchuk on how to leverage social media and build a brand. This 30 minute interview is one of the best I’ve watched in quite some time with many gems of wisdom from Gary. He also talks a little about his new new book on social media, Crush It!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Got a 5 year Business Plan? Throw it out says 37Signals

Chandesh Parekh — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:43:57 +0000

I often write about or quote 37 Signals here, largely due to the respect I have for them as designers/developers and for the way they manage their business.

This week Matt Linderman has written the article “Advice for entrepreneurs: Throw out that five-year plan, build something now, and don’t take any money” where he’s brought together thoughts from 2 articles, in this month’s Best Life magazine, by Greg Gianforte and Mark Cuban respectively:

Gianforte describes how to build a company from sales rather than enlisting professional financiers. The secret is to stop sweating your five-year plan and start moving the product from day one. If your business idea requires more money than you have at hand, then shrink the idea.

“An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.”

… and from Mark Cuban:

Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”

As always, it’s the comments that the articles at 37 Signals inspire that are really worth reading as they tend to be from people like you and me at various stages of the entrepreneurial game.

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Using Social Networks to Create your Business Market

Chandesh Parekh — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 06:19:44 +0000

Last month’s Inc. magazine featured clothing company Threadless on the front cover, a company founded by 2 college drop-outs (an interesting trend in itself – so many successful start-ups have college drop-outs at the helm) Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff.

Founded in 2000, Threadless is set to hit $5million is sales this year selling, wait for it, t-shirts! Yep, and they’ve never had a single design that hasn’t sold out!

So how has Threadless managed to sell out every design? By asking their market what designs they’d buy! Simple!

Using a social network, Threadless runs design competitions and whichever designs are most popular make it onto a t-shirt. The t-shirts are then sold through the same social network to the very people who voted for the designs. This way Threadless supply the market with exactly what they demanded in the first place!

The power of social networking is only now becoming apparent and businesses are beginning to understand just how well ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, the best and cheapest kind of marketing, works within the semi-porous walls of a social network.

Most think of social networks as the domain of bored teenagers but considering that Facebook, a social network that targets the 25 to 35 demographic, outpaced MySpace, a social network that does target teenagers, in May with the most number of unique visits many will need to re-assess their opinions of the importance of social networking to business.

Retailers can Cash in using Social Networks

Chandesh Parekh — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:07:19 +0000

With the credit crunch truly making itself felt, retailers should be pulling out all the stops to get eyeballs on their products and making sales.

Gartner research found that UK retailers are missing a trick by not using Social Networking as a marketing tool. With social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo getting so much traffic retailers can advertise and market their products in innovative ways like Amazon US has done through the use of a Facebook application.

Read more about the Gartner report here and more about Amazon’s Social Networking strategy here…

Too many Good Business Ideas?

Chandesh Parekh — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:12:47 +0000

As an entrepreneur, it’s very likely you have many good business ideas but don’t have the focus or even the time to make them all work.
Sometimes it becomes clear, midway through setting up a business based on an idea, that the current idea may not work as well as a business compared to another idea you trashed earlier on.

I personally have an ‘ideas book’ with over 70 business ideas; some seem good, some I know are lousy. However, what do you do to prioritise your list so you don’t waste time on the lousy or mediocre ideas, or those ideas whose time may not yet have come?

The first thing I do is make up a set of criteria to benchmark the idea against. The criteria could include:

Do I have the resources required or do I need to buy it in;
Is this a now, or future, business;
What’s a reasonable time-frame to get from ‘idea’ to ‘business’ and is it possible to find that time;
What are the perceived costs involved in getting the business to launch phase;
Is this a lone-wolf business or will I require partners;
Social and economic factors that may affect the success of my business model now and in 3 years time;
and one of the most important: does this business sound exciting enough to dedicate time and effort in the long run?

Once you have your set of criteria, look at your ideas one by one and make some rough notes for each based on the criteria so you can easily give each one a priority, say 1 to10. Shortlist those with the highest priority and further develop the notes for each of these to see which one comes out looking like a winner.

Now it’s possible to put the other ideas on the shelf and concentrate on the chosen one and develop it further using the usual business development tools like market research, business plans etc.

None of this is rocket science but it’s unbelievable how many ideas are developed into businesses, and usually headed for failure, without any thought to any of the criteria I mention above. I know this from personal experience.

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Addicted to Facebook? Make Some Money from it!

Chandesh Parekh — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:12:51 +0000

Are you a serious facebooker? Spend hours at a time catching up with friends? Wouldn’t it be great it you got paid for doing it?

Well, now you can!

urTurn.com offers a reward scheme where you earn points for posting pictures to Facebook (and MySpace soon too) and writing on friends’ walls. The points can be redeemed for gifts or sold for cash!

Check out how it works here and the urTurn web site also has a FAQ section here

The Auctomatic story

Chandesh Parekh — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:20:01 +0000

I was recently directed to the BBC article ‘From Oxford to Silicon Valley’ by a friend who had by chance met with the CEO of Auctomatic, and as a budding Internet entrepreneur it’s a very inspiring story.

The story of Auctomatic, by founder Kulveer Taggar, has been serialized on the BBC web site since February 2007 and it makes for interesting reading. Kulveer lays out some sound advice for Internet entrepreneurs all of it based on his, and his company’s, experience.

From Auctomatic’s ‘about‘ page:

The Auctomatic mission is making selling online easy. We think it should be simple to take your stuff and list it on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and Overstock. But it shouldn’t end there. Auctomatic does more than just let you list your items and manage your sales – it teaches how you can maximize your profits and to increase the success of your business. With Auctomatic you can be running your own successful online business in no time.

Read the BBC series of articles starting here…

and the latest article is here… where Kulveer announces the sale of Auctomatic for ‘many millions of dollars’.

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Michael Gerber’s 3 Step Process On Building An Automated Business System

Sol Shah — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:36:14 +0000

In the Tim Ferriss interview with Michael Gerber (author of The E-Myth Revisited) on Escaping The Entrepreneurial Seizure, Michael introduces the three step process for building an automated business system.

As an entrepreneur, the focus here is not on working in the company (being the technician), nor is it about managing the company. The entrepreneur steps outside of the process and works ON the company rather than IN it.

Albert Einstein certainly had the right idea when he said “Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created.”

So here is Michael Gerber’s 3 step process (with commentary from me) for building your very own business system…

Step #1: Intentional Dreaming

With this foundational step, take the time to dream, formulating your vision for your business and the impact you want to make on your immediate surroundings and the wider world. What is the purpose for your business? Who will it serve? How will it serve them now, and how will it serve them 10 years from now? Dream big, and dream outside yourself. Dream so that this system can continue without you, and will live strong way beyond your own life span.

Step #2: Intentional Organisation

What is the specific product or service that your client will receive, and how will your company get it to them? How will the company operate? Conceive, build, and perfect the automated client fulfilment systems that make up how your company operates.

Step #3: Intentional Growth

Once you’ve dreamed up what the business will do, and you have perfected the system that delivers this product or service, the final step is to conceive, build, and perfect the operating systems of the company that focus on lead generation and lead conversion.

Lead Generation: How are you going to tell potential clients about the business and how are you going to get them to come to you? What is the marketing effort that needs to take place to attract your ideal clients to your business? How can you automate the whole process so that you are leveraging technology and other people’s time to drive more business to your company?

Lead Conversion: Once your prospects come to know about your company and the products or services it offers, how are you going to help them take decisive action and give you money for the products and services that you are offering? What are the barriers to securing the sale that need addressing? How can you leverage technology and other people’s time to automate this sales process?

All successful entrepreneurs seem to follow this simple 3 step model for building their very own automated business system.

Over To You

So what do you think of this 3 step process for building a business system? Where else in your work can you apply these very principles? How would you adapt them to make them work better for you?

How To Get A Buzzing Money Making Promotional Website Like OneAndOnlyMadonna.com Set Up Within A Day In Just 10 Steps

Sol Shah — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:01:59 +0000

When you know that something hot is happening right now and you want to support it, here’s how you can get a good looking, self funding, great work promoting website up and running within a day.

In the example, we’ll use www.oneandonlymadonna.com, which is the site we have set up for our friend Evelyne Brink, who is currently on her way to winning the BBC1 prime time show hosted by Graham Norton: “The One and Only”. When she wins, she’ll have the opportunity to take her Madonna tribute show to Las Vegas for three months!

Here’s a 10 step plan on how you can create your very own site just like it…

Step #1: Get A Domain Name

Think up a domain name that you know people will be searching for. In our case, we chose www.oneandonlymadonna.com because our intention was to promote Evelyne Brink and help her get to Vegas, and the phrase “one and only madonna” was certainly catching on – Evelyne is most certainly the “one and only Madonna” on that show! See our article on Descriptive Domain Names for guidance.

Then go to GoDaddy.com and purchase the domain name that you think is ideal for your promotional campaign. You can pick one up for about £5. Sometimes you can even get a discount of 10% by searching Google for “godaddy promo code“and entering that code when you make your purchase. Hey, every penny counts!

While you’re getting this domain, you’ll need to point it to an external web host such as Dreamhost, by entering the relevant name servers – in this instance, you’ll need ns1.dreamhost.com. ns2.dreamhost.com, and ns3.dreamhost.com

Step #2: Get A Hosting Account

Next you need a place to actually host your website. We recommended Dreamhost for their hosting package, and you can get a terrific deal of approximately £60 for a year’s worth of hosting an unlimited number of domains.

Step #3: Add Your Domain To Your Hosting Account

Once you have opened your hosting account, you can add your new domain to be hosted at your new Dreamhost account. At this time, also create a new FTP account to upload files where necessary, and an email address to receive email correspondence specific to this campaign.

Step #4: Load Up Your Content Management System

The next step is to install the application on your host that lets you design and add content to your website quickly – for this you’ll be installing WordPress, which is commonly used for blogs.

When logged into WordPress, along the left hand menu, select Goodies –> One-Click Installs, and proceed with the instructions for setting up your new WordPress site on your domain.

Once installed, you’ll want to log in to your new WordPress website and set up the permalinks to show URLs with the full date and post name, as well as set the title and description for the site.

Step # 5: Install A Decent Looking Revenue Generating Theme

Now that you have the core website set up, you want it to look good and set up in a way that it generates revenue for you through contextual adverts such as AdSense and Amazon Associates – you’ll need to sign up with these services and enter the codes it generates into your theme.

The quickest way to find a decent theme that achieves this is by searching “adsense optimized wordpress theme” in Google, downloading a theme you like, and following the instructions given to you on how you can install the theme on your site.

Another way to make further revenue is to sell affiliated products – i.e. products that other people have either created or are distributing, and you are simply referring people to them and making an affiliate commission on each sale. You can set up your very own affiliate store by signing up as a My Affiliate Store member.

Step #6: Add A Mailing List

Set up a mailing list on the site that can capture your visitors’ name and email addresses so that you may keep in touch with them and send them regular updates by email about the artist, to keep them engaged on the site. We recommend you use Professional Cart Solutions.

Step #7: Add Quality Content

When the look and feel of the site is set up, you’ll want to start adding relevant content. In our case, we located videos from YouTube, pictures of Evelyne as Madonna from Flickr, and Diva Eve’s music from the Last.fm playlist.

Evelyne has many fans around the world, so we have also been in touch with some of her most dedicated fans who are more than happy to write about Evelyne and how she progresses in BBC1′s The One and Only show with Graham Norton to be selected to perform as Madonna in Las Vegas for three months.

If you’re asking other writers for content, you may even want to create an account for them on your site so that they can contribute content as and when they are inspired to write.

Step #8: Help Visitors And Search Engines Find Your Site

To let search engines know that your site exists and ask them to list you, simply send them a request to add your site to their database. With Google, just go to their Add URL page.

You’ll also want to further optimise your site so that your description and keywords meta tags have something useful in them for search engines to pick up when visitors are searching for your content. The plugin we recommend that you download, install and configure is the Add Meta Tags WordPress Plugin.

Step #9: Get Fans To Rave About The Site

Finally you want fans raving about this promotional fansite by telling all their friends about it on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Help them do this by installing the I Love Social Bookmarking Plugin.

When fans are on your site, you can build stronger relationships with them by leveraging comments. Read our article on 6 WordPress Comment Plugins To Build Stronger Relationships With Site Visitors.

Step #10: Sit Back And Enjoy

So there you have it – get your very own buzzing money making promotional website like www.OneAndOnlyMadonna.com up and running within a day. Now sit back, watch your favourite performer being helped along the way by their fans, and see some money coming in to make up for the time you spent building the site.

“Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” Top Quote Becomes A Downloadable Ringback Tone

Sol Shah — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:01:44 +0000

The recently announced top quote “Don’t ‘tase me bro” by protester Andrew Meyers has now been turned into a ringback tone.

On 17th September 2007, University of Florida student Andrew Meyer was arrested and thrown out of a speech by a U.S. Senator. According to a Wired blog, “Meyer barged in line to harangue Massachusetts senator John Kerry during a campus talk that day. The student refused to pipe down after being asked to by the forum’s organizers, and after he carried on pressing Kerry for answers, police hauled him off. They forced him to the ground, and tasered him.”

This week, the quote was named most memorable quote of 2007, and has been turned into a ringback tone (sometimes known as a callback tone). Available from the Verizon site, this downloadable ringback tone is what the caller hears when they call you.

A ringtone or ringback tone is just another good idea for an Instant Digital Download product that can generate revenue for your business. Already we’re aware of other products that can be sold to and downloaded online by customers who want to be informed or entertained instantly, such as eBooks and MP3s.

What would you want your customers to have their callers hear when calling through? What ringback tone product could you create for your customers that would add value to them, and generate further revenue for you?

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Use Blinkx Ad Hoc to Generate Revenue from Videos on your Web-site or Blog

Chandesh Parekh — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 07:05:38 +0000

If you’re a person who takes a lot of video and posts them up on your web-site, blog or social network then Blinkx may be of interest.

Blinkx Ad Hoc is an easy way to display ads on your posted videos and, following the pay-per-click model, any time an ad is clicked you get paid.

It’s easy to set up an account with Blinkx and you could soon be generating revenue from your videos.

From the Blinkx home page…

Make money every time you share a video on your blog, website or social networking profile. Sound good to you? It’s easy to do! Our clever technology matches relevant, in-video text ads to any video. Whenever someone clicks on an ad in your video, you make half the cash!

Check out Blinkx Ad Hoc today…

leonjacksonmusic.com – X-Factor Winner Leverages the power of the ‘Instant Digital Download’

Chandesh Parekh — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 09:45:10 +0000

Leon Jackson was crowned the winner of the 2007 X-Factor competition last night. Winning a 1 million pound recording contract, his music single, a cover version of the song “When You Believe”, originally recorded by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey for the animated movie “Alladin”, is released on CD on Monday to give it a chance of making it to the Christmas No.1 chart position.

However, the song is already available from the official Leon Jackson website (www.leonjacksonmusic.com) for download. For the first time X-Factor has leveraged the power of the “Instant Download” by taking advantage of the obvious frenzy that surrounds the finals of such competitions. Marketing the website and the available download in the final show ensures that the masses of fans that voted for Leon Jackson can immediately satiate their need for his first single before the single even hits the stands on CD!

The Instant Download is one of the most important advantages the Internet brings to a business, especially a business that deals primarily in digital products, or even physical products that can be digitised in some way, for example e-books are digital versions of books, music and interviews can be digitised into MP3s, etc.

If your business can digitise its products then giving your customers access to the digital versions from your web site is a critical revenue channel. Once a product is digitised there are practically no further overheads involved and that single digital product can be sold millions of times and through dozens of partner websites.

Can you leverage the power of the Instant Download for your business?

Gadget Show Challenge Demonstrates The Success of Guerilla Marketing Using Blogs and Facebook

Chandesh Parekh — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:54:11 +0000

Last night’s Gadget Show challenge results clearly demonstrated the strength of running a guerilla marketing campaign on the Internet using blogging and social networking to drive massive traffic.

Every week Suzi Perry and Jason Bradbury reveal the results of a challenge and last night was the culmination of a 3 week long challenge to see who could generate the most Internet traffic to their videos on YouTube using viral marketing.

Suzi Perry decided to go down the route of an on-line game where the players aim for the highest score to get access to a ‘reward’ video and Jason Bradbury had a friend film him doing the ‘caterpillar’ move on the streets of London. Both videos were posted on YouTube and the number of views tracked for 3 weeks, with a final tally made on the program last night.

The results were astounding, with Jason Bradbury’s video getting 10 times more views, with over 2 million, than Suzi Perry’s which weighed in at just over 200,000.

But, in all honesty, it wasn’t the theme of the videos that drove the traffic. Jason Bradbury went on to explain that he’d blogged extensively about his video as well as sharing it with other bloggers to drive traffic. A friend had also set up Facebook group to drive even more traffic by creating a buzz around his funny video.

This clearly demonstrates that a huge budget isn’t required to generate buzz and drive good traffic to a web site. All it takes is some imagination and knowledge of how to leverage existing mediums like blogs and social networks like Facebook to run a successful Internet marketing campaign.

Click here to read more about running a marketing campaign on Facebook for free

View Jason Bradbury’s ‘Extreme Caterpillar Breakdance’ here…

Dragons from Dragons’ Den Invest In hungryhouse.co.uk

Chandesh Parekh — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:03:11 +0000

Last night’s episode of the BBC programme Dragons’ Den was of particular interest to me as it featured a company called hungryhouse.co.uk, a web site to make ordering takeaway-food easier, which needed investment to expand their operation across the UK.

Having successfully run the Dragons’ Den gauntlet, hungryhouse.co.uk partnered with two of the Dragons, Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan, who agreed to invest £100,000 for a total equity stake of 25%.

The site has partnered with restaurants in various parts of the UK and provides the user with a single point of access by offering restaurant choice by area and the ability to place orders with the selected restaurant via the site. This does away with the drawer full of takeaway menus and means that a user, presumably, will have access to the latest menus.

It’s a great idea, especially considering more than 100 million takeaways are ordered in the UK annually, however what I wanted to stress here is that the investment was required primarily for off-line marketing, to recruit more restaurants to join the site and grow the coverage.
This is a point many ‘web-entrepreneurs’ fail to take into account. Many believe that just having a web site will generate enough interest in the market and lead to revenue generation. Not so. Off-line marketing is still as important as it ever was especially since it’s fairly easy to get a website up and running, meaning competition is ever increasing.

So, when you’re putting together your business plan for a web-business, don’t forget to consider all the marketing channels available to you, off and on-line.

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Use Facebook To Run A Free Marketing Campaign

Chandesh Parekh — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:22:17 +0000

Social networks like Facebook are a marketer’s dream. Social networks, by nature, are viral i.e. they’re built to ‘spread’ ideas, photos, video or anything you can think of to your list of contacts within the site, and they to their list of contacts and so on…

Facebook is second only to MySpace in the number of members it has, however it’s built to be a better viral vehicle for marketing. Whether you’re selling a new product or want to get exposure for a social event, it’s very easy to get ‘eyeballs’ on it using Facebook and what’s more it doesn’t cost anything.

The first step would be to set up a Facebook group for your specific product or service and invite all your contacts to join. When your contacts do join, the feed on their friends’ pages will be updated with that fact and will likely lead to a lot of them at the very least visiting the group page to check out if there’s anything of interest for them. “After all if a friend of mine joined a group it’s more than likely it’ll be of interest to me too” is the concept we’re going for here (you want to be sure to have some compelling copy on the group page to make sure your message is getting across to your ideal market to entice people to join). This will carry on for a while and pretty soon the group will have hundreds of members. And by ‘pretty soon’ I mean within weeks.

Whilst this is going on you want to be sure to have a website, preferably with a descriptive domain name that users can relate to the Facebook group, where members can find more details of your product(s) or services or whatever it is you’re marketing. Why? Because the site is under your control; you’re not limited in what information to host on the site or in what manner. Also, having a website allows you to capture the email addresses of your visitors so you can start marketing to them directly.

Drive the members of the group to the website (it could also be a special page you set up on an existing website created just for members of the Facebook group) using teaser information like articles or special offers/discounts. This will lead to more people joining the group so they can take advantage of the special discounts thereby continuing the viral campaign for you.

That’s it! Using this simple method you’ll be driving traffic to your web site in no time.

Here are a few links to help you set something like this up:

If you’re setting up your Facebook marketing campaign and web site and need some advice don’t hesitate to contact us – we’ll be happy to help.