Last year we launched our first product called Hypemarks. It was a social bookmarking service aimed at meaningful discovery of links through your friends and people you care about. We were fresh graduates from college and did not know how to scale the product to generate revenue. We were in the “honeymoon phase” of  a startup journey. After all, a company’s success  depends on the revenue you generate and the value you provide to the customers. But our business model was not sustainable; Hypemarks could only make money if we had millions of users as our primary source of revenue was advertisements. Looking back, it was really sad to know that we had to spend all our efforts in first acquiring users and then figure out a monetization model. As we persisted and did not see any growth in acquiring users, we realized that we needed to change our product vision to a more realistic one that could actually generate revenue. We were in the “pivot phase”. We pivoted our product to Tint (www.tintup.com). We had a product with a business model, but the question was still left unanswered. How to get  more customers? Over the past few months we have adopted 9 strategies listed below that helped us get more customers, thereby increasing our revenue by 100-200% month over month.

1) Product:

Finding out the right product is the key to a successful business. Eric Rees in this article clearly explains how to figure out the right product market fit before you scale your product. This is the exact same principle we applied for Tint. Instead of asking our friends or families for customer feedback, we asked our customers directly. Initially we thought that people would be making Tint as their primary website but we soon realized that it was a false assumption. So taking the customer feedback into account we made a simple and flexible embed. People loved the embed so much that they were ready to pay for it in the first week of our launch. At this stage we had the right product ready to take off. Now the question is to find customers. Where are our customers?

2) Partnerships: 

A product is a failed one if you cannot put it in your customers hands. Partnerships are the quickest way to grow your business. We reached out to a number of website builders to help us grow. We integrated our product with them and this helped us get more customers. It was a win win for both of us. This helped us get more exposure and helped us quickly validate our idea. Looking back,  we would have been less confident of our product had it not been for our partnership distributions. We eventually ended up as the number #1 app on their app store which is a huge validation for a startup. Eventually people started to blog about us, which resulted in a higher Google search ranking. This brings me to the next topic. Why is SEO really important?

3) SEO:

Even though we had been getting customers through partnerships, we did not want to depend on them to grow our company. Partnerships are a great way to start, but it’s not sustainable to depend on someone else. So after sifting through thousands of blog articles on the web, we realized the true power of SEO. Its the most underrated and the most easiest way to drive traffic. SEO definitely helped us by
1) Acquiring more customers
2) Lowered the cost of acquisition of a customer from $40 per customer to $0 per customer.
You can read more about how we increased out SEO by 2600% here.

4) Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging helps you generate high quality leads to your business or website. It also helps you with high quality inbound links that results in a higher SEO. Bufferapp has written a insightful article on how they acquired 100,000 users using guest blogging here. This is the strategy we recently adopted at Tint. To start, reach out to blogs with high traffic and ask them if you can contribute to their blog with great content you wrote. Start small, build legitmacy, and expand from there.

5) Press: 

Reach out to top blogs to write about your product. Be persistent, and always pitch from a perspective that will help their readers learn something useful. Don’t use a PR firm to do the job for you. We relied heavily on press for our first product. Once we ran out of resources, we slowly started to see traffic dying down. So, for our second product we used press as a medium to quickly build legitimacy when selling to big brands. Our assumption worked. We landed some of our biggest clients through the press. The lesson we learnt here is to use press to gain credibility and quickly validate your product,  instead of relying on it for your user growth. Recently we got a premium customer through a google search with the keywords  ”social feed aggregation website“. The image below shows you some sample results.

You can see that the Techcrunch articles gave us the credibility and a higher SEO ranking for those keywords. So use press for the right reasons.

