Since I could remember, my parents have been frugal. And not frugal like you maybe used to, but they’re down right cheap. So cheap that my mom doesn’t like my dad eating at Taco Bell because it’s expensive.
The funny part is, my parents aren’t struggling financially. They have a bit more than 6 figures in cash if you combine their bank accounts, stock market accounts and 401k. They also own a home that is worth around $550,000 and it is almost paid off. [click to continue…]
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:
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…]
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.
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.
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…]
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…]
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:
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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Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics. Through these 2 companies he has helped large corporations such as AOL, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading