5 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Needs
Today’s entrepreneurs have the world at their fingertips, literally. The internet has made it possible for anyone to become a successful entrepreneur, but that doesn’t mean everybody does. Despite the illusion of fast-tracked success and adoration, being a successful entrepreneur takes more than a bit of hard work.
In fact, the life of an entrepreneur is less glamorous than you might imagine, particularly when you’re starting out. Of course, if you’re willing to put the effort in, you the rewards are spectacular. Want to be your own boss and make it on your own terms? Take a look at the five must-have things every successful entrepreneur needs…
1. Determination
Contrary to popular belief, success doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re looking for a fast-tracked way to make it to the top, entrepreneurship probably isn’t for you. Every ‘overnight success’ you encounter has spent years toiling away behind the scenes to get to where they are now. Furthermore, the path to success is rarely easy.
Whether you’re inventing a new product, launching a new business or creating an innovative social enterprise, you’ll hit stumbling blocks along the way. To be successful, however, you’ll need to find a way to get around them, through them or over them.
2. Attention to Detail
When you start out as an entrepreneur, chances are you’ll be working on your own a lot of the time. Budding entrepreneurs rarely have the budget for staff, fancy offices or vast amounts of equipment. In fact, a coffee machine is probably pushing it. Instead, you’ll be flitting from one job to another as you try to get your organisation off the ground.
Fortunately, the staff, equipment and fancy offices for come along, providing you stick at it long enough to be successful. Entrepreneurs are known for their precision and attention to detail, so if you’re detailed-oriented and organised, you’re already on the right track.
Every element of your product, service or brand is going to be scrutinised. Investors, competitors, customers and clients will be queuing up to assess what you’ve got to offer, so it’s essential that every detail is covered. If you’ve got the tenacity to cover the seemingly minor details, as well as the major ones, it will stand you in good stead for life as an entrepreneur.
3. Work/Life Balance
Entrepreneurs are known for their hard work and you will certainly need to put the hours in if you want to be successful. However, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week isn’t sustainable in the long term. Many entrepreneurs who devote too much time to their work end up burning out before they can enjoy their success.
If you want to build an entrepreneurial career, you need to find a way to balance your long hours with some form of relaxation. Whether that’s time with family, socialising with friends, hitting the gym or practising a hobby is up to you.
Of course, being an entrepreneur isn’t the right choice for someone who wants to clock out everyday at 5pm or enjoys working part-time. Being your own boss may sound attractive but, in reality, it’s a hard slog with limited downtime.
The trick to building a sustainable career is an entrepreneur is factoring in that downtime and making it a priority. If you can do this, you’ll be able to build long-lasting success in your industry, rather than fleeting fame.
4. Self-Awareness
As entrepreneurs tend to work alone when they’re starting out, it can be hard to let go. When things start moving forward, however, it becomes impossible to undertake every task without assistance. Entrepreneurs have a tendency to micro-manage, which is frustrating for everyone involved.
The best entrepreneurs are self-aware enough to recognise their own strengths and weaknesses. What’s more – the know when to call in help. If you’re launching a social enterprise and you’re not a tech wizard, for example, there’s no point spending hours trying to troubleshoot your network when issues arise.
By hiring staff and outsourcing to companies, subcontractors and freelancers, you can build a reliable professional network. This will give you the resources you need, whenever you need them. Furthermore, outsourcing your needs to specialists means you can access their expertise in the most cost-effective way. By doing so, you’re freeing up more of your time, which you can dedicate to your core business activities.
5. Publicity
If you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur, you’ll need some form of publicity. Whether you want to be a recognisable face, or you want your brand to become a household name, marketing and promotion is critically important.
In today’s digital landscape, the internet is the most effective way to build a profile and establish a new product or service. No matter what sector you operate in, it’s vital to have a positive online web presence.
Anyone can setup a website, but this doesn’t mean that people will automatically know where to find you. Instead, you’ll need to invest time in promoting your brand online and attracting clients to your content.
Search engine optimisation, content marketing and PPC are all effective ways of doing this. As well as providing long-term results, you’ll find that building an online profile brings immediate rewards too. With the right expertise, you can promote your online profile and see your traffic spike within hours.
There’s a lot that goes into making a product, service or brand successful but publicity is always a key factor. However good your USP is, it won’t sell if people don’t know about. To generate interest, you’ll need the right tools build your profile and engage your target audience.
