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A quote for the aspiring entrepreneur... We hope you enjoy issue twenty five of the Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!
In the first article I talk about my time at the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Conference that I just got back from Sunday night. The second article, "The Axiom of Value in Permission-Based Email Marketing" discusses the critical importance of providing value to your subscribers within your email newsletter--and what happens when you don't. Finally, we have an update on my new Anti-Poverty Blog, an update on the Zeromillion.com Discussion Forum, a section that provide free content you may use on your web site and a list of our book recommendations for current and aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders. If you have any comments, suggestions, or would like to contribute content to be published in the newsletter or online, I encourage you to contact us at myoung@virante.com. Please do feel free to forward this newsletter on to your colleagues and associates. On behalf of the Zeromillion.com team I thank you for being a subscriber. Yours entrepreneurially, Report
from the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization Conference in Orlando I got back last night from the 2005 Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization conference in Orlando. I drove down with Phil Gennett, the new president of the Carolina Entrepreneurship Club. Let's just say there's nothing quite like driving a Nissan 350z across Florida with the top down. This year's conference was my fourth and one of my favorites. Although Navy Pier in Chicago has been nice the past two years, it's always good to go back to Florida and hang out at the pool between sessions. At this year's conference I spoke twice--once on Friday morning and once on Saturday. I spoke Friday to about 140 students and to about 60 on Saturday on the topic "How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales: Before You Graduate." You can download my presentation from the conference here. Greg Jones of uBid fame gave quite an inspiring speech Friday evening. It really motivates me to think the guy built a company from nothing to $1 billion in valuation in 9 months and gave Merrill Lynch one of its biggest IPOs in its history. I think I'm just going to shut up until I've taken a company public with a $1B or higher valuation. If only it were 1997 again. One event at the conference that stood out was the elevator pitch competition. This competition was definitely the best one I've seen so far--in terms of quality of the pitches as well as the entertainment value. It was clear that a number of the presenters had spent a lot of hours preparing. I especially liked the eco-friendly worm-fertilizer idea and the idea of the winner--to create a business that provided an organized tour for college business students of 25-30 businesses across Europe and Asia over a few week period. The highlight of the conference for me, however, was hearing Steve Wozniak speak on Friday night. He shared the story of how he created the Apple I and Apple II and created the first computer game as software. I previously didn't know that at one point, simple games like Pong were actually "hardware" hard coded onto physical chips. For a moment, Wozniak really made me wish that I had been born in 1960 and had the opportunity to have been a part of the microcomputer and then the early Internet revolutions. I quickly got solace, however, from the realization that being born in 1984 will in the end likely present even more opportunities. It's truly
amazing what people like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry
Ellison and others did in their 20s during the 1970s and 1980s. I wonder
what my generation (the 1980s generation) will accomplish in the next
two decades now that the "world
is flat" and the fiber optic and digital frameworks are in place.
Those guys built the world of 1995. Now it's our turn to build the
world of 2025. I can only wonder what impact on the economy, technology,
innovation, and job creation the 800 attendees of this year's CEO conference
will have over the next two
decades. It will certainly
be
interesting
to see. Ryan P. Allis, 21, is the author of the book Zero to One Million, a guide to building a company to $1 million in sales, and the founder of www.zeromillion.com. Ryan is also the CEO of Broadwick Corp., provider of the web-based email marketing software IntelliContact and CEO of Virante, Inc., a web marketing and search engine optimization firm. Ryan is presently on leave from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a senior economics major and a Blanchard Scholar. [ learn more ]. This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains The
Axiom of Value in Permission-Based Email Marketing For the last 100 years, companies have relied on traditional advertising in the form of catchy jingles, TV commercials, billboards, print ads in newspapers and magazines, direct mail, hot air balloons, and waving mascots. The technique is to interrupt a radio listener, TV viewer, or magazine reader with an attention grabbing ad that compels the consumer to buy the company’s product or at least have the product closer to the forefront of his or her mind next time the individual is making a buying decision. In most instances, advertising is acceptable to the consumer. Most people don’t mind seeing ads while watching television, listening to the radio, or reading magazines—or at least they understand that these ads are necessary in order to receive the content they are seeing, reading, or hearing. While technologies like TiVo, DVR, and satellite radio are challenging advertisers to come up with new methods of advertising, other technologies such as Internet television require users to watch a 30-second advertisement prior to the start of a show. The point is, as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements. This same axiom holds true online. As long as your web site provides content that people value, visitors will continue returning to the site even if there are a few banner ads or Google AdWords boxes within the page layout. While some web sites, such as WSJ.com, have successfully switched to a subscription-based model, many more web sites rely on banner, box, skyscraper, and contextual advertisements to earn the bulk of their income. The same axiom, that as long as value is provided, consumers will be willing to be exposed to a few advertisements, also holds true with email. As long as one provides value—whether by providing content on a topic a recipient is interested in or a discount off a product related to one purchased previously—people will allow you to continue to contact them. Each and every email you send of course contains your logo, information on your products and services, and links to your web sites. These items are the advertising and should be surrounded on all sides by the items which make the communication actually add value to the lives of your readers. Spam however, by its very nature, breaks the axiom. Unsolicited bulk email very rarely has any value. Spam is usually irrelevant, always impersonal, and rarely helpful. Everyone with an email inbox knows how aggravating it is to sort through forty new emails to only find two that are from persons you know. While spam may make money for persons in Eastern Europe promoting fake Cialis, I feel strongly that sending spam will always have a net negative impact on any legitimate organization. For this reason, we strongly recommend only sending permission-based email, also known as opt-in email. Permission-based email marketing can be an extremely effective way to increase visitor-to-sale conversion rates, build strong relationships with your customers, and turn your one-time buyers into lifetime product evangelizers who recommend your organization to everyone they know. Permission-based email marketing allows companies to develop and sustain relationships with their prospects and consumers by creating value. Permission marketing is about “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers” as Seth Godin likes to say. The nature of permission marketing—building a relationship with a prospect or expanding the relationship with an existing customer over time—allows you to concentrate on the prospects and customers who are really interested in what you have to sell and are more than willing to become repeat customers. Ryan P. Allis, 21, is the author of the book Zero to One Million, a guide to building a company to $1 million in sales, and the founder of www.zeromillion.com. Ryan is also the CEO of Broadwick Corp., provider of the web-based email marketing software IntelliContact and CEO of Virante, Inc., a web marketing and search engine optimization firm. Ryan is presently on leave from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a senior economics major and a Blanchard Scholar. [ learn more ]. This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains. In September I started a new blog at AntiPovertyCampaign.org so I would have an outlet for my passion of finding ways to reduce poverty in developing counties. Check it out www.antipovertycampaign.org. Below are some of the topics I've discussed so far. If you want to contribute to the blog just email me at ryan [at] virante.com and I'll set you up as an authorized contributor. Topics To Date:
If you have
a web site that has to do with business, entrepreneurship, marketing, web
marketing, ebusiness, personal development, or economics and would like high
quality free content for your web site, you may syndicate the following articles
from our web site. These articles are stored in zip format and can be downloaded
by clicking on the appropriate link. We simply ask that you keep the author
byline at the bottom of each article per the instructions included with each
zip file. If you choose to use any of the articles we ask that you notify
us at ryan@zeromillion.com. Members: 1132
The following books are recommended for reading by aspiring and current entrepreneurs and business leaders. The books in bold are must reads. Please email any recommendations for additions to this list to myoung@virante.com. Globalization & Economics
Entrepreneurship
Marketing
Personal Development
Follow the journey of young entrepreneur Ryan Allis as he builds his second company, Broadwick Corporation to one million dollars in sales, publishes his first book, Zero to One Million, travels the country as a web marketing consultant and speaker on young entrepreneurship and personal development, launches his non-profit organization, and lives the life of a bootstrapping entrepreneur. Read Ryan's Blog Now. Last month Ryan posted updates with the titles of:
You can read the blog now at http://www.ryanallis.com/blog/.
Past Highlighted Organizations: This concludes issue twenty five of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you November 1, 2005. If you are not subscribed and would like to subscribe, please visit http://www.zeromillion.com. If you would like to contribute content, become involved with the zeromillion.com team, make suggestions, or provide feedback please feel free to contact us at info@zeromillion.com. We encourage you to participate in our discussion forum at http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/. This newsletter is published by www.zeromillion.com with support from the Entrepreneurs’ Coalition. The newsletter is sent using the IntelliContact web-based email marketing and list management software. Comments/Suggestions: myoung@virante.com Archives online at: http://www.zeromillion.com/echronicle/
All Contents Copyright © 2005
by Zeromillion.com, the top entrepreneurship
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