Business Building Tips Weekly Round-Up: October 24, 2014

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The 7 Toughest Startup Lessons You Don’t Want to Learn the Hard Way

In this article for Entrepreneur, Kimanzi Constable discusses the 7 lessons he’s learned in his experience as an entrepreneur that will help those just starting out building their businesses. Those lessons include:

  • Be clear about who your customer is
  • Don’t over-promise and under-deliver
  • Stay organized
  • Stay on top of your taxes
  • Focus on what’s important to growing your business
  • Speed of implementation is crucial
  • Quickly get over set-backs and failures

To get all of the details, click the article title above.

 

How to Determine What You Should Charge Customers

In this article for Entrepreneur, Dorie Clark recommends asking yourself 5 questions to help you determine how much you should charge for your offerings:

  • What’s the going rate?
  • Who’s your audience?
  • What value are you providing?
  • How do you compare to others in your field?
  • How can you create predictable revenue streams?

Click the article title above to get all of the details.

Top Startup Mistakes: Going It Alone

In this week’s New Venture Mentor article I talk about why insisting on doing everything yourself can easily lead to failure in entrepreneurship, how to tell if you need a partner/co-founder, and how to decide what to outsource or delegate and what to tackle yourself.

 

3 Fundamentals Learned the Hard Way About Generating PR for a Startup

Generating some positive public relations for your startup or small business can be one of the most effective ways of drawing in new customers. It can also be a colossal waste of time if you don’t know how to go about it correctly. In this article for Entrepreneur, Vikas Lalwani gives 3 tips he’s learned from his experience trying to generate PR:

  • Personalize your pitch
  • Share facts, not opinions
  • Be patient

To get all of the details, click the article title above.

 

Why Are Infographics So Darn Effective?

In this article for HubSpot, Lindsay Kolowich shares an infographic from Market Domination Media explaining why infographics are so effective at conveying ideas and information. If you’d like to learn more, click the article title above.

 

How to Create a Facebook Business Page in 5 Simple Steps

In this article for HubSpot, Anum Hussain walks you through the 5 steps necessary to creating a business page on Facebook. The steps include:

  • Choose a classification
  • Complete basic information
  • Understand the admin panel
  • Populate the page with content
  • Measure your growth

If you’d like to learn more, click the article title above.

How to Get Your Business in the Press Using HARO

Naturally, one of the biggest struggles for any new business is marketing. They don’t have the name recognition they need but they also don’t have the money to fund major marketing projects or pay for a public relations team. That’s why entrepreneurs have to learn a few tricks to try to get their names out into the press and in front of potential customers and one of those tricks is the service Help a Reporter Out. Watch this week’s video to learn what HARO is, why you should be using it, and how to get started.

Update: I got a note from the folks over at MonkeyLearn who said, “we recently discovered that some experts sources are using MonkeyLearn to create personalized alerts for HARO requests. This helps them speed up the process of answering relevant HARO queries and save time. With this in mind, we wrote a guide about automating this process in four easy steps (without writing a single line of code).”

I haven’t tried it yet but I’m interested in anything that helps me save time so I wanted to share. Let me know if you give it a try and find it helpful. Again, here’s the link to their guide