All you need to know about 'how to create a blog'.This blog also helps you to prepare well in terms of digital marketing basics and other important terms related to it like SEO,SEM etc.
1. Don't offer too much equity, too soon. Beware of parting with more than one third of your company in the first funding round (called Series A), warns Lori Hoberman, the head of Chadbourne & Parke's emerging companies and venture-capital practice. While you may be tempted to give investors a higher percentage of your company in exchange for more cash, she says don't do it. As your company grows, you may need to raise additional rounds and give away more of your company down the road, so remember to think ahead.
2. Know your numbers. You are going to have to impress the investors with your backwards-and-forwards knowledge of your financial projections. If you are intimidated by the math, bring an expert in to help you prepare. But when it's time to present to investors, you -- the entrepreneur -- are going to have to talk with confidence about how your company is going to make money, when you will break even, and what your market looks like.
Determining exactly what your company is worth and what your revenues will be in coming years is as imprecise a science as throwing darts, says Hoberman. "All it has to do is pass the straight-face test," she says, referring to the need for thought-out projections, well-cited research, and reasonable expectations. And at that point, it's about making the sale: "You've got to own those numbers," she says.
3. Pay yourself. When you are calculating expenses, be sure to include a salary for yourself, says Hoberman. "Investors expect it," she says. There may be months you can't actually take a salary due to other expenses, but keep track of that and put yourself back on the payroll as soon as you can. If you don't respect yourself enough to pay yourself, neither will your investors, says Hoberman.
First, let’s figure out why we are talking about funding as something you need to do. This is not a given. The opposite of funding is “bootstrapping,” the process of funding a startup through your own savings. There are a few companies that bootstrapped for a while until taking investment, like MailChimp and AirBnB.
If you know the basics of how funding works, skim to the end. In this article I am giving the easiest to understand explanation of the process. Let’s start with the basics.
Every time you get funding, you give up a piece of your company. The more funding you get, the more company you give up. That ‘piece of company’ is ‘equity.’ Everyone you give it to becomes a co-owner of your company.
Splitting the Pie
The basic idea behind equity is the splitting of a pie. When you start something, your pie is really small. You have a 100% of a really small, bite-size pie. When you take outside investment and your company grows, your pie becomes bigger. Your slice of the bigger pie will be bigger than your initial bite-size pie.
When Google went public, Larry and Sergey had about 15% of the pie, each. But that 15% was a small slice of a really big pie.
Funding Stages
Let’s look at how a hypothetical startup would get funding.
Idea stage
At first it is just you. You are pretty brilliant, and out of the many ideas you have had, you finally decide that this is the one. You start working on it. The moment you started working, you started creating value. That value will translate into equity later, but since you own 100% of it now, and you are the only person in your still unregistered company, you are not even thinking about equity yet.
Co-Founder Stage
As you start to transform your idea into a physical prototype you realize that it is taking you longer (it almost always does.) You know you could really use another person’s skills. So you look for a co-founder. You find someone who is both enthusiastic and smart. You work together for a couple of days on your idea, and you see that she is adding a lot of value. So you offer them to become a co-founder. But you can’t pay her any money (and if you could, she would become an employee, not a co-founder), so you offer equity in exchange for work (sweat equity.) But how much should you give? 20% – too little? 40%? After all it is YOUR idea that even made this startup happen. But then you realize that your startup is worth practically nothing at this point, and your co-founder is taking a huge risk on it. You also realize that since she will do half of the work, she should get the same as you – 50%. Otherwise, she might be less motivated than you. A true partnership is based on respect. Respect is based on fairness. Anything less than fairness will fall apart eventually. And you want this thing to last. So you give your co-founder 50%.
Soon you realize that the two of you have been eating Ramen noodles three times a day. You need funding. You would prefer to go straight to a VC, but so far you don’t think you have enough of a working product to show, so you start looking at other options.
The Family and Friends Round: You think of putting an ad in the newspaper saying, “Startup investment opportunity.” But your lawyer friend tells you that would violate securities laws. Now you are a “private company,” and asking for money from “the public,” that is people you don’t know would be a “public solicitation,” which is illegal for private companies. So who can you take money from?
Accredited investors – People who either have $1 Million in the bank or make $200,000 annually. They are the “sophisticated investors” – that is people who the government thinks are smart enough to decide whether to invest in an ultra-risky company, like yours. What if you don’t know anyone with $1 Million? You are in luck, because there is an exception – friends and family.
Family and Friends – Even if your family and friends are not as rich as an investor, you can still accept their cash. That is what you decide to do, since your co-founder has a rich uncle. You give him 5% of the company in exchange for $15,000 cash. Now you can afford room and ramen for another 6 months while building your prototype.
Registering the Company
To give uncle the 5%, you registered the company, either though an online service like LegalZoom ($400), or through a lawyer friend (0$-$2,000). You issued some common stock, gave 5% to uncle and set aside 20% for your future employees – that is the ‘option pool.’ (You did this because 1. Future investors will want an option pool;, 2. That stock is safe from you and your co-founders doing anything with it.)
The Angel Round
With uncle’s cash in pocket and 6 months before it runs out, you realize that you need to start looking for your next funding source right now. If you run out of money, your startup dies. So you look at the options:
Incubators, accelerators, and “excubators” – these places often provide cash, working space, and advisors. The cash is tight – about $25,000 (for 5 to 10% of the company.) Some advisors are better than cash, like Paul Graham at Y Combinator.
Angels – in 2013 (Q1) the average angel round was $600,000 (from the HALO report). That’s the good news. The bad news is that angels were giving that money to companies that they valued at $2.5 million. So, now you have to ask if you are worth $2.5 million. How do you know? Make your best case. Let’s say it is still early days for you, and your working prototype is not that far along. You find an angel who looks at what you have and thinks that it is worth $1 million. He agrees to invest $200,000.
Now let’s count what percentage of the company you will give to the angel. Not 20%. We have to add the ‘pre-money valuation’ (how much the company is worth before new money comes in) and the investment
(Think of it like this, first you take the money, then you give the shares. If you gave the shares before you added the angel’s investment, you would be dividing what was there before the angel joined. )
Now divide the investment by the post-money valuation $200,000/$1,200,000=1/6= 16.7%
The angel gets 16.7% of the company, or 1/6.
How Funding Works – Cutting the Pie
What about you, your co-founder and uncle? How much do you have left? All of your stakes will be diluted by 1/6. (See the infographic.)
Is dilution bad? No, because your pie is getting bigger with each investment. But, yes, dilution is bad, because you are losing control of your company. So what should you do? Take investment only when it is necessary. Only take money from people you respect. (There are other ways, like buying shares back from employees or the public, but that is further down the road.)
Venture Capital Round
Finally, you have built your first version and you have traction with users. You approach VCs. How much can VCs give you? They invest north of $500,000. Let’s say the VC values what you have now at $4 million. Again, that is your pre-money valuation. He says he wants to invest $2 Million. The math is the same as in the angel round. The VC gets 33.3% of your company. Now it’s his company, too, though.
Your first VC round is your series A. Now you can go on to have series B,C – at some point either of the three things will happen to you. Either you will run out of funding and no one will want to invest, so you die. Or, you get enough funding to build something a bigger company wants to buy, and they acquire you. Or, you do so well that, after many rounds of funding, you decide to go public.
Why Companies Go Public?
There are two basic reasons. Technically an IPO is just another way to raise money, but this time from millions of regular people. Through an IPO a company can sell stocks on the stock market and anyone can buy them. Since anyone can buy you can likely sell a lot of stock right away rather than go to individual investors and ask them to invest. So it sounds like an easier way to get money.
There is another reason to IPO. All those people who have invested in your company so far, including you, are holding the so-called ‘restricted stock’ – basically this is stock that you can’t simply go and sell for cash. Why? Because this is stock of a company that has not been so-to-say “verified by the government,” which is what the IPO process does. Unless the government sees your IPO paperwork, you might as well be selling snake oil, for all people know. So, the government thinks it is not safe to let regular people to invest in such companies. (Of course, that automatically precludes the poor from making high-return investments. But that is another story.) The people who have invested so far want to finally convert or sell their restricted stock and get cash or unrestricted stock, which is almost as good as cash. This is a liquidity event – when what you have becomes easily convertible into cash.
There is another group of people that really want you to IPO. The investment bankers, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to name the most famous ones. They will give you a call and ask to be your lead underwriter – the bank that prepares your IPO paperwork and calls up wealthy clients to sell them your stock. Why are the bankers so eager? Because they get 7% of all the money you raise in the IPO. In this infographic your startup raised $235,000,000 in the IPO – 7% of that is about $16.5 million (for two or three weeks of work for a team of 12 bankers). As you see, it is a win-win for all.
Being an Early Employee at a Startup
Last but not least, some of your “sweat equity” investors were the early employees who took stock in exchange for working at low salaries and living with the risk that your startup might fold. At the IPO it is their cash-out day.
A good business plan was presented to investors. They liked it a lot. They trusted your energy and efforts put in it and promise you initial seed funding. Now that you got some capital you search for a co founder, share the capital with him. He also brings his expertise and expands your business. Seeing your business grow you get more funding.
Then the aim to be an entrepreneur shifts to become a money making machine whose each action is limited to raise some funds.
Indians have witness a chain of startups in say any segment you can think of. The startups were accepted by public on account that they were solving there problems, making life simple.
So what we have got, a mobile app to order food, look for houses or a piece of land on rent or even a plumber.
But the main question is why startups are going in loss? Why do people leave the idea they nurtured as their own kid? I recently went through news of Rahul Yadav EX CEO of Housing.com resigning first and ultimately fired. This whole incident made me to think and think more.
To make it simple, Indian markets is the most unique market among the world. Despite the huge potential, the commoners take time in adapting a change. There are very few early birds rather most are adopters, who when get to see someone trying a product and being satisfied with that, then only opt it themselves. (Refer product adoption life cycle)
But on a global front, people trust the new generation. The ideas are being respected and thus there is more and more investment. You are in your mid twenties and thirties and you are the brain behind a big xyz dollars company, which is too much exciting and motivational.
Taking the other side of the coin. You are a graduate / post graduate working with a great company whose package has spoiled you. You have never been in the market and have never tasted risk. Suddenly you bring a solution (which you see as a solution) and you prepare a business on it. You get series of fundings but that would actually kill your Entrepreneurial spirit. Every investor you get is investing on you more rather than your business and round the time line they will catch you for returns that the business. With great power goes great responsibility is true in the case of startups.
You may get huge funds but that would make you to run, run pretty fast. Prepare your team well and remember slow and steady wins the race. Growth is good but a growth for very short period is never digestible.
If you have been following most of the top bloggers and internet marketers, who are intoaffiliate marketing, one suggestion from them is if your niche allows get into WebHosting affiliate programs. Web hosting affiliate is one of the most lucrative and one of the highest paying affiliate programs available.
There are many people out there who are making thousands of dollars from commissions by selling and promoting different WebHosting Companies such as HostGator, GoDaddy, DreamHost, BluehostEtc.These are not the only Hosting companies that are providing Affiliate Options; almost all the hosting companies offer affiliate earning possibilities. Eespecially, if your blog teaches about how to blog, how to start a website or around Blogging and hosting niche, Webhosting affiliate can always help to earn more than what you are earning from Adsense or any Ad network.
Here we will look at some of the reasons on how Web Hosting Affiliate programs can help you make handsome money and some of the Aff. programs that you can join.
How WebHosting Affiliate Programs are useful:
High commission payout:
Affiliate Income Proof for Hosting Affiliate
Hosting Affiliate Programs offer insane commissions to those who bring in new sales, for example, HostGator pays a minimum of 50$ commission to the publisher for each sale, they have an inverted pyramid type system where, the more sales you make in a month, the higher the commission for each sale, it can go up to 125$ a sale if you get 21+ sales a month.You might be thinking, “How can these companies afford to pay these insane commissions?” This is exactly what I thought when I first heard about these commissions; then I went through some literature of these hosting companies and their business plan was a pretty good actually.They feel that if someone registers for a new hosting plan with them, these companies are confident in their services that they can hold on to the customer for years to come.Hence they make much more than 50$ from the sale, over time.
Increase in Popularity of building Websites
There is a more interest towards designing websites and building websites these days than there was say 10 years ago.So the market is there, all you need to do is, make sure that you can attract this market to buy through you. This can be done by good SEO, Good use of Coupons (4th Point) as well as promoting through Social Networks.With many people wanting to build websites, they are going to need hosting, so there is a huge market of people arising every day who are wanting to buy hosting.If you have corresponding articles and information, there is no doubt that you will bag some commissions each month.
Suggested Niche for Webhosting Affiliates:
Do not think that you need to have a Domain like HostingReviews.com or HostingDiscounts.com and write only about Hosting topics to earn commissions.There are some other niches that can get you good results as well.Here are some of them –
Technology
Blogging
How to Create/Design Website
Coding Tips
WordPress/Blogger Tutorials
Templates Blog
These are just some of the Topics, which have a good potential to get commissions.You will not believe it when I say that I got my first two commissions from HostGator through a Personal Blog and another from an Education Blog.Even today I am dumbfounded how that happened, but as I said your niche does not have to about Hosting.The central point is whatever be your niche, you earn a fixed commission of a good number of dollars, unlike Adsense or Chitika, which depend mainly on your niche and pay according to the keywords.
Hosting Discount Coupons:
Most of the Hosting Affiliates provide custom coupon codes for you, if someone buys a hosting plan using those coupons, then you can get the commission.If it’s possible, try to make your codes very simple and easy to remember, market these codes at your blog stating the discounts they offer.If you use your coupons well, you can earn a lot more than with any CPC or CPM platform.Coupons give an incentive for users to go and buy a hosting plan for their website.
With the Hosting Companies providing so many opportunities, I think if you just do a little hard work you can surely earn a lot from Hosting Commissions.Make use of this high paying type of Affiliates, I am sure that you will not regret it.
Now, there are many Webhosting companies that you can pick and join their affiliate programs. In most of the cases, joining Webhost affiliate program is free, and I will also share how you can find an affiliate program of any Webhosting. You can also use Affiliate marketplace like CJ, Clickbank to find many high-paying Web hosting aff programs. But, I prefer joining directly to any hosting affiliate.
Though, don’t try to jump into every hosting affiliate network. Pick the affiliate of hosting which you are using, and you are confident of. For example, at ShoutMeLoud you will notice under suggested Webhosting, there are three programs and all of them is personally used by the team here at SML. So, it’s always a wise advice to suggest something that you are sure of and confident about.
You can always use Google to find if any hosting company offers the affiliate program or not. For example: Hostgator Affiliate program or better search like Site:dreamhost.com affiliate program.
How to promote Webhosting Affiliates:
Like any other hosting affiliate program, you can promote any Hosting Affiliate. Though, here are some tips for newbies to promote any of your Web-Hosting Aff programs:
Write Hosting review:
Write a review of hosting which you would like to promote. Give complete details and technical specification and some strong reasons why you recommend it. Make sure, none of the words should be fake marketing stunt but should be a genuine and personalized review. This will help, readers to pick a genuine Webhosting company. Ex:Hostgator review
Hosting Discount coupon:
All the hosting company offers discount coupon to increase their sale. You can keep an eye on latest hosting discount coupons, by setting up Google alert or follow those blogs or sites, which share latest hosting discount coupon. When ever you find any discount offer, that is hard to resist., share it with your readers by blog Post, Email newsletter, Fan page or Twitter. If the discount period is longer, you can add a banner at prominent space on your Website.
Custom Discount coupon:
Hosting companies like Hostgator, Dreamhost offers their affiliates to create a custom hosting discount coupon. This will help them to increase their sales. For example, here at ShoutMeLoud we have custom coupon “SML97” for Dreamhost hosting, which offers $97 discount. Similarly, you can create your own custom coupon. If you are using your blog to promote it, keep the coupon code close to your brand name.
You can find affiliate Banner promotion material under your affiliate panel. Or you can also create create custom ad banner for those hosting affiliate and put it on your site. Custom but attractive banner performs way better than general and common ad banners. (Ad blindness)
Create Hosting Comparision sites:
When I shop for any Web host for me, I usually read lots of review for different hosting company account. Hosting comparision sites are very popular to pick best host. Though, it’s really hard to find genuine one, but if you can create an honest site with great review, comparision and discount coupons, a proper strategy can do wonder to your make money arsenal.
Here is a video guide for getting started with HG affiliate program:
If affiliate market is something which interest you, Webhosting Affiliate is something which you should probably look into right away. Don’t forget to subscribe to our Email newsletter, to get an update on our news guide on starting your own Domain business. Do share which is most successful Hosting Affiliate program for your?
IF you manage communication and marketing for a shopping mall, please read on for some ideas and examples of how to create promotions, contests and sweepstakes which will help you dynamize publicity. Take advantage of our suggestions and put them in practice with Easypromos. They will help you attract customers, incentivize consumption and loyalize clients.
Whether or not a shopping mall is successful depends on many factors and variables which should be studied strategically before getting the project underway. These factors include access, location, services, variety of establishments, ease of parking, and so on. But the Online Marketing actions we carry out are also fundamental and play a huge part in attracting consumers or possible clients. Such actions incentivize consumption in the establishments – in terms of both frequency and value; loyalize customers; avoid excessive sales seasonality; encourage the public to try products and services; and develop branding.
Below, we provide some ideas and give you examples that will help you achieve the following objectives:
Photo contest
Promotions groups with discount coupons
Sweepstakes
Pick your favorite contests
Text contests
1. Photo contests
Photo contests are very effective in developing branding. It’s always possible to organize a photocall, or even to improvise one, as long as the logo or name appears in the background.
Here’s an idea:
Usually shopping malls are full of posters containing the logo and name of the mall, so it should be quite simple to propose a photo contest in which users have to upload a photo of themselves with the logo in order to qualify for the prize. As a prize you can raffle free workshops for children, allowing parents to shop more easily or enjoy an afternoon in the cinema.
Here’s an example:
The San Cugat Shopping Mall proposed a photo contest in which visitors were encouraged to take a photo of themselves somewhere in the mall and enter it with the hashtag #momentssancugatcc.
We suggest you enable participation from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram via hashtag. You will increase participation if you facilitate routes to entry.
2. Promotions group combined with discount coupons
It’s likely that various establishments in the shopping mall will have offers or promotions. It’s a good idea to group these promotions together, so that before customers reach the mall they can find out if there are any interesting promotions on. You can create a promotions group, combined with discount coupons, promoting different types of establishment: cinemas, restaurants, entertainment stores and fashion stores.
Here’s an example:
One example is the Heron City Coupons Campaign, in which customers were offered discounts.
The more promotions, the better. If one of them happens to fit the needs of the client at that time, or if it is sufficiently attractive enough, it will bring that customer to the shopping mall.
3. Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes are a very useful tool for obtaining a customer database. By simply providing their details, participants will be entered into a sweepstake for a specific prize. Easypromos now also gives you the chance to ask your users to validate their email address.
Carry out a sweepstake offering the chance to win an attractive prize to all customers who have visited the mall on a specific day and made a purchase. Inform all the establishments as they can be the ones to inform customers. In this way, you will obtain a comprehensive database with which to carry out a subsequent email marketing campaign with the aim of communicating future events or promotions. Winning customers will need to present proof of purchase when claiming their prize.
Here’s an example:
The shopping mall Airesur usually raffles products connected with coming events or special holidays. In this case it was Easter. Other examples could be tickets to upcoming soccer games.
4. Pick Your Favorite combined with the recruiting system
The Pick Your Favorite application offers many possibilities and it’s one of the easiest types of promotions to take part in. Users can participate with just one click.
Here’s an idea:
If your objective is to sell more cinema tickets, we suggest you use the Pick Your Favorite application. Show a trailer with all the movies that will be onscreen soon and ask users to vote for the film they’d most like to see. As a prize you could award winners with free tickets to the movie of their choice. If you combine this with the recruiting system, the prize could be for the winner and three recruited friends.
Here’s an example:
The Marina Shopping Mall encouraged customers to come to a photo wall that had been set up in the mall and have their photo taken with their partner. The shopping mallwas responsible for uploading photos of participants and the most-voted couple won a gift card which they could redeem at any establishment in the mall. In this way they were able to combine two promotional actions – one online and one offline.
5. Text contest
Text-based contests offer a simple dynamic that is usually very well received by users. It is simple to participate with a phrase from any mobile device, and if you also allow Facebook and Twitter participation you facilitate participation even further. Hold your text-based contest on an important day such as Father’s Day.
Here’s an idea:
Set up a text-based contest in which clients have to say what they most like or value about the mall using a single phrase. In this way you will collect a great deal of information about what it is your customers most value about your mall. You will be able to use this information later for future promotional actions, publicity or communication.
Here’s an example:
The Madrid Sur shopping mall asked its customers to explain in which ways they and their children are “like father like son.”
The possibility for online promotions in shopping malls is infinite. In future posts we will continue to offer you ideas and examples of shopping malls that have counted on Easypromos, hopefully inspiring you to carry out your own promotions.
