February 2011

5 Ways To Revitalize Your Stagnant Business

by Guest Author

johnny cupcakes

You maybe wondering why your business has never become the next Apple, Virgin, Bad Boy, or Coke.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs spend long hours on their business, and sometimes become frustrated because all they do is work FOR the business, and not ON the business.

As a business owner myself, I used to wonder what set apart top businesses from the rest of the herd. How did thought leaders such as Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Sean John grow their business, and what type of grassroots approach they used when they first begun.

After taking a closer look and studying some businesses, I realized that there were a few distinguishing factors that enabled these businesses to explode their loyal fan following and boost their sales. I’ll be sharing about 5 approaches these thought leaders took, and how it can help take your business to the next level: [click to continue…]

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What Interviewing 31 Sales People Taught Me About “Sales”

by Neil Patel

sales person

Over the past few months I have interviewed 31 potential hires for a sales position. I’ve posted openings on job boards, used recruiters and even tapped into my network. The one thing I quickly realized is that it’s really, really hard to find the right sales person.

Although I haven’t found the perfect fit yet, luckily interviewing 31 people hasn’t been a complete waste of time since I learned much more about “sales” than I did before. Here are some of the “ah-ha” moments I had over the last few months:

You can’t hire without testing the waters

If you want to grow your sales, what’s the first thing you would want to do? Hire a sales person, right? It sounds like the logical thing to do, but it isn’t.

You won’t know what problems the sales person is going to run into unless you try it out yourself. So before you try to hire someone to sell for you, make sure you do it for a few weeks if not a few months. It’s not easy to teach someone to sell something if you can’t even do it yourself. Even if you’re not the greatest sales person in the world, you need to spend time training your new hire on what they can expect.

Also, from a compensation perspective, you can get an idea of how much each sale will be worth to the company and how many deals a sales person can potentially bring in each quarter. [click to continue…]

161 comments

5 SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings

by Neil Patel

search engine optimization

Many of you know may know me as an entrepreneur, but my background is actually SEO. Although I follow the rules these days, I am known to have dabbled in the dark arts of SEO. But don’t worry this post isn’t on SEO ethics or if you should be a black or white hat SEO.

From my experiences in both the black and white hat world of SEO, I have learned what you should avoid, if you don’t want your rankings to tank. [click to continue…]

317 comments