by Neil Patel on September 16, 2009
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…]
by Neil Patel on September 9, 2009
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…]
by Neil Patel on September 3, 2009
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…]
by Neil Patel on August 31, 2009
Despite the fact that the year isn’t over yet, I have learned some valuable lessons that have helped me grow my businesses. I would like to share them with you. Some of these may seem like common sense and others may be new to you…
Either way, here is what I have learned so far:
Shoot for the stars and you’ll land on the moon
As Donald Trump once said:
I like thinking big. If you are going to be thinking about anything, you might as well think big.
If you want to build a medium size company, you need to plan on creating a large company. Problems always pop up and they can derail your company off its current trajectory. As long as you are striving to reach a star, hopefully you’ll at least land on the moon.
Now when you try and shoot for the stars, you have to be realistic. You can’t just say you are going to create the next Facebook or your company is going to grow into a billion dollar business. Shooting for unrealistic goals won’t help you land on the moon, it will just cause you to keep on spinning your wheels and get nowhere.
If your goal is to generate $100,000 in revenue over the next 12 months, aim for $250,000. By creating a plan that will allow you to revenue $250,000 hopefully you at least hit $100,000. Just don’t plan on spending money as if you were making $250,000 until you actually hit that number. 
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by Neil Patel on August 24, 2009
The Fortune 500 makes up the biggest companies in the U.S. The smallest of the 500 companies, Legg Mason, brings in a bit more than 4.6 billion dollars a year and the largest company, Exxon Mobile, brings in around 442 billion dollars a year.
The Fortune 5,000,000 on the other hand is composed of small companies. Most of them don’t even generate a billion in revenue and surprisingly enough, a lot of them may not even revenue a million dollars a year.
I know this doesn’t make the Fortune 5,000,000 seem attractive, but in actuality it is. Before I go into why you should target the Fortune 5,000,000, lets break down why you shouldn’t go after the Fortune 500: [click to continue…]
