5 Tools For Entrepreneurs to Grow Their Online Presence in No Time

Growing your online presence is no easy job - especially for small and midsize business that are often lacking the brand awareness and resources of their much larger counterparts. Fortunately, now, more than ever there are a plethora of tools to help newly-minted entrepreneurs build their brand quickly and cheaply.

Here are five to help jumpstart your online-community presence.

1. Buffer to post content. Content sharing is one of the easiest way to grow and nurture your community. Yet, with more and more social platforms popping up online, content sharing can be time consuming, as each has its own style and messaging. Enter Buffer. This tool is a great way to streamline your posting and schedule on multiple platforms, making sure you're talking to everyone where it counts. Plus, it's a great way to keep your communications going on the weekend, a time when many users are interested in sharing online content.

2. LaunchCrew to launch campaigns. When launch day comes, startups need to get the word out to as many people to have the most impact and increase the probability of being heard in crowded industries. Often this entails getting your current followers to share with their friends, family and connections. LaunchCrew will help you do just that. It lets you cast a much wider net, practically doubling or tripling your impact. But how? By asking your audience for their credentials to be able to post on their behalf on the day of your launch. Or for any major campaign. You'll get that initial boost you've always dreamed of - the one you really need these days to break out of the pack from the very start.

3. Unbounce to create landing pages. Landing pages are now a must-have design choice to boost your online special operations. By customizing these towards a targeted audience, along with specific and relatable calls to action, it makes them way more efficient at achieving higher click-through rates. Unbounce allows you to create landing pages incredibly fast, with no technical skills required, making it easy not only to build but also to A/B test and implement the best results.

4. Click to Tweet to foster sharing. It’s ok to ask people to share. But the simpler it is, the more people you’ll get to do so. By giving out a simple, pre-composed click-to-tweet URL for your audience to tweet in seconds, you’ll find that your potential for virality is drastically increased.

5. Mention to monitor and react. Once people start talking about you, the best way to continue growing is to detect these mentions and to reply to every one of them. By doing so, it fosters a lot of motivation for them to talk and mention even more about you, creating a network of trusted brand advocates. By having alerts based on keywords -- like the name of your company, your products or your competitors -- mention allows you to stay in the know and react in seconds by connecting your social accounts directly to the app.

With these five tools, you'll find yourself developing and maintaining a clear brand voice in no time. And it's then that you'll start to see your online presence heating up.

From Entrepreneur

By Clément Delangue

Nigeria Economy Set to Leapfrog South Africa on Data Revamp

Nigeria may leapfrog South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy when the government statistics agency publishes revamped data this weekend.

The National Bureau of Statistics is set to release gross domestic product figures based on 2010 production patterns in Africa’s most populous country, the first time Nigeria has overhauled the data in two decades. A report will be released at a press conference in the capital, Abuja, at about 2 p.m. local time on April 6.
The revision may boost the size of the economy by as much as 60 percent to between $384 billion and $424 billion, according to London-based Renaissance Capital Ltd., lifting Nigeria ahead of South Africa in the World Bank’s global rankings.
“This will make it increasingly hard for companies looking at Africa to overlook Nigeria, especially considering the size of the domestic market and its potential,” Samir Gadio, a strategist at Standard Bank (STAN) Group Ltd. in London, said in an e-mailed response to questions.
The World Bank calculated Nigeria’s GDP at $263 billion in 2012 and South Africa’s at $384 billion. The West African nation’s population of 170 million is more than three times bigger than South Africa’s.
Regardless of the new GDP number, investment in oil-producing Nigeria is constrained by power and infrastructure bottlenecks, corruption and weak governance. Nigeria’s power supply is less than a 10th of South Africa’s, while the West African nation was ranked at 144 out of 177 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index last year.
GDP Ratios
“Addressing these shortcomings will probably have much more impact on investment than the perception that Nigeria is now a bigger economy,” Gadio said.
The statistics agency said on March 28 it’s increased the number of industries in the GDP calculation to 46 from 33, adding telecommunications, financial institutions, insurance, real estate and film-making.
The new numbers will probably lower Nigeria’s debt-to-GDP ratio, while reducing the proportion of government revenue to GDP.
“Crucially, what is not always clear is how governments then respond to these new ratios,” David Cowan, an Africa economist at Citigroup Inc. in London, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “Do they think they can borrow a lot more, or do they think the best policy response is to boost tax revenue? The latter is clearly the better policy response.”
Nigerian Poverty
The naira has dropped 2.1 percent against the dollar this year and was trading at 163.77 on the interbank market as of 7:24 a.m. in Lagos, the commercial capital.
Per capita GDP in Nigeria is estimated at $2,666, according to data from the World Bank, compared with $11,255 in South Africa.
The NBS’s most recent poverty survey, published in 2012, shows that 61 percent of Nigerians were living on less than a dollar a day in 2010, up from 52 percent in 2004. In the desert northeast, where Amnesty International estimates at least 1,500 people have been killed this year as security forces battle a Islamist insurgency, poverty rates may be even higher.
Nigeria emerging as the biggest economy in Africa “changes nothing in terms of the challenges facing the economy -- the need to build infrastructure,” Cowan said. “Nigeria will remain a poor country in terms of per capita income, even compared to South Africa.”

From Bloomberg

By Daniel Magnowski

Take a step back to think about the risks

Business owners are so busy juggling the daily challenges of managing their business, suppliers, clients and staff that they often fail to take a step back and assess the various risks they face.

This is according to Gerrie van Biljon, executive director of Business Partners Limited, who says that while it is not very pleasant, in the midst of this juggling, to dwell on the negative incidents that can still go wrong, the simple act of thinking about these, and the mere awareness of it, can mean the difference between success and failure.

“In our daily dealings with small and medium enterprises, we have seen setbacks within businesses as a result of disasters that have struck throughout the years, namely external disaster such as floods, power outages and new legislation. But there are also internal business risks such as computers crashes, new competition, strikes and new innovation.”

While it is important for business owners to deliberately set aside time to assess the risks facing their business, they also need to be aware of key areas within their business that could potentially be affected as a result of these risks, says Van Biljon.

“Business owners need to accept that they cannot think of everything and instead need to concentrate on the basics. These include fire, theft, accident, loss of key personnel and loss of data. By listing the basics and spending time considering these risks in the context of the business, they have already done more than many other business owners, and have awakened a crucial awareness.”

However, Van Biljon advises against undertaking the exercise alone as this may lead to significant aspects being left off the list of possible risks which face the business. He recommends that business owners approach any large corporation that they deal with, either suppliers or clients, and ask how these parties consider risks. Where possible he advises that business owners use experts to assist.

“Risk management is a fairly recent discipline in the corporate world, but most large organisations have undergone at least a few formal risk assessment processes. Knowledge of the approach to risk is therefore relatively widely spread in those organisations and a sympathetic contact on the inside could be willing to help with some pointers.”

He adds that ideally, business owners should contemplate each of the set of risks one by one, prioritise them according to how likely they are to happen, and put precautions and contingency plans in place. “For example, most business robberies happen after the perpetrators have scouted the premises by gaining entry under some pretext, such as pretending to be looking for someone. By installing some form of access control, a business can dramatically lower its chances of being burgled.”

He adds that risk assessment is unfortunately not simply something that a business owner can do once to get it over with. “Risk assessment is an exercise that needs to be done regularly as a business’s risk changes constantly, not only because of changes inside the business, but also because of changes in the environment around the business.”

Some of these risks can be countered, or at least the entrepreneur would be aware of the possible risks, says Van Biljon. “A strategy or a back-up plan can be instituted and where possible insurance should be in place.

“Insurance experts could assist a business owner with a general risk assessment that will protect the business against inadequate or inappropriate cover. It is, however, imperative that the business owner selects a reputable and knowledgeable insurance broker to minimise the risk as it is certainly possible for a business to be over-insured, and insurance is only a small, if crucial, part of risk management.”

He says that even if few business owners get around to implementing regular, formal risk management processes, it is important to adopt awareness and an approach to business that takes risks into account. “It comes down to the survival of the cleverest. The cleverest business owners learn from setbacks of others. Average business owners learn from their own setbacks, and the foolish never learn; neither do they last long in business,” concludes Van Biljon

From How We Made it in Africa

By Business Partners team

Brand-Building With F-Bombs: Small Biz Looks To Twitter

Richard Easton loves the mixed grill special at Mangal 2, a family-owned Turkish restaurant in the gentrifying East London neighborhood of Dalston. What first drew him, though, wasn’t the food. It was the sassy, profanity-laden commentary on the restaurant’s Twitter (TWTR) feed.

“It’s very focused on London life and making fun of groups like hipsters,” said Easton, 26, who finally visited the restaurant last month after following it on Twitter since summer. “The food was really good and I was impressed,” he said -- though he was surprised at how serious the staff was, given the tone of the Twitter feed.

Mangal 2 tweets, penned by the owner’s 25-year-old son, have as much to do with soccer and current events as they do with kebabs or koftas. “Don’t be too surprised when Facebook buys your Mum for $3 billion,” declares one. During the Olympics, he posted: “Today’s special is the Sochi Kebab: same kebab but served ice cold. Gay customers get 40 percent off. Putin’s not welcome.”

With more than 11,000 followers, Mangal 2 shows that slick marketing isn’t always the key to raising brand awareness. No longer just a forum for self-absorbed musings, Twitter has become a venue where small businesses such as watering holes, booksellers and florists connect with fans and customers -- and have fun doing it.

“Some of the tweets are a bit crude and provocative, but it’s real and it’s got a voice instead of just Instagramming food images and saying today’s special is so and so,” said Ferhat Dirik, Mangal 2’s Twitter-meister. In December, his tweets landed him a job as a social media editor at the U.K.’s Daily Mail newspaper.

London Riots

A half-hour walk from Mangal 2 is The Dolphin, a pub that has garnered almost 22,000 followers. Its feed is run by David Levin, 33, a former writer at MTV who often stops in at The Dolphin for a pint or two. During the 2011 riots in London, Levin created @The_Dolphin_pubwhen it was rumored the building had been torched.

The next day, the feed had 1,000 followers, and it soon gained recognition for humorous tweets such as: “FYI: for the price of a gym membership, you could take a skipping rope to the pub three times a week and drink gin while you work out.”

Though the Dolphin now has its own Twitter account, @dolphinhackney, Levin still tweets under the original name with the blessing of the pub’s owner -- and has eight times as many followers.

“Twitter is now part of the equation for branding,” said Levin, who says it’s not uncommon for new customers at The Dolphin to say they heard about the pub because of the tweets. “I’ve seen the power of Twitter firsthand.”

Single Mother

Levin, too, has spun his Twitter experience into a job. He has tweeted for Adidas, L’Oreal and Ikea, where he posed as a single mom in her mid-20s as part of an ad campaign for making do with small spaces.

Last summer, Levin set up a group of social-media writers-for-hire, called That Lot. The group runs one-day Twitter training workshops for 120 pounds ($200). Levin’s advice: be short, be topical and engage with followers.

“A lot of advertisers don’t get” Twitter, said Paul Frampton, chief executive officer at Havas Media, the ad placement arm of French advertising company Havas SA. (HAV) “People have to be brought into the conversation on Twitter and it has to be more of an opinion or you won’t get followers.”

Punchy Sentences

The upside to Twitter is that it’s free and small businesses can reach as many people as they can attract. On Facebook, by contrast, large brands are increasingly paying to win fans. Aside from slapping ads directly on the site, Facebook advertisers can target consumers based on location, demographics and interests and build pages for brands to interact with customers through posts, events and offers.

“Small businesses like a pub, florist and restaurant can all have a social media voice on Twitter because it’s the same for everyone, while Facebook is becoming a paid platform,” said James Whatley, head of social media at ad company Ogilvy & Mather. Facebook declined to comment.

