Startup Revolution

The Tao of Marty summarizes the OVER (gain) versus UNDER (loss) philosophy we used to make over $30M in online sales with hundreds of thousands of orders. Want your ecommerce site to make money online? Read and share the Tao of Marty. 

Amazon is a monster, but SMBs & smaller merchants can compete playing David to Amazon's Goliath. We discuss online marketing tactics to compete with Amazon.

Phil's Digital Marketing For Business [#DMFB14] in Raleigh, NC was a big this year. Phil, one of the cofounders of the event, shares information about Curagami's name change and reception to the idea by SMBs at the conference.

A look at the financing landscape for business owners, plus some tips for finding alternative funding opportunities.

Lessons by Marcus Lemonis of CNBC's hit show, "The Profit", for small business owners. We take a close look at lessons learned from all Season 1 episodes.

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Content curation is key for Small To Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) online success & Scoop.it's new Content Director makes curation a marketing reality.

Great update by Moore. Key time codes include:

5:34 - the Lean Startup answer to Where's the Chasm.

11:00 - How Amazon is leveling the Walmart karma.

#toogood great update.

Never Ending Battle Truth, Justice & American Way
Tough "Dog Days" of summer for "Super Hero" marketing tactics. Here is a list of the dead and dying tactics:

SMB Marketing Tactics Costing More, Getting Less:

* Yellow Pages (near death). 
* Print ads (near death).

* Val-u-pak coupons (near death).

* Coupons of any kind (losing relevance with smartphone users)..

* Groupons (blows brands up almost beyond repair).
* Email marketing (sick due to social / mobile web). 
* Social Media Marketing (sick and getting sicker fast). 
* Content Marketing.(content shock sick).

* Ecommerce (too many stores, same offerings).
* PPC (paying more to get less). 
* Retargeting (cat out of bag, so sick efficacy declining).
* Video Marketing (steep learning curve, expensive). 
* Viral Marketing (everyone has that cold now & hit or miss). 
* Cause Marketing (not as unique as once was & live or die with partner).

* Celebrity Marketing (expensive and live or die with branded celeb).

* SEO (don't even get us started, all but gone, baby, gone). 

Many of these "SMB" tactics are in a startup's launch plan too. Good luck with that. Startups have to double down on asynchronous tactics since their money is tight and they have little or no brand awareness yet.

Favorite startup asynchronous tactics of ours include:

* OPN (tap Other People's Networks).
* OPM (tap Other People's Money via crowdfunding).
* Crowdfunding.
* Friends-of-Friends marketing.
* Community (start handing of the keys to your content early).
* Partnerships.
* OPC (Other People's Content via content curation with attribution(.
* Video Marketing (learning curve and expense scares most away).
* Events.
* Training.
* Contests & Games.

That last bullet can be especially powerful for startups. Remember to create tools needed to empower advocates, contributors and Sherpas. Make it easy to help you by providing graphical tools, listening and curating content into a social space (curation is a form of social reward).  

SOAR is an important project. Glad we have a chapter in the Triangle ares of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill). We want to support SOAR anyway we can including putting our startup @CrowdFunde into the mix and writing some checks. This initiative is long overdue and we are all in. 

CrowdFunde team is attending startup school. This Triangle Startup Factory Dairy shares our journey. Day 2 = creation of "unrealized networks", UGC & SEO.

Day 2: Tapping Unrealized Networks
Wow, what a day. Started with a Scrum-like standup and then worked the Business Model Canvas with TSF Founder Chris Heivly and Whitney. Discussing CrowdFunde's SEO benefit we realized that many businesses have "unrealized networks".

Unrealized networks are your customers. One undeniable New SEO truth is commons or platforms like HuffPost and Facebook out perform all other models. Problem is how does a small business easily add a "commons" that won't cost them a million bucks in cash or time?

CrowdFunde to the rescue.

CrowdFunde's goal is to help our partners TAP the gold they carry in their unrealized network. When I was a Director of Ecommerce our mailing list was around 50,000. We communicated with our customers regularly because email marketing was the most profitable Internet marketing channel (by far).

What we DID NOT do was for a community. We didn't realize benefits from our network. This Video Diary includes a 2 minute video that walks you through our first cut at tapping "unrealized networks". Please share any thoughts, reactions or ideas.

We are in "startup school" at the Triangle Startup Factory in Durham, NC for 12 weeks and everything is up for grabs. Together we create a cool tool, a "get more with less" tool to help conquer the "New SEO".

Thanks, CrowdFunde team and Marty

Without revenue a small business is just a hobby.  So, how does a typical small business go about getting clients and revenue?