Your best bet is to go on the Java discussion board for this type of question.

You should try searching yelp, they will give you customer reviews with feedback.

Hello, great question here. First of all you should understand that there is no 1 way and depending on who your audience is and what you sell the answer will definitely vary. A short answer however would be - engagement. Forget about likes and follows and shares are engagement, if you want to be a successful marketer you need to see engagement as conversations. The more conversations you can build around products the more you can rely on them to follow links or follow up on a request when you do make one. With that said, social media updates should be about what your followers want to see - depending on the social media - try to avoid being too pitchy on each post. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been a strategist for about 10 years now and have helped countless of entrepreneurs and businesses thrive through creative competitive strategy and marketing and I'm the co-founder of Unthink.Me. I hope my answer helps you a bit.

There's no set-in-stone formula. The answer depends on the degree to which implementing a revenue model would potentially cause a mass user exodus. A) If implementing a revenue model would obviously cause no problems, then investors might be ok with Camp 2. B) If a reasomable person might think that implementing a revenue model could cause a mass exodus of users from your service, then investors would not be ok with Camp 2. Having said that, each investor is different, and there has been a steady decrease in the popularity of investing in Camp 2 startups. The popularity of Camp 2 startups fluctuates with the current strength of the economy (weaker economy = less investors willing to go with Camp 2). I usually recommend a hybrid approach, which involves initially implementing a revenue model on at least a small scale to start testing the waters. You want to deploy this as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then scale it up, just like an MVP. You start off by exposing a potentially unrefined revenue model to just a small % (e.g. 1%) of your users to test the waters, and then slowly scale up its deployment as you improve it (based on data feedback from that first pool of users). Even if you only have time to test the 1% implementation before approaching investors, it will be better than nothing. You can use the data from that experiment to show investors that (hopefully) it didn't cause a mass exodus of that 1% of users, and you can use it to have a ballpark estimate of the revenue you could get if it was fully deployed and better implemented. For certain unique situations, it may be important to remember that for this initial testing, the deployment of your revenue model doesn't actually have to generate revenue for yourself, it just has to have the appearance to those 1% (or whatever %) of users as your revenue model would. The most important part of this initial testing is just testing whether your revenue model will interfere with your user base. For instance, you can start by creating fake ads that don't actually generate any revenue. That may sound weird, but it was relevant to a unique situation I helped someone else with. It allowed them to save time and money to deploy their initial test. Once you have data showing that it doesn't scare users away, then you can make convincing estimates of future revenue based on your growing user base. If you'd like more tailored advice to your specific situation let me know, best, Lee

The answer to this varies wildly. It is dependent upon what you're asking the customer to do, what your relationship with them is, and what barriers they need to navigate to signup again (your stated win-back goal). I've seen success rates as high as 80% and as low as single digit. I don't think you will find a "typical" because each brand, product, and consumer is different. All of which effect this type of conversion rate. I would be happy to help you calculate what is typical for *you* and your product. If you're interested, drop me a note or schedule a call. All the best, -Shaun

Some more information about your situation would help. What is your product? What problem does it solve for buyers? Do they acknowledge that problem exists, and value fixing it? Are they willing to trade money for your solution? Do you have a "ladder" for people to buy increasingly valuable things from you, or are you trying to rely entirely on revenue from this one thing? Do you have Traffic and Conversion tools in place? You are asking us to diagnose a situation, but just like your doctor not being able to diagnose what's wrong if they can't see you or hear fully what's going on, it's pretty tough to blind. Only two components or issues exist when it comes to Sales: Traffic, and Conversion. I don't care how great your Conversion tool is, or how great you believe it is--if you don't have a high quality Traffic source hooked up to it, the Conversion tool is basically useless. So where are you getting leads (potential buyers) from? Are they pre-qualified for your offer (do they have a want or need, at least, for what you can give them)? And in what quantity are you receiving them into your funnel? Each business needs four systems: 1. Lead Generation 2. Qualification 3. Closing 4. Fulfillment. How well are you doing on all four of these? It's very common for a tech guy to rush out and drop money on the development of some brainwave they had. Unfortunately, you cannot ignore "business" in the hectic race to bring a product to life. If you've created something nobody wants, or nobody understands, you've wasted your resources. I recommend these Sales Tactics videos I've made about SaaS; there are links to written blog posts in the video descriptions if you would rather read than watch and listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MGF-C0GPQY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZQ_8Srt7g

List your item against the wrong UPC code. This provided Amazon with all the correct information, including the correct photo. Then go back and mark your inventory at zero.. keep an eye on this as you don't want to sell the item as you might not have the wrong item to ship. Then email Amazon with the ASIN number and explain that you have piggybacked on the listing based on the UPC code but the detail page reflects the wrong item. Let them know that you have removed your inventory till this can be worked out. I included photos to show the UPC for the correct item. Ask Amazon to cleave the listing so you can list your item. Amazon cleaved the ASIN. I had never heard that term. What Amazon did was split the listings and assigned a new ASIN to the listing I started. This allowed both listings for one UPC code while Amazon looking into the questionable listing. You have to have a UPC code to list an item... or you need an exception from Amazon. You can't take an item that has a UPC code and add a non-UPC code item as a variation. The photos are slower than the text. When starting a new listing, the photos don't even start to be loaded until you have completed the listing. Just the way Amazon's system works.

If there’s one tool that I recommend above all other solutions it’s ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is the backbone of all of our ventures here at Venture Harbour. It’s easy to use, and easily the most feature-packed email marketing / marketing automation tool for small to medium-sized businesses. On top of that, it’s also one of the most affordable tools. What sets ActiveCampaign apart is the fact that it has its own CRM system for managing leads, and marketing automation for nurturing your leads into customers. In short, it’s an all-in-one platform for handling small business sales and marketing. Unlike some of the other tools that do this, ActiveCampaign is affordable starting at $9/month – a twentieth of the starting cost of tools like Infusionsoft, Hubspot and Ontraport.

Do you have an idea of what kind of invalid emails you are receiving? That will help you determine which vendor is the best fit for you. For example do you consider support@, info@, or postmaster@ invalid, some vendors will weed those out for you? Or are you just concerned with making sure the email has an accurate Domain/MX Record? Will blocking SPAM IP addresses be enough to address your needs, if so you need a vendor who checks agains URI DNSBLs. With that in mind, here's a good blog article about the top vendors. Best wishes! https://www.formget.com/best-email-verification-services/

The way you describe it, the 301 redirect is looping right back to the original URL which is odd. Start by looking at your .htaccess file. It lives on your server with all the other files that drive your website. Often times it's hidden and you have to take extra steps to find it. Your hosting provider should have instructions on this. *Back up this file first* Make a copy and name it htaccess.bak or something like that. Small errors in this file can break your website so always make a backup before tinkering. Once you have it open look for lines that say RedirectPermanent or Rewrite Rule with 301 in brackets nearby. If you find something that doesn't belong you can comment it out with # or delete it. Based on what you find, I recommend doing some research to see what others in similar situations have done. If you do something that breaks your website, simply copy your .bak file and rename it .htaccess file and start over. Don't be afraid to explore and learn, but do understand you can drastically change how your website operates with just a small error. Backups are your friend! Shoot me a message if you need more help.

Probably not. Most carousels these days are javascript-driven. Therefore the source code for those products exists on the page (and is therefore easily viewed by Google et al). The javascript moves items around the *screen* but it does not modify the *source.* And it's the source code that matters most to search engines. The exception to my answer above is AJAX. If any products are being dynamically loaded to a page via an AJAX call, then they would hidden from search engines. Google's John Mueller confirmed about a year ago that, despite all their progress with javascript and AJAX, Google still struggles with some Ajax-driven websites — http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267 So, as with so many answers in SEO: *it depends.* If you have any specific examples, I'd be happy to take a look! Feel free to message me here on Clarity.

The complexity of your situation is similar to multiple acquisitions I have encountered on both sides of the table in private and public transactions. In most situations involving private equity, it is doubtful if the additional cost of a private agent would generate a material gain given your minority position. However, since your situation has the additional complexities of differentiation in EBITDA contribution and negotiation with family members, I would agree with your recommendation to use an external agent. If the cost is a concern, you may want to consider using an advisor/coach/consultant to work on a fixed fee basis instead. I took this approach in selling one of the private companies I ran and was able to complete the transaction at a much lower cost than using an investment banker or agent. I'm happy to share my experience and lessons learned if you would like to follow up with a discussion.

There are a number of best practices -- and, generally, they are universal regardless of your product or service. The one that I would stress above all others is: Understand Your Customer. That is, resist the temptation to "jump in and build something", take some time to interview prospective customers. Understand what they want (be looking for clues, as Steve Jobs famously said, most consumers don't know what they want, but you can find sources of friction and answer those) Talk to people. Understand what frustrates them with the current solution. What would their lives be like with your product? Do they *need* this? What happens if they don't have it? Are their implications if they don't buy? Is their FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)? A lot of entrepreneurs make a solution based on *their* perception of a problem without taking into consideration that their ideal customer may have a different need. Good luck and let me know if I can help further, -Shaun

Clarity charges by the minute. It is not possible to have two different rates.

Hire a local immigration lawyer. Been through the process myself. Sooner started, sooner finished. Probably good to get in before the administration changes and possible new guidelines come down from on high.

Based on what you've shared, I would recommend splitting your two products into different brands; they appeal to different audiences and should be marketed as such. That said, there is ample opportunity for cross-promotion, as there are some similar needs between the two audiences. Good luck. I'd be happy to help more. Just drop me a note or book a call. -Shaun

Absolutely! In fact, this is where many solopreneurs "max out". With the Internet, as long as you have a flow of traffic of interested prospects, you can keep converting and selling, right? There's no limit at the scale an individual can operate on to that flow. As a consultant, if that's what you choose, you need to move beyond "trading time for dollars" as soon as possible. Staying stuck in that mindset is how most consultants hamstring their revenue. Key ideas: > work with high ticket industries so you can charge high fees in line with the value you are creating > get your own products (courses, physical goods) out there for sale ASAP > always be looking to expand your distribution channels to expand your revenue sources.

Let me start off by saying that my expertise is in domains proper – not websites and certainly not SEO. So I can't say with absolute certainty that a whois change won't affect Google rankings. Nobody CAN give you that kind of reassurance, since Google's algorithm is so inscrutable. What I can say is this: Whois changes are normal. Established companies often reassign the contact info when an employee changes roles. Likewise after rebrands or mergers or buyouts. More often, they simply reformat the whois, going from "Smith, James" to "James Smith" or "Jim Smith", updating phone numbers, standardizing old idiosyncratic email addresses, and so forth. Google would be insane to penalize whois updates per se. Insofar as Google's algorithm picks up on whois changes, this may alert the system to a possible ownership change. So maybe, just maybe, the algorithm re-evaluates the site's trustworthiness at that juncture. But a change of ownership is no reason to penalize a website either. It's much more important to look at the website itself to see if anything a visitor sees is concurrently changing. THOSE changes might upset earlier rankings. A rebrand, for example, can damage SERP rankings if URLs aren't handled carefully, if old links are broken and Google mistakes the site for something entirely new. In all the thousands of articles I pour over in the domain industry, I've never come across a story of a website losing its rankings after a mere whois change. Never. After a domain name change, yes. After a website overhaul, yes. But not after an update to the whois database. Google has been around the block a few times. Their algorithm has dealt with websites being bought and sold before. When domains change hands, that invariably entails a whois change. So it would be idiotic for Google to downgrade rankings purely on that basis. It's unlikely, therefore, that they do. Searching for instances of such catastrophes just now, I couldn't find any. The consensus among professional SEOs, based on a few articles I've sampled, seems to be that whois changes ought not to coincide with other large-scale website and branding modifications. Of course, you should do your own reading. And consult with an SEO professional. But I suspect you're more nervous in this case than you need be. One option might be to ask for whois privacy to be applied during and after the escrow holding period. That would mask the ownership change once the website is paid off and the domain comes out of escrow. But note this: Some whois privacy services invent a long random string of characters for use in the email address proxy. Those random strings are automatically updated every so often. If Google really were fanatical about punishing whois changes, then such whois privacy services would be driven out of existence. Yet they're still here. Conclusion?

I am not an attorney and this is not legal or "professional" advice. Copyright protection will be the easiest, as an artist's work. However, trademark is what you will really want. And that is not at all as cheap. Overall, my advice is for you to get moving, quit worrying about what theoretical other people will do, and work on yourself. Otherwise, you'll remain stuck in "analysis paralysis".

Hello! This is a great question, alimena many new self-employed or entrepreneurs face. When I started consulting 10 years ago i started mentoring people in this exact situation - you know you're good, but you feel like your skillsets are diverse and you obviously want to do something productive that generates steady income thus you're unsure as to what path to follow. If this goes un-addressed for too long you'll see years pass by w/no fruitful effort. My background is in strategic marketing - here are my thoughts for you: First, try coupling your skillsets to a certain industry such as marketing, pr, sales, technology, etc. Are you capable of creating the logos or imagery you propose to someone? Second, based on whether you can deliver and the industry that best suits you - understand your would be role in the current eco-system. For example I would place your interest into marketing but you see, a logo does not make a brand, a slogan requires clever pitching to be accepted at once, and clever repetition to the audience for it to stick and become a slogan or part of the brand. Why would a company go to a consultant who cannot deliver campaigns but only create words on microsoft or sketch a logo but not create it? Even a graphic artist must go through dozens of variations of the same 'finished' logo before one gets accepted and thats because a miniscule detail makes a huge difference to a client. So a sketch is close to delivering nothing. Consulting can be a good gig, but you must understand what consulting is - is not just speaking, unless you're amazing public speaker and jargonist. No, sustainable consulting delivers a product in the form of research, theories, thesis, manages others implementing the effort, works side by side the teams they are hired by. So this means that even for logo and branding consulting you must be perceived as an expert in your field, have experts who like you as a human and respect you as a professional. Specially if you want to simply create verbal content and not tangible brand assets. With that said, on the other hand, let's say that you are able to deliver tangible assets to a company client. Good for you, now lets understand your role in the current eco-system as follows: You are either a disruptor, traditionalist, softserver, specialist, connector or a soloist. Now, is important that you don't get played by your ego - none of these is above another and even through the distruptor classisification might be of your liking it doesn't mean that you are - you, to me, sound like would fit under the soloist. A distruptor is someone with ton of experiences and abilities to bring all others together under one roof service and deliver a hybrid company - I have done that with Unthink, a hybrid marketing agency that caters to small and new business owners who need high budget services on monthly payments and have gathered expert professionals to work under my model and not traditional lump sum plans for traditional and digital marketing and advertising. A traditionalist are becoming irrelevant and depend heavily on relations and past authorities in a field. For newcomers this is obviously out of the question and a dying competitive strategy. Specialists, you could be here, focus heavily and depend on NICHE markets only. These individuals can charge a premium because they offer a single solution to any client and deliver it well because they understand it backwards and inside out. These people are constantly improving, reading, learning and networking and have a pitch crafted down to the T. They depend heavily on connections obviously and patience for their connections to need their services. Connectors, are networkers, not doers. - you could be here too. They make the connections and hire or subcontract others who can serve. Soloists are common - these are web devs, programmers, graphic artists, solo-business owners - who have modest growth goals, low cost of living and thus can comfortably build connections and offer a small variety of services which once sold they create and deliver themselves. (if you know graphic design you would be here) These people are not looking to build an agency right off the bat or at all, instead just make a good living doing something they love either as main provider or as a contractor or sub-contractor to clients directly or other companies. I hope my answer helps you figure out what type of business to start, I cannot give you a direct response because that is a loaded question which answer depends heavily on things only you know. If you would like to chat a bit more give me a call, message me, or google me. Right now, we currently added a yelp account, if you feel like my answer helped me I would invite you to leave a yelp review for me in return :) https://www.yelp.com/biz/unthink-marketing-avondale

LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or search the experts here on Clarity. Good luck!

Does your target market want your solution? Do they acknowledge it creates value for them? Are they willing to pay for it? What words and phrases do they use to describe the problem you fix in their niche?

A mentor should be someone who has successfully accomplished a goal that you wish to accomplish or have great insight. I personally would like a mentor that is helpful, patient, provides good direction, and doesn't mind communicating with me.

[This is a duplicate of the question at https://clarity.fm/questions/4300] Since some new business owners get excited about revenue, instead of gross profit, it is always wise to show the difference. Let us consider as an example, that your business makes $10,000 (revenue) in revenue in one month, and has a cost of goods (or services rendered) of $7,000. This means that you have to pay someone (e.g. a vendor) $7,000 to make $10,000. Then, you are faced with general expenses for the month that amount to $2,000 (utilities, etc.). The excerpts that you quoted from the article mean that you should NOT think that you are spending $2,000 from the $10,000 (revenue), but that you are spending $2,000 from the $3,000 (gross profit: $10,000 - $7,000). As you can imagine, you will be much more cautious when you realize that you are spending 66% of your gross profit on expenses, and not simply 20% of your revenue. While this is certainly common sense, the reason for his pointing it out is that sometimes people do not keep it in mind.

Since some new business owners get excited about revenue, instead of gross profit, it is always wise to show the difference. Let us consider as an example, that your business makes $10,000 (revenue) in revenue in one month, and has a cost of goods (or services rendered) of $7,000. This means that you have to pay someone (e.g. a vendor) $7,000 to make $10,000. Then, you are faced with general expenses for the month that amount to $2,000 (utilities, etc.). The excerpts that you quoted from the article mean that you should NOT think that you are spending $2,000 from the $10,000 (revenue), but that you are spending $2,000 from the $3,000 (gross profit: $10,000 - $7,000). As you can imagine, you will be much more cautious when you realize that you are spending 66% of your gross profit on expenses, and not simply 20% of your revenue. While this is certainly common sense, the reason for his pointing it out is that sometimes people do not keep it in mind.