Small business owners without sassy, media-savvy offspring or a knack for writing punchy sentences can hire someone to run their Twitter account. Will Wynne, a former private equity banker at Credit Agricole who founded an online florist called ArenaFlowers.com, turned to a pro to pen his Twitter feed. Since it was launched 18 months ago, the account has attracted more than 22,000 followers.

Wynne’s aim was to get readers to think of flowers beyond the two-to-three times annually that most people buy them. He says sales have increased 30 percent since his Twitter account started posting tweets such as, “When you’re asked what your weaknesses are at a job interview, look lovingly into their eyes, place your hands on theirs and say ‘You.’”

While Wynne doesn’t attribute the sales boost entirely to the tweets, “there’s no doubt Twitter has helped,” he said. “Twitter has humanized our brand and in the end, life’s too short and we like to have a bit of fun.”

From Bloomberg

By Kristen Schweizer

Israeli Moms Mentored by Google for Women Making Startups

Women cradle newborn babies in their arms and dangle soft toys in front of older infants on colorful mattresses, all in a room in a Tel Aviv high-rise strewn with strollers and oversized bean bags.

It’s not a play facility. It’s the location ofGoogle Inc.’s first baby-friendly school for startups. Called Campus for Moms, the program involves a series of nine weekly classes designed to give women on maternity leave a boost toward opening their own ventures in a country whose economy is dependent on innovation.

“The course helped me realize that this is who I am,” said Nira Sheleg, a 37-year-old mother of two who founded Wizer.me, a teacher-resource company, during the program. “I am an entrepreneur, not just a mom with an idea. Now I have a support group, and the mothers around me are amazing.”

Since graduation last July, she’s recruited a chief executive officer and several advisers and plans to start sales soon. Her targeted market: the U.S.

The classes –- two series have run so far -- are designed to address a dearth of women entrepreneurs in Israel, where technology makes up almost half of industrial exports. That contributes about one-third of economic growth, making staffing such companies a priority for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet only 9 percent of technology startups around Tel Aviv are headed by women –- about the same as in Silicon Valley.

“The biggest miss we have on talent in the technology industry is the lack of women entrepreneurs and engineers,” said Google Israel’s head of research and development, Yossi Matias, the senior company executive working with the Campus for Moms project. Google is following up with similar programs in London and in Krakow, Poland, he said.

Micro-Venture

Employees of technology companies in Israel make up less than 10 percent of the total workforce, according to figures from 2011 posted on the Central Bureau of Statistics website. About 7 percent of all working women are employed in technology, compared with 12 percent for men.

As little as 4 percent of global venture capital flows into female-initiated startups, according to Eva Ventures, a micro-venture capital fund dedicated to the promotion of women entrepreneurship. Its website uses figures from the Kauffman Foundation, an educational and entrepreneurial grant maker in Kansas City.

Eva Ventures started raising funds a few months ago and hopes to close with about $30 million in a few months before seeking candidates to invest in, said Michal Michaeli, founder and managing partner of the fund. All three managing partners are women.

“We know that having more women as start-up founders would enrich the vibrant, innovative and unique scene that is Israeli high tech,” the fund’s website says.

‘Man’s Society’

Orna Berry has lived in the skewed world of Israel’s technology industry for more than 25 years.

“It was always clear to me that this was a man’s society,” said Berry, former chief scientist for the Israeli government and venture partner at Gemini Israel fund. She is now a corporate vice president at EMC Corp., the world’s biggest maker of storage computers.

Along the way, she’s reached out to women in the industry. She calls it less an act of mentoring and more the “virtue of the fact that a woman leader was with them so they allowed themselves not to stop at red lights.”

Sheleg, who abandoned the first business she started due to the demands of her family life, attests to that. She was able to create Wizer.me in the nurturing environment of Campus for Moms, where conversations ranged from baby-sleeping issues to where to register a business. Wizer.me lets teachers create online worksheets and other educational tools.

Long Distance

Her first venture, ShellEgg, was an Internet showcase for architects. She founded it with her sister when they both had infants.

