5 Important Business Lessons For Entrepreneurs From Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban has a net worth of $3 billion. Most of his wealth has come
from two major transactions, but the businessman has continued to enjoy
success, whether with the Dallas Mavericks or Shark Tank. Cuban has
transitioned from a boy who sold garbage bags to one of the most famous
businessmen in the entire world.

Some pooh-pooh Cuban’s success as
mere dumb luck in cashing out of the Y2K market early, but luck is when
success meets opportunity. There is a lot that any entrepreneur could
learn from Cuban’s success, and here are five business tricks which any
an entrepreneur can use to grasp just a small part of all he has
accomplished.

1. Don’t persuade

For many, selling is
persuasion. Do a Google search and you’ll find a whole bunch of articles
that claim that with a little persuasion trick, a salesman can convince
all the people in the world.

But Cuban knows that selling and persuasion are not the same things, as he observed
that “selling is never about convincing. It is always about helping.”
You don’t want to persuade someone your product is awesome. You want to
show that the product will fundamentally help them in some way.

If
there is anyone neat persuasion trick, it is this: put yourself in the
shoes of others. That is the basis of any relationship, and that is the
basis of salesmanship.

2. Work hard, but smart

Cuban will
be the first to tell you that hard work is the key to success. One of
his first business moves as a young man was to take advantage of a local
newspaper strike. Cuban and his friends drove several hours to
Cleveland bought tons of newspapers and sold them back in his hometown
of Pittsburgh for a good profit.

But Cuban will tell you that
hard work is not about putting a lot of hours in at an office. It is
about getting things done. If you sit at a desk for ten hours but
accomplish nothing, you might as well have stayed home. In order to work
smart, you need to be organized, come to work every day with a plan,
and know what needs to be accomplished.

3. Save money

If
there is any one single rule which Cuban emphasizes, it is this one.
Cuban may be worth a lot of money today, and he grew up in a decently
well-off family, but he has known privation. He famously recounts living
off ketchup and mustard sandwiches as he worked to reach his current
heights.

Cuban was willing to accept this privation because he
wanted to get rich, and a lot of entrepreneurs will have to endure similar
conditions if they wish to get anywhere in life. Get rid of the credit
card, don’t eat out, and slash personal expenses as much as possible.
Living cheaply isn’t a weekly or monthly thing, but something which can
last years until an opportunity finally arrives.

As Cuban observed, there is no such thing as “getting rich quick.” There is only getting rich, and that takes time and a willingness to sacrifice.

4. Never go into debt

This
is similar to the above point, but Cuban believes in this so fervently
that it needs to be covered twice. While there is the personal aspect of
saving money by staying home, not going out to eat, and investing money where you can, there is also the business end of the deal.

As Cuban told one interviewer, “if you’re starting a business and you take out a loan, you’re a moron.”

Most
businesses can start with very little capital if you put enough effort
into it. Think about Apple’s humble beginnings, or how Facebook was set
up in a college dorm. If you can put in the effort and have a great idea
which will appeal to consumers, then you will be able to get the
capital without essentially becoming a puppet of the bank.

5. Listen to your customers’ feedback

People like to talk. And customers like to talk about the products they purchase — especially what went wrong with them. Cuban points out
that the fundamental goal of any business is to satisfy their
customers because that is what will lead to growth and then to profits.

Now,
there are limits to this. As Henry Ford observed, “If I asked people
what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Innovation is
supposed to be, well, innovative. An innovative businessman should push
on ahead with a new product as long as they can show how it will make
the customer’s life better in unexpected ways.

But customer
feedback is more important than all of the marketing research in the
world. If you can ensure that the customer feels respected, then they
will respect you. That will open up new opportunities and lead to good
things for your business.

Sea Life vs. Space Life (Infographic

The sea and outer space are the most unexplored areas known to man.
However, in the past century, technology has enabled us to trek farther than ever before into the Earth’s oceans and out into the final frontier. Despite these advances in technology, one of the major issues that still arises whenever humans explore the sea or the sky revolves around communication.
Although on land we can use a variety of electronic devices to instantly speak with friends and family all over the globe, it’s not so easy when adrift at sea. Sailors and the like rely on satellite telephones for a majority of communication. Though it is possible to connect to the Internet while at sea, it doesn’t work nearly as fast as on land – and there are restrictions as to the type of message that can be sent.
The situation is similar in space. Though astronauts can utilize telephones and the Internet to communicate with family and friends back home, they only have a limited amount of time to do so.
The following infographic, created by Global Navigation Solutions, details the nuances of communication while living at sea or in space.

