#Crowdfunding Part 4

After pulling all together I have submitted the following information about the project to the CF platform:

I have submitted the following looooong description:

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Clever Books are the books with personalised stories for kids. We cover day to day life routines  helping parents to teach kids through stories to brush teeth, keep room in order, help parents and much more. This idea is coming from me and my husband as we use stories for our kid and decided to share our experience with other parents through creating great quality books.

Being an Irish start-up company we are looking for local support and the funds we are aiming to raise will be use for the following following purposes:

1) to  create the rest 5 books of the blue book series with new stories (we need to pay designer work, publishing and arts/illustrations)

2) to create marketing awareness campaign so more people in Ireland become aware of our products

We are gladly presenting what we have already achieved so far with our own funds: this is the Blue Book of personalised stories and we believe we can achieve even more with your support!

The Blue Book Set includes

1 book of 32 pages of 204 X 145 mm size

5 unique tales about YOUR KID

great illustrations

7 photos of YOUR KID printed in the book!

softcover

extra-white paper with a thickness of 0.3 mm (300 g/m2)

semi-matte paper with a very soft surface

pages that turn easily and never crease or tear

high quality printing

eco-friendly

5 customised tales, where your kid is the main character covering the following educative topics:

The Story of the Sad Teeth (importance of brushing teeth)

The Joy of Giving a Gift (sharing with others and making presents)

Tale of a Helpful Kid (importance of helping parents)

Why we go to creche/school (going to creche/school depending on the child's age)

Tale about The Land of Chocolate (if kids need to be careful with eating sweets).

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And I have submitted the awards as well the following way (I wanted to keep it simple and really value for money if you go for project funding)

I have submitted the project and it has been returned :( In general it looked good good but for

1. picture needs to be changed. I will work on it and resubmit.

2. as a recommendation I was asked to add more information about team members. good point!

Work keeps on!

#Crowdfunding. Part 3

And here we come with the project description on the selected CF. So I have got the video already. You can see it here. 

I have had a chat with the CF and the advised me the following:

1. Create a story behind the project and where the idea came from.
2. Provide full description and provide visual (video and pictures) of the product.
3. Write down the description of full product specification.
4. Set up reward scheme. This one is very interesting. They say it's better not to go for smallest reward like 5 EUR or so even if it's just "Thanks" from company. The reason behind is that people tend to go and support with the smallest amount in order to support and feel good. So don't use that.
5. Also, set up the shortest funding period possible due to the reason that people tend to postpone things and they need to feel urgency to take part in the project and the shorter period the better it is.
6. Pictures should be clear and demonstrate the product without any destructing extras.
7. Number of rewards you provide (especially they are limited) should be calculated in advance to make sure they amount of funding they represent will match the funding amount you are aiming to get.

#Crowdfunding. Part 2

And here it comes! I have selected an Irish crowdfunding platform. 
By the way! Selecting the platform is on of the important moments 

• as you need to consider not only your first two circles as funding potential but also who are the regular visitors to this platform as they may be your potential investors as well. So search if your project scope really falling into their portfolio. The CF platform will also share your project in their social media and you need to have your target there as well.
• go for local especially as I want to target local people and therefore it makes sense to select local CF platform. By the way if you consider selecting not local one, check out legal part as at the end you may not be able to withdraw the money or they will not accept your project
• read some feedback about platform
• have a look ta the projects of your type that were funded there and how successful they were and analyze.

This all is of course general and each case is individually evaluated. I have only outlined what I have personally considered while making my selection.

I have came across this website once and found it very useful. These guys are doing a good job in CF platforms analysis and give a lot of useful data.

#Crowdfunding. Part 1

Many people were asking me about #crowdfunding and how to do it and if its difficult and so on. So I decided to create a campaign and let's watch what happens :)

This is the first time I do it in #Ireland. Other #campaigns I have done were abroad and I was either designing them or leading but I never did one on my own. Let's walk it through together.

One of my businesses is connected to #publishing (www.cleverbooks.eu). I write stories and publish books for kids with educative stories that help parents in solving tiny day to day issues through #personalized stories. That's roughly the idea.

Basically we have done sales however strangely enough outside Ireland mainly. So we use this campaign to create awareness in Ireland that we exist.

Let's set up the main objectives now:

1. Get funds for marketing the business in Ireland.

2. Create awareness through CF campaign about the business.

Don't seem to be SMART enough.. let's try this way:

1. Get 3000 EUR in 60 days through CF campaign on Fundit for marketing expenses to promote CleverBooks in Ireland.

2. Use 1000 EUR for creating 5 new books with new stories in the next 11 months.

3. Create awareness for the business locally in the republic of Ireland reaching out up to 500K people (fingers crossed!!).

Goals seem to be smart and fingers crossed we are good to go. Watch out for the new part on how I set up the campaign and what came next!

P.S. And here you can see the book:

Matt Anton SEO Ecommerce Without a Website

I have recently met a great specialist and simply a very nice person Matt. He was so kind to share different tips on SEO which is extremely important part of any business. He share useful information and soon I will even have a video chat with him which we will record so I can share with you all the great tips and tricks! Meanwhile have a look on what is SEO all about (quoting Matt Anton)

What is SEO?

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It's the art and science of ranking higher in Google, so when someone searches for a service or product you offer, you show up instead of your competition.

How Long Have you Been Involved with SEO?

Since 2006, when I wanted to get more website traffic to a social network for gamers website. Learned how to get insane amounts of traffic and rank for incredibly hard terms such as "gaming" and "mmorpg" but never had the financial backing or coding knowledge to compete with the big boys like Myspace and Facebook at the time. I realized that I had a skillset that was needed and useful, and began to help others get more leads for their real businesses.

Can SEO Be Effective Without a Website? Seller's on Youtube, Amazon, Pinterst, Etsy, Ebay, for example

Empahtic yes! Over the years my clients have shown me ways to use my services in ways I couldn't even imagine. I quickly noticed the people getting the best results with SEO weren't even promoting their own website, in fact, they were piggybacking off the trust and authority of very well known established platforms. This is evident if you look at the top trafficked websites in Alexa; since these websites are highly trusted, it doesn't take much to get them to outrank your competitors.

Please Describe The Process of SEO For One of These Platforms

The search engines and the platform you are promoting on have one thing in common; they want to return the most relevant results. This means showing sellers with a clear Product Title using the main keywords, and using the keywords throughout your sales copy and product listing. Without setting up each listing or product as its own entity, you are going to miss out on search engine traffic, and most likely internal search traffic from within the ecosystem's platform.

Those are all the steps you can "control". The next step of SEO involves promotion, where the fun begins

Relevancy in this case is determined by user metrics (click through rate), and dwell time of a product page. If it's a good experience, and a catchy headline that uses their keywords, it will be clicked on more, and viewed longer, which is a huge signal to Google that it's a quality result. This is why Crowd Search Me is such a popular service amongst ecommerce sellers.

Next would be social network signals. Are people sharing it on facebook, twitter, google+, pinterest, etc? The more a product page is shared online, the more it becomes popular and relevant.

Backlinks, are bloggers, forums, directories linking back to the product page? The foundation of the search engine algorithms to start

X factor is reputation and # of reviews. The search engines and internal algorithms favor peer trusted reviews. Everytime your brand or product is mentioned online in a favorable context, whether that's with positive language (robots can discern this now) or schema markup with star ratings, it reinforces the other factors. All together, the algorithm analyzes if it's a) relevant b) popular/best c) reputable.

SEO Can Be Overwhelming, Where to Start?

I would highly suggest focusing on creating quality products or services and giving them out to friends/family and asking them to leave you reviews online. The first couple reviews are the hardest to get, but after that you'll gain momentum. This will help work on b & c. You already setup your product page to not only have the keyword in it, but be eye-catching with images and video. Once you are profitable, or start selling more regularly you can utilize a guaranteed SEO service, SafeRankBacklinks, which will do all the other steps to promote your product listings in the search engines. It's important to not lose your passion for your hobby or side income. Once it naturally starts to make you more money, then you can invest, but would certainly recommend focusing on product giveaways and obtaining client testimonials until the time is right to pul the trigger on really promoting yourself and your products.

How Old Should be an Entrepreneur?

This is the question :) Sounds funny enough however for me this question is at the same level with the one about "best time to start". Entrepreneur should simply be or become. That's it!