A few press articles about us :
1) Techcrunch
2) Twit TV
3) Makeuseof

6) Content Marketing:

Content marketing has a rich history that extends far before the Internet. Started in the early 20th century, the Michelin Guides are one outstanding example of how far the content marketing concept can be taken, and demonstrates that great content marketing is neither spammy nor salesy. Michelin, a small French tire company, needed to get more people in cars and on the roads, so they started producing restaurant review guides. Their guides cultivated such a strong culinary following, that people started to flock to restaurants based on the guide’s rankings. Eventually, the guides helped build the reputation of Michelin’s global brand for what it is today. If one lesson can be learned from Michelin, it’s this: Solve a problem for your customers or target audience.

Write posts that serve your audience. Read more about here.

7) Customer Feedback:

We adopt a customer centric approach to guide our product development. We build features that our customers ask for and are willing to pay for. Being a startup we have an unfair advantage of releasing features quickly and iterating our product on the feedback given by our customers. We use tools like Qualaroo and UserVoice to gather customer feedback. In the past few months customer feedback has helped us in:
1)  Choosing the right pricing for the product
2)  Feature development
3)  Identifying our target customers

Customer feedback gathered from Qualaroo.

Here in the above image, you can clearly see users complaining about our pricing plan. We went ahead and changed the pricing which helped us get more customers. If not for the feedback we would have lost a lot of potential customers.

8) Olark: 

Olark is a simple widget that can be placed in your site to start a conversation with the visitors. We observed that people love the live chat support more than email/phone call support. Live chat also keeps your customers on the site which is an added bonus. Overall, Olark helped us in converting visitors into customers.

9) A/B testing: 

We heavily rely on A/B testing to guide our product development. Instead of tinkering over what might work, we run a test and let the customers decide what is right for us. There are many tools like Optimizely, Mix Panel and Google Analytics that can help you A/B test various features. We use Google Analytics for A/B testing. Some of the metrics we A/B test are :
a) Landing page conversions: To measure how many visitors convert to users when exposed to different landing pages.

b) Pricing plan conversion: To find out how many free users turn into customers with different pricing plans.

To give an example, recently we wanted the customers to try out the trial version of the product. Instead of building it, we employed the following approach:
a) Release a trial plan button on our pricing page to see how many people click on the button
b) A form to collect email ids of the users interested in the trial version.

Just after two days we had 40-50 people requesting the trail version. We went ahead and built the trail version. As a result we saw an increase in a 10%number of customers.

—

These 9 strategies helped us to get 700 paying customers and 10,000 free users over the course of 3 months.

What do you think? Let us know if you have any other strategies that helped you get more customers in the comments section below!

-Nik, Dev

The post 9 Effective Strategies To Get More Customers appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

Our Story

A couple of months ago, I was reading Suhail Doshi’s post on Bullshit Metrics, another name for vanity metrics. In the post, he describes the idiocy of focusing on metrics that don’t matter like new users or pageviews. His argument made sense to me: Pageviews don’t correlate with the bottom line, and businesses/startups would be all the smarter to find the metrics that really matter to them, (a.k.a. their Key Performance Indicators).

Unfortunately, Team Tint was tracking all of the wrong numbers. For example, our second monitors displayed our google analytics realtime pageviews ticker and on Fridays we would congratulate each other on reaching new records for daily pageviews. The only problem was that the majority of the pageviews were being served for free customers, and that higher pageviews meant higher server costs. Fail.

After realizing our mistake, I decided to change our team’s attitude regarding the “pageviews=success” mentality. The trouble was that the easiest metrics to see on Google Analytics were the vanity metrics. I had to find a way to make our real metrics even easier to access. Thus, we went to create a KPI dashboard.

Which metrics to track?

But first, I had to ask myself, what were our most important metrics, or in business jargon, “Key Performance Indicators“? There is a lot of great reading regarding the topic, and the post that influenced me the most was Cristoph Janz post on KPI’s for early stage startups and David Skok’s advice for SAAS businesses. He also provides a google drive spreadsheet that makes it easy to start plugging in monthly numbers and seeing graphs. After plugging in some of our numbers, I realized that tracking every single metric on the sheet might be overkill for the first version of our KPI dashboard, so I distilled out our key metrics to the following:

• Total Monthly Recurring Revenue
• