If you run a startup yourself Archives - The Content Marketing Blog

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.

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

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!

Startups have many things to worry about, so it’s not surprising that sometimes they neglect SEO. That’s detrimental to their websites because search engine optimization can bring them online exposure, as well as help them establish a more powerful online presence more quickly. If you run a startup yourself, hiring a SEO company may prove to be one of the best investments that you ever make for your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do some optimization on your own for your website, before the experts arrive.

What to Focus On

First you have to make sure that when someone enters your company’s name in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, the first result that the search retrieves is your website. This is done most of the time by the search engines automatically. Once that is done, you need to focus on optimizing your web pages for search engines, so that when someone searches for keywords that define one of your offerings, your website appears as high as possible in the search results. Ranking first is tough if there is strong competition in your niche, but you must struggle to make it to the first page of the results, because few people check the second page. The SEO for startups strategies below will help you get more exposure, but to really make it on the first page you need the help of an SEO expert. A SEO company can help you out to make your local business grow in all of the San Francisco area. There are some good companies that are offering SEO services for small fees. Make sure that you always check their portfolio before hiring one.

Invest in high-quality web design. A bad, cluttered design can ruin all your SEO efforts.

Use Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Tools to monitor your website and get more insight into how your visitors are using it.

Make a list of your offerings and come up with relevant keyword ideas. You can use Google Keyword Planner to check how the keywords perform. The best keywords are those that have a high volume but a relatively low cost per click.

Ensure that every page on your website has a friendly URL, a unique title, and adequate page tags.

Make all website pages accessible in less than 3 clicks from the home page.

Fix any broken links.

Put your sponsors, endorsers, and partners in a visible location – on the homepage if there’s enough space – and link to their websites.

Add keyword-optimized content to your website, including images and videos.

Set up a blog on your domain and publish on it worthwhile content weekly, including in your posts links and references to your events and offerings.

Optimize your website for mobile devices, making sure that it displays well on all the popular smartphones and tablets used today.

These are only a few things that startups can to do improve their SEO. Save yourself the trouble to apply all these tips yourself by hiring a reliable SEO company. You have nothing to lose.

Citations:

Learn SEO from Moz.

As a marketing expert who has experience with online advertising, our guest blogger Josh loves to share his expert advice. He regularly researches the evolving SEO trends, and provides consultation to a bay area SEO company. You can check his contribution on Google+.