September 2009

Beginner’s Guide to Attending Conferences

by Neil Patel

conference

During the last two days I was at a conference, TechCrunch50, and I noticed that most of the attendees weren’t getting their money’s worth. It doesn’t matter if you got in for free or paid because the 2 days of your time spent at the event, is worth money to someone.

So if you want to get your money’s worth out of attending a conference, here are a few things you have to do:

Have business cards

It’s not cool to not have business cards. Over the past few years it has become a trend to not carry business cards, which is a big mistake. If you don’t make it easy for people to contact you, no one will.

If you plan on attending any event, make sure you bring plenty of business cards with you.

If you don’t have any business cards, create some. But don’t just create any type of card because it needs to stand out when thrown into a stack of hundred of other cards and more importantly it has to say something about you. [click to continue…]

253 comments

Your First 30 Days of Blogging

by Neil Patel

blogging

Starting a blog is easy…right? Technically it is easy to throw up a WordPress or Blogger blog, but it isn’t easy to create a successful blog.

If you want your blog to flourish and be looked upon as the go to resource for your industry, then it is critical that you follow and act on these steps over the next 30 days.

Day 1: Don’t launch until your blog is correctly setup.

No matter how tempting it maybe, you don’t want to launch your blog too early. You have to cover the basics by making sure you have an about and contact page as well as a decent looking design. Your design doesn’t have to be perfect or unique, you could just use a free WordPress theme.

And lastly, make sure you are using Feedburner to track your RSS feed and Google Analaytics to track your visitors.

Day 2: Pick a topic and stick with it

Even though it’s your blog and you can write on whatever you want, you have to pick a topic and stick with it. Although there is nothing stopping you from doing whatever you want, your blog will be much more popular if you stick with 1 topic.

It’s very rare to see a popular blog that covers dozens of different topics. Most of the popular blogs (TechCrunch, I Can Has Cheezburger, Gizmodo, Perez Hilton) write on 1 topic. [click to continue…]

280 comments

Ask the readers: What makes a great entrepreneur?

by Neil Patel

lazy entrepreneur

When you think of some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the web (Evan Williams, Jason Fried, Marc Andreessen, Caterina Fake, Elon Musk, Niklas Zennstrom and Arianna Huffington) what similarities come to your mind?

Yes, they all have built successful companies, but other than that what commonalities do you see?

When you look at it from a high level these successful entrepreneurs don’t share much in common. They aren’t all men, they have different levels of education, they are made up of different nationalities, and they live in different regions of the world.

However, there are a lot of commonalities between them and other successful entrepreneurs when you dig a bit deeper. [click to continue…]

214 comments