What you want to do is create a relationship with that new potential customer. People can only oo and ah for so long, so what you want to do is create a compelling offer to bring them in. This is why candy and treats often work. Whatever it is, make it instantly satisfying and memorable (homemade cookies, perhaps?). Then strike up a conversation about your product or service. Just remember to always keep the potential customer in mind.

You need a CRM system that manages incoming leads. I am a beta tester for Salesformics.com and Stewart there will give you an awesome walk-through.

The freelancer is on the right track, and they should stick with their own stuff.

I started a large SaaS Company for B2B where perfection in code is as importante as it gets. So here is my advice, DON'T CODE until you know what the Saas Really is. First start understanding what the problem REALLY is. Interview people and actually spend 100% of your time doing Customer Discovery. (This sounds easy but it is a skill you'll have to develop far more important than coding). Once you understand what the problem is, come up with a value proposition. Still no code. Then make a sell. If you can actually find things already existing that you can Hack and put it together then use that. Then make another sell. If you can sell it to at least 50 people if you are B2C, or if you are B2B you should have at least 1 customer. Once you do that then start automating some parts of the solution that you have hacked and so on. But THE most important thing is to be in constant conversations with your customers and hot leads. Remember you are a customer making machine not a coding machine, the first one is where the money is. Hope this helped you, if you want to talk more about customer discovery and customer development, just give me a call.

Remember when you start a business or are an established business you have to decide who is your perfect customer, since not all potential customers are equal, and not all potential customers are profitable. It is likely that the type of customer who is purely price orientated like those on Elance etc. may not be profitable to your overall business success as it is very unlikely they will pay you more in the future. You would be better focusing your marketing attempts on finding customers who do appraciate your work and understand the added value your agency has to offer, than chasing jobs, by people that only value you and your business by lowest price, which is a business model that can only lead to failure.

I've worked in digital marketing since 1997, led business operations at two digital marketing agencies, and advise digital agency owners on improving the business side of their agencies. Agencies tend to use some version of the standard consulting phases: Discovery, Analysis, Recommendations, and Implementation. Some agencies like to give them cutesy, proprietary-sounding names. In my experience, I'm not sure that really fools anyone. You also want to convey that you understand their problem. When I evaluate proposals by agencies, the biggest problem is talking about the agency and not the client. Focus on how they'll benefit (including likely metrics and potential results), not what you'll do. Milestones and deliverables will depend on the nature of the project. If it's implementation work, you might list typical deliverables (e.g., landing pages, nurture campaigns, or eBooks). If it's strategy work, your deliverables will be the research, analysis, and meetings you do to make recommendations. Beware of getting too specific about granular deliverables -- you don't want to prescribe a solution before you [get paid to] diagnose the problem. Which leads to your second point -- don't give them the plan/strategy you have in mind until they pay for your help. Don't treat your strategy advice like the free coathangers at the drycleaner (so value-less that they're thrown in with your cleaned shirt). Many prospects won't like this. I think you should refuse to do business with them. When agencies deliver spec work (a la 1960s ad agency pitches from "Mad Men"), they're making it harder for everyone else (and themselves), by showing prospects and clients that strategy has so little value, you're willing to give it away. What can you do instead? Position yourself as an expert as solving their problems in their industry niche. (If you call yourself a "full service agency," you're already doing it wrong.) People hire specialists. If you need heart surgery, would you hire the surgeon who does general heart surgery or who's done your specific procedure 500 times? I know I'd pick the specialist-specialist! Instead of sharing specific recommendations, use case studies of how you've solved similar problems for similar clients before. And if you don't have similar clients yet, use the closest analogy you can. You've got to start somewhere. And it's a reminder about doing the same type of work over and over again, rather than jumping around to a million types of projects. Ultimately, don't over-invest in the proposal process. Once it becomes clear someone isn't a good match, gracefully bow out and invest your energies in working with clients who value your expertise by paying for it. Good luck on your proposals! I'm glad to do a call to answer any followup questions.

You can do this! "Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid." I have held a number of C level positions in the past, each of which was for the first time. I made a lot of mistakes but learned very quickly. I'll never forget attending my first corporate board meeting as the CEO of the company and Chairman of the Board. Whew! That was hairy! It is often said that we learn best by our mistakes and that's how I became an expert! :-) To your success, Frank

Have you watched Jonathan Fields' Good Life Project http://www.goodlifeproject.com/ Maybe that'll get you some ideas and inspiration. I know Jonathan and could connect you. I may have some other ideas but would need more information to know if they'd be worth trying. Let's connect

Better than a cover letter is to actually proactively DO something to help them. It'll show them not only that you've researched them, but you're passionate about the startup and worth bringing on. A man got a job at Square early on for just making them a marketing video on his own (back before they had one). Since you're a web designer, design a stellar 1-pager that's targeting their message to a particular niche. Something they could use on social media or something. If they're like most startups, they're not interested in reading cover letters. They're interested in passionate individuals who can add value to the organization.

I agree with some of the recommendations above; 1) Focus on making sure your XML sitemap is accurate, and make sure your weightings (server priority weights) are set correctly from parent to child (category > sub-category > product detail). 2) Submit through Google webmaster tools 3) Submit partials in increments (again, good suggestion at 50k/time) and pay close attention to your index rate to see how fast these are picked up 4) you can brute force a lot of these crawls by submitting and re-submitting your sitemap(s) - as often as every day 5) For very important URL's that are not getting picked up a handy trick is to tweet them out from an account that has a positive share of voice (more followers than following)

Answer with the truth. And perhaps follow their question up with a question such as "Why do you ask?" This serves 2 key purposes: 1. It helps you get to the root of what they are looking for / need / want. And regardless of whether you get that particular client's business or not - you gain valuable insight into the mind of your market. 2. It positions you as the adviser... Asking "why" helps you get more clarity so that you can make sure you are the best fit for them. In fact - their answer might prompt YOU to say "I'm sorry - it sounds like we might not be a good fit for you." By willing to walk away you show poise, confidence, and professionalism. For more tips and assistance with growing your agency - give me a call. Best of luck!

I always feel the next step once you have an idea is to validate it by creating something simple that you can put in front of someone, so they can review and give feedback. This can come in different forms 1) Verbally describing the solution and getting feedback from target customers 2) Design simple 1 page brochure to describe the solution and it's features. 3) Clickeable prototype using Keynote, Balsamiq or other. You don't need to build a working solution ... first start on defining what the problem is, and see if anyone cares. The key to doing this right, is: 1) Don't tell them it's your idea, say it's a friends project and your helping him collect feedback. 2) Only get feedback from your target customer (i.e. Entrepreneurs, VP's of Marketing, etc) - whoever is going to use or pay for it. 3) DONT SELL. If they don't like it, ask why - but don't sell the idea. Your goal at this stage is to learn. Another tip if you're up for it, is to ask them to give you $20 for early access. Most people don't have the guts to do this, but it's the fastest way to know if you're truly building something of value, or a nice to have. I covered how to prototype in this answer if you're curious. https://clarity.fm/questions/933/building-an-mvp-for-an-online-reward-system-for-consultants-freelancers-va-s

So you do lab work for dentists? If you post your website or some other info it might be easier to help you with the issue. If you want to improve cash flow you can either reduce expenses or grow revenue. My experience is that it is usually way easier to grow revenue since expenses are so thin for companies like yours unless you have wasteful habits. Figure out who your ideal customer is and develop a marketing plan. Make sure the marketing plan uses multiple marketing medians to get brand recognition with the target market. Follow up with phone calls and offer test orders or test lab work. Make sure you can demonstrate a clear advantage to working with you compared to others. Any clients you work with should respect your professionalism to sign an agreement with their orders to pay within a specified time frame. The agreement might also clearly spell out how the collections process works. Get signatures on orders, if they can order online include info like this in your TOS.

Git is the latest and coolest software, and SVN is the outdated old one. When you tell SVN that you want to create a new branch of your code to have some fun, it creates a heavy weight dumb carbon copy for you. But Git is intelligent, it won't create a new copy for you instead it will only keep track of the things you're adding/removing/changing with respect to the original sources. I hope I made the point, for more let's have a telephone call some time :)

If you spent that money on Clarity ($200 with an expert) and you didn't get value, email support@clarity.fm for a full refund. We offer 100% money back guarantee. Alternatively, you can sort by ratings and price. If you want a great coach - call John, he's awesome https://clarity.fm/johnramey Also, Marcy if you can afford her https://clarity.fm/marcyswenson

That degree if churn is highly indicative of poor employee morale which could be caused by a variety of factors must is most often due to a bad manager or general leadership issues. Have you tried an anonymous survey or any other means by which to uncover your blind spots? Happy to talk through the specifics of your situation in a call.

There are many, to name a few TCS, Wipro, Infosys, even IBM have interest in such markets.

I have advised a number of Clarity members on this question exactly. LinkedIn can be a great place to find your technical cofounder. I would look for someone who has been at their current company longer than 18 months and has relevant experience or interest in the problem you're looking to solve. Reaching-out "cold" can work, if you keep your message short and relevant. Here's what a technical cofounder will need to see in order to feel comfortable joining you: 1) That you can fund and/or have raised sufficient money to cover the expenses up to and past launching the first version of your product. 2) That - in their assessment - you have what it takes to raise multiple rounds of funding (if the business is reliant on VC) or that you have what it takes to successfully bootstrap the business. 3) That you are realistic or at least credible in your assessment of the opportunity and have done sufficient customer development to ensure there is a viable market for your product or service. 4) That you and the technical cofounder have sufficient personal chemistry so as to want to and be able to survive an incredibly stressful and emotionally intensive journey together. Happy to talk you through any of this in detail in a call and go into the specifics related to your location, background, and type of product or service you're looking to recruit a cofounder to.