Regardless the motivational things and related to it you have probably already came across the info-graphics about entrepreneurs that have built fantastic companies and they started with only 1 idea and were able to change the world. Yes! starting from one-self. That is important. For some people entrepreneur life begins quote early at 20-s and for some after 40. This is so individual! For some people it's inspiration and for some it's experience!

Have a look an the infographics below from Entrepreneur:

Following your intuition and inspiration should be the best advice. If you have an idea then go and implement it! This is the best thing to start with and you learn every single step. Many entrepreneurs gather experience first and when they feel that's the right step to take they just go for it. Feeling confident that you are doing what you want to is one of the signs to follow. Stop waiting for the best time. If you are looking for the best day to start you know already that this day will never come.

Saying that, here you have an interview with Eric, one of the youngest world entrepreneurs who follows his ideas and dream, finds like minded people who can support him and gets things done! That's the way to go. If your time to become entrepreneur is 11, just do it! If it's 37, go for it! 

How My Procrastination Fight Turned into a Business Idea

I'm a lazy person. I'm a very lazy one. Not that I try to postpone stuff.. or maybe I do? Well I caught myself once on the idea that I'm quite lazy to do sports. I thought I definitely need to do something about that because my office based job doesn't really help a lot in terms of exercising physically. 

Next thing I've done was buying a gym membership. happily enough I was going there for couple of months on a regular basis... and then.. I caught myself on the fact that each time I was tired after work of I saw the weather was not really nice and rainy (those who live in Ireland know what I mean ;)) I was just NOT going to the gym.

fair enough.. maybe gym doesn't motivate me a lot and I need to do some other sports activity like jogging. I've done that couple of times and the same weather issue stopped me again (or was it not?)

I was drinking my evening tea and a genius idea (!OMG those ideas are visiting me quite often) came to my mind. I know how I can push myself to do sports without finding any reasons to stay home or not to go etc. I need to be a trainer or instructor myself and being a very responsible person by nature  that was something very much suitable for me.

Next step was to find out which sport I was to practice. So here I have started all types of sports that were quite interesting at least to try: yoga normal and hot was too much slow and no action (not that I'm too much into action but I was falling asleep), zumba was interesting but kind of seemed to me just dancing (though I like Latin american dancing), then just fitness instructor didn't really worked well for me as well and then I went to a Pilates class with one of my friends (was actually her idea to bring me there). That was nice with a kind of "doing nothing" and feeling everything after the class which was cool and quite relaxing exercises and stretching.. so I saw a lot of benefits it that.

After choosing Pilates I went to look for becoming an instructor. I have made some search over web and found a studio where I can do the workshops and certification with exams as well. Half year later I have become a certified Pilates instructor Mat 1 from Balanced Body University. Well.. was quite challenging as being not a native speaker to learn a lot of new words and terms and then take an exam using them all, perform a class which I had designed on my own and lots of stuff. But I loved it! It was fun and very interesting. Luckily enough I was invited by that studio to work for them as a part time instructor. I'm really thankful I got this offer because without having any hours of teaching classes (basically that's your CV and experience in the filed) you are more likely to not get the gob. Fair enough because everyone want a qualified instructor who knows all the exercises by heart, self confident and does those exercises perfectly as well as explanations to them. Unfortunately straight after education like in any field you don't have all the above and therefore it's difficult to find the job straight away. But I was lucky there and here I'm - the Pilates Teacher.

I still remember my first class where I was standing in front of 20 people I've never seen in my life and I need to show how cool I was as a Pilates instructor and how well I can explain everything and do exercises myself. That was challenging! However it worked and I loved it even after several classes. And I was happily teaching for a couple of years which actually helped me a lot to fight my procrastination just because being a teacher is a responsibility and you must come because your customers will be there and if you just don't come it will damage your image as a teacher. That was a perfect motivation for me including on top a lot of positive feedback from customers!

Couple of years later I decided to start my own studio and that was really great. I have learnt a lot already and even created my own sequence of exercises and stretching, learned how to teach the group of different levels and a lot of other useful things. On top of that I wanted to keep on going and I loved the idea of my own startup.

This is the way I have turned my procrastination into a business. Have you a similar story or maybe you already have a business idea? ;)