Launching Your Career as an Entrepreneur
If you’ve got what it takes to become the next successful entrepreneur, ClickSlice can help. Our SEO services are guaranteed to increase your search engine rankings and generate increased website traffic. Want to build your profile and gain maximum publicity? Contact ClickSlice now on 020 3287 3638.
Powerful Internal Linking Strategies – Case Study (Live Example And Results)
Internal linking is one of the most effective ways to increase your rankings without spending a dime.
It’s an incredibly simple but effective way to utilise all the power from an existing backlink profile and direct it to the page(s) you want to rank.
When done correctly, you can see massive gains without investing in any additional backlinks.
Do you see why I’m such a big fan?
What is an internal link?
An Internal link connects one page on your website to another hence the name “Internal”. Here’s an example of an internal link to our homepage.
Internal linking helps spread the authority and power from one page on your site to another, they can also help improve the indexation rate of your new inner pages.
Check out the diagram for an over-simplistic explanation of how you can optimise internal links to help push link juice to the pages you want to rank.
The Client Site In Question
We always carry out internal linking in the first month of taking on a new client, this ensures we are effectively utilising all the power the site already possess. To be precise, its something we actually implement on the third day of every campaign we start and is built into our agency SOPs.
We took on MadeSimpleMedia as a client back in Feb earlier this year. MadeSimpleMedia is a web design company based in Horsham, as a result, the main keyword we targeted was “web design Horsham”. For the data-driven readers, I’ll save you the time.. this keyword has a monthly search volume of 200 and has a respective KD of 34 putting it in Ahrefs “hard” category.
As always, we carried out our internal link process on the third day into the campaign.
We typically have 2 processes we follow for internal linking, each with a slightly different goal.
The main goal for our first method is to find existing internal link opportunities whilst the second is to find the most linked to pages on a site and then create an internal link opportunity.
We recommend using a mix of both to get the best results.
The Process – Method One
Step 1 – Enter the clients site into google using the below string:
site:clientsite.com + “main keyword”.
For MadeSimpleMedia it was site:madesimplemedia.co.uk “web design Horsham”.
Once entered, you’ll now see all the pages Google deems to be relevant to the keyword or specific phrase.
Step 2 – Use Ahrefs toolbar and download all the results (make sure you have your google settings to show 100 listings per page to get all the results).
Step 3 – Once downloaded, open the spreadsheet and sort the data by URL rating.
Note: URL is the best option to use as it only takes into consideration do-follow backlinks.
You now have a list of pages on the clients site (in order of power) which you can log into and add an internal link.
4 – Once you made all the changes, resubmit the sitemap to Google.
ProTip: Repeat Step 1 but use an LSI keyword instead. Make sure you also repeat using single phrases of the keyword too like “web design” and “Horsham” etc.
The Process – Method Two (My Fav)
Whilst the above process is good, it doesn’t allow you to make the most effective use of the existing backlink profile. For example, a client may have the majority of their backlinks pointing to a page on their site that doesn’t include any elements of the main keyword.. this is where method 2 comes into play.
Goal: Find the most linked to pages on the clients site and update the content to create an internal link opportunity.
Step 1 – Enter the clients site into Ahrefs and click “Best by links” under pages. This will show you the most linked to pages on the site.
Step 2 – Filter the list by UR rating.
It’s unlikely that a lot of these pages will have an existing internal link opportunity already on the page. That’s not to say we can’t use them, we can easily go into the page and edit the content naturally to create one.
Example: https://www.madesimplemedia.co.uk/web-design was the 3rd highest linked to page on the site. As a result, we logged into that specific page and updated the first paragraph to include a link to the page we’re trying to rank, which in this case was the homepage.
You can see the link we added below.
In total, we added 4 internal links from 4 different pages. There is no need to go overboard with this, like anything in SEO, you’ll see better results by focusing on quality and not quantity.
Step 3 – Resubmit the sitemap to Google once you’ve made all the changes.
Results
2 weeks into the campaign and MadeSimpleMedia was up 61 positions across the board.
Not bad if I say so myself.
What’s better is that the client messaged me 2 weeks into the campaign to let me know that he has already received an inbound enquiry from a company based in Horsham.
Fast forward to June and we’ve carried out a custom link building plan and we’re now in position 1 for the Horsham based keywords. We’ve recently allocated our resources to the West Sussex page so watch this space.
I hope this highlights how powerful internal linking can be and gives you a reason to include it in your SOPs. If you ever want to view a website that has perfect internal links then check out the business blog website by Business Cobra, they’re onpage SEO is literally perfect. However, if you’re a local business owner and would like help optimising your internal links, feel free to get in touch with us today and we’ll be more than happy to help.