It is a pretty good chance Google won't accelerate anything for you and provide you with better help. They are just too big and their priorities lie with far much bigger initiatives. You might have luck if you find an Adsense employee via LinkedIn and establish a connection that way! but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Thank you for your question. I love real estate and have been dealing in this business for almost 20 years now across the world. I've personally invested in quite a few countries around the world and have learned a good deal of this business the hard way. It's always important to have a good broker on the floor and good management that can help you can returns from your property. But most of all, since you are looking at investing out of your home country (probably), the main issue is that you should not be cheated. The truth is that it really depends on your needs and business. If you are looking at buying a properly and relocating to that place, then you would have to consider which timezone suits you the best and we can take it from there. However, if you are looking at this project strictly from an investment point of view, I would always focus now more on the west and main cities (New York, London, Paris, etc). You can get good properties that under a good management could give you good yearly returns. One of the reasons I am discarding the far east now is because of the initial problems we are seeing in the asian markets. The prices are very high there and could be approaching in a few years a real estate bubble. You should take this into account in order to insulate yourself from a property crash and seeing how your investment loses value. Now, once again, if your idea is live it and keep it (ie, not rent it) and let it appreciate in value, then think about how long would you want to keep it (10 years - 20 years) as the lifespan of a property investment goes along with economic cycles. All in all, I still think the best places where to invest in properties now are civilzed first economy countries (USA, Canada, England, France, Germany and even Spain). If you want to expand, we can arrange for an expert call. Just book a time that suits you and we can look into it more deeply. Thank you and best of luck with your investment.

That's a great question. I hope I understood it properly. In terms of the comp landscape, tools like glassdoor.com are great for finding market value salaries for specific titles/locations. No need to hire someone there. For the rest, it seems like the expertise would be spread between an HR exec, or a CEO. I'd recommend reaching out to retired CEOs who are in mentorship programs at local incubators. They've been there and done that, so they know what goes into negotiating and retaining folks. They're used to walking through these types of challenges with startups. If this is a one-time thing, I'd be happy to hop on a call to talk about these challenges as well.

Teamviewer works across both platforms and is very simple and secure to setup and use.

Let me start by giving you some real data for our agency. When we started blogging we had about 1,000 visitors a month to our website. Today we have 13,000 a month. We currently have almost 700 subscribers to our blog and we blog almost every single day. The result is almost 250 new leads a month for our agency. I don't think blogging is dead a all, in fact I think it is a vital part of any agency and every client's set of marketing tactics. We use blogging as a tactic for clients and integrate that into their social media marketing effort as well as teaching them how to integrate blog content into their sales process, so sales people leverage that thought leadership with prospects furthering the relationship and driving more blog subscribers. Its all tied together today, it's virtually impossible to pull out one tactic without impacting performance and unraveling the overall program integrity. I would be happy to share even more data and real life experiences with you, in a follow up call. Just let me know. Thanks.

You've asked a lot of questions here. And I can say that these approaches are all valid. > companies that bury their blog are often tentative about it. Someone in the company has decided that it doesn't warrant attention - perhaps it's not ready for prime time. > Industry-wide stand-alone publications work for some niches, but if you're talking about paper, they are old-school and dying. Digital magazines are one option I've used. > Stand-alone blogs exist, but from an SEO point of view are usually a bad idea because your domain name equity gets spread across two sites, diluting it. For most, it's best to utilize the main domain name for all content, with subfolders for industry verticals. > Hubspot like sites are curation oriented, and if you have the manpower to develop curation to your industry, they can pay off because you save people time and energy by focusing the news. Most, sadly, are horribly done. > Content structure is hard to answer, but I recommend that you not stray too far from the path of blog convention - people are used to a certain approach - categories, tags, subscriptions, etc. > Content itself is where most people DIE in blogging. Simply stated, they are publishing *crap* and you must avoid it. I've done a lot of thinking about this, and the slog of content marketing. Rather than repeat a bunch of advice here, I invite you to see these URLs where I've given it some proper thinking: http://www.buzzmaven.com/2012/12/authorship-corporate-voice.html http://www.buzzmaven.com/2012/10/blogging-success-engagement.html

Both answers so far are good. Especially the info about having great songs. I think it's so competitive out there that my suggestion to you is to focus on developing relationships with artists you believe in. If you write songs with them and they value your writing contribution, you will have a chance that they will cut your song or songs. Yes there are song pluggers and publishing deals. But ultimately it is about the steps you take to become good at what you do and to be proactively selling them in a way that fits your brand and isn't too pushy. And it's about becoming of value in the co-writing experience. Unless of course your songs are insanely amazing. Actually even when they are, you still need believers to want to cut them.