How To Ensure Link Building Strategies

On the subject of Search Engine Optimization, getting other websites to link aimed at your site is the most essential aspect in achieving top search engine results positioning. Here is a directory 10 link building strategies which you will be implementing for top search engine results positioning (in no particular order):

Write quality articles – generate quality articles that other websites will need to post on their websites and hyperlink to. The higher the quality on the article, the more one-way inbound links you’ll get. The best articles to write down are ‘how-to’ and info articles. Stay away by self-promotion.

Start a WordPress blog site – setup a WordPress blog with your website and post articles to it weekly. It’s a great way to build the length of your website, keep your blog content fresh and receive incoming links. Plus The search engines loves WordPress!

Syndicate your articles on the net – take the articles or blog posts that you’ve posted on your blog and syndicate them on article banks such as Ezine Articles or blog posts and Go Articles, making sure that other website owners can post them on their websites.

Submit your website to help online directories – submit your blog to free SEO friendly website directories for just a quick way to start building one-way links aimed at your site.

Submit your blog to help blog directories – work with RSS Submit software to submit your site to blog directories. Use both the automatic and manual syndication tools.

Exchange links with applicable websites – exchange links with premium quality, relevant websites in ones field. This can possibly be extremely powerful, as long when very selective with with whom you exchange links having.

Use social bookmarking – submit your site posts and other top grade content to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Aside from the one-way link you’ll get along with the (short-term) top Google rank, you can hit the ‘jackpot’ by handling the first page connected with digg. com, where you’ll receive many one-way links.

Syndicate press announcements online – write newsworthy press announcments and syndicate them online at blog post syndication sites such seeing that PRWeb. If the release is up to scratch, you can get many one-way links to your web site.

Post comments on marketplace blogs – post top grade comments on other blogs with your industry to spark talk. Even if the reviews are ‘no-followed’, you can still get links on your site from other bloggers that consider your posts.

Link regarding the web pages – use contextual links with your website copy to hyperlink to other pages within ones websites. Each of your pages needs some PageRank.

Webmaster, Social Media and Technology News

On-Page Website Optimization for SEO

Not simply is keyword optimization suitable for landing pages and your distributed written content, but it is usually very important to be sure your entire on-page site is fully optimized and working together to create you more leads along with sales. However, there are particular issues with a website that all businesses need to focus on in their website optimization for SEO to achieve the best results.

 On-Page Title Tags

Sometimes an enterprise will overlook the small things and will lose out on a big opportunity for you to rank higher on search engines like yahoo. Fortunately, there’s a simple fix by having your important keywords to your title presents itself your website.

Titles normally explain the actual page the user can be on and integrating considered one of your major keywords might help with keyword rank. It is also the most important things for site optimization. Some things within the title can always be:

• Full name of your business
• Professional phone number
• Your most prominent keywords

Meta Descriptions

Another essential, though often overlooked, area to target your keywords in could be the meta description of your entire pages. You know those tiny snippets of information underneath a web link on search engines that explain it? That’s the meta outline. Use it to attract your target audiences. The idea is to be able to immediately sell the reader in order that they click-through to your internet site.

Website Headings 

When it comes to building your pages, headings are normally seen as H1, H2, and H3 tags. Did you know that headings are given higher rank on search engines than your actual website content your keywords put in?

Other important aspects of headings include:

• H1 tags will be the most dominant heading on your pages as they are the title of the pages.
• In order to break up content on your website, H2 and H3 tags come in handy and should organically include your most dominant keywords.
• Always bold or use italics for your headings on all of your pages using headings in order to break up content and make your website even easier to read and go through.

CSS Optimization and Domain Information

Even websites can have bloat that make them harder to crawl for bots and rank on search engines, but there are ways to make sure your website optimization fixes that. Here are some ways to do so:

• Keep your code organized and streamlined for faster recognition. A few ways of doing this is making a separate file for your CSS code or making sure all of the CSS is put in a single place that can be easily indexed all together.
• Make sure to keep all of your HTML very simple, instead of using fancier tags.
• Use emphasis in your code to help the crawlers identify important content.

Domain information is also very important for a website. Make sure your information is all up to date, constantly updated, and try to fill out everything for Alexa Rank, mozRank, and other website information.

 

  

Don’t forget to include information for the search engines

Don’t forget about images! When you save images and place them into your HTML, remember to add keywords to the picture’s name. Don’t forget about the ALT text (that blip of info when a mouse hovers over an image), image title in HTML, and of course the file name of the image.

Links

Finally, there are your URL’s structure. Yes, even keywords need to be included in your anchor text when linking out from other websites, a very streamlined link structure among your website that can be easily found by crawlers and utilize keywords, and there is the potential of permalinks. Content Management Systems allow you to make the headings of your posts and content permalinks, allowing for crawlers to put higher priority on your pages.