“We had lots of trouble going to the States for the long-distance trips that were necessary and we didn’t progress as we should have,” said Sheleg, who studied information technology at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “At the time, we didn’t know how to combine motherhood with startups.”

At Campus for Moms, lecturers speak once a week about technology, give how-to lessons on forming a business and share life experiences. Leaders in the industry explain how to win investors and how to develop a market.

Women startup aspirations in Israel can be undermined by the lack of child care outside the family in a country where school and day care can end in early afternoon.

Military Service

Hilla Brenner, founder of Yazamiyot, a women’s entrepreneurial group that worked with Google to create Campus for Moms, says the country’s mandatory military service of two years for women and three years for men is also partly to blame for muting female business dreams. Women often have to accommodate their husbands’ armed-forces duties or delay careers because of their own.

“To become an entrepreneur you need to be completely involved in something else besides your family,” said Brenner, a 38-year-old mother of three who raised money for her first venture when she was eight months pregnant with her first child. “This is more difficult in Israel than in other places because your partner does reserve duty, sacrificing for his country, while you sacrifice for the kids.”

Shelly Hod Moyal, co-founder of equity crowd-funding platform iAngels, which launched this month, says mandatory service also means studies are delayed. Career-building begins when women are as old as 28 and thinking about starting a family.

‘Pretty Smile’

When they do decide to go ahead, there are prejudices to overcome.

“There was one lead angel investor who said ‘just because you have a pretty smile doesn’t mean you will be successful,’ and another told us we were missing male energy,” she said. “On the other hand, there were a lot of people who empowered us and said, ‘Just seeing two women doing this is refreshing.’”

IAngels has already raised more than $1 million for four companies with investors from all over the world, she said. The company has two employees: an associated partner and a developer.

According to a 2013 report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Israel’s percentage of self-employed women ranked 11th from the bottom of 38 countries, better than Germany and France and just behind the U.S. Mexico and Greece took the top places.

Gender stereotypes moved Rebecca Rachmany, a 46-year-old mother of two, to co-found a startup to counter them. Gangly Sister Productions has posted a YouTube cartoon series for tween girls in English called ‘Purple and Nine’ that seeks to inspire them to explore technology.

No Programming

“No one ever tells a girl she isn’t cut out to be a movie star, but they do say she isn’t cut out to be a programmer,” said Rachmany, whose team includes six founders, two of whom are men, as well as paid translators, animators and production sound specialists. Most work part-time and more than half the contractors are women.

Costs are financed for now by Rachmany and her co-founder, who left other jobs to do Gangly Sisters full time. The goal is to make money from online paid community memberships and affiliated projects.

At Campus for Moms, which is attended by about 50 women, a new session will start in May. If Sheleg’s experience is a guide, more startups will emerge.

“Once you’re in this community of mothers doing the same thing you are you don’t think it’s so extraordinary,” she said.

From Bloomberg

By  Gwen Ackerman

The startup staffed by ex-cons

The sleek San Francisco office of tech startup LaunchPodium is a big step up for two of its staffers.

Tulio Cardozo, 32, and Caleb Hunter, 35, were inmates at California's infamous San Quentin State Prison. But today, their lives are similar to 20-somethings across Silicon Valley: They're trying to build a startup.

LaunchPodium, founded in the spring of 2013, is an online marketing firm helping small businesses build websites, social engagement and advertising. The two men make up half the new company's full-time workforce: Cardozo is a lead developer, while Hunter is a technology architect.

"LaunchPodium's main focus is about simplifying an entrepreneur's life," Cardozo said. "Think of it as an entrepreneur support package in a box."

They pull all-nighters, weigh Wordpress versus Drupal, and spend their days white-boarding ideas. But only a short time ago, they wore matching blue uniforms and had access to nothing more advanced than a prison typewriter.

Cardozo served just under six years in prison for manufacture of a controlled substance and was released in October 2011. Hunter served eight years for carjacking and vehicle theft and was released in October 2013.

LaunchPodium founder Mike Parsons met the two men through a six-month prison entrepreneurship program called The Last Mile, founded by Chris Redlitz.

Inmates create tech-oriented business plans and learn about the industry from guest lecturers and books by prominent entrepreneurs, like Guy Kawasaki's "Enchantment." They finish with a "demo day" where they pitch to actual Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Parsons partners with the program, helping ex-convicts get acquainted with the tech world when they're released from prison. In addition to Hunter and Cardozo, he has five other newly released prisoners working as "entrepreneurs-in-residence" (meaning they work primarily on their own startups from the LaunchPodium offices). Hunter and Cardozo actually began their tenure at LaunchPodium three months ago as EIRs, where they perfected their technical skills. They were hired full time last month.

"We made a very deliberate choice to go out there and work with people that really are just so committed to making a contribution," Parsons said. "Their advantage is in their attitude."

The program is not just "do-gooderism" -- it's good business. Customers find the unusual backgrounds of the LP staff a compelling reason to work with them.

"We bring a certain level of insight that perhaps someone who's [been] part of the everyday conversation wouldn't necessarily see," Hunter said.

It's an unexpected benefit of their isolation, since much of the technology used today was developed while they were serving time. The smartest phone on the market when they were incarcerated was the Motorola Razer. Facebook (FB, Fortune 500) still had "The" before its name.

For both men, technology was at arm's length for years: Cardozo learned about Massive Open Online Courses while incarcerated, but to participate, he had to have his mother download course materials on computer science and mail him stacks of paper.

"I always wanted to be a geek and go to MIT ... [but] I knew that wasn't gonna happen," Cardozo said.

LaunchPodium has given the men a way to break into the tech world.

"When they get in front of a computer or they see a smartphone for the first time, it's really a special moment," said Redlitz. "It's like a kid at Christmas or someone with a new toy."

Back inside San Quentin, TLM is starting to select inmates for the program based on their potential for filling openings at its partner tech companies. It's a sort of in-prison job recruitment.

After years of the concerns that cropped up on the cell block, the highs and lows of the startup world don't phase these guys.

"We're sitting in a meeting, and it took me a moment to pause and realize, I'm literally living my dream," said Hunter.

From CNN Money

By Erica Fink

Facebook execs get another big payday

In addition to her duties at Facebook, Sandberg serves on the board at Disney and was previously a director at Starbucks.

Facebook executives took home another big haul for their efforts in 2013, even though their pay packages weren't quite as lucrative as they were in 2012.

In a regulatory filing Monday, Facebook said that three of its top executives earned more than $10 million in salary, bonuses and stock awards last year. A year earlier three top execs made more than $17 million.

Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's compensation dropped to $16.1 million last year, down from the $26.2 million she earned in 2012. But Facebook's executives receive a significant portion of their compensation in stock grants that vest over the course of four years, so those totals could change depending on what happens with the company's share price over time.

Chief financial officer David Ebersman earned $10.5 million last year, down from $17.5 million for 2012. And Mike Schroepfer, Facebok's chief engineer, earned $12.6 million in 2013 after making $20.7 million a year earlier.

It doesn't appear that the cuts in compensation are related to performance -- Facebook's board praised Sandberg's leadership in "the continued growth in mobile ad revenue, helping to grow the base of Facebook users, and strengthening key policy relationships globally." Ebersman, the board said, contributed to growing the company's revenue and the "execution of financial planning and forecasting."

CEO Mark Zuckerberg accepted a $1 salary for 2013, as the company had previously announced, following the example of other tech industry leaders like Google' Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously took home just $1 a year.

It's safe to say Zuckerberg can afford it -- as Facebook's leading shareholder, he had a net worth of $27 billion as of Monday, according to Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg did receive chartered air travel paid for by Facebook, which the company valued at $650,164 for 2013.

Facebook's ad revenue soared 72% in 2013, including strong growth in mobile ads, which had been a question mark for the company. Overall sales hit $7.8 billion on the year, up from $5.1 billion in 2012. 

From CNN Money
By James O'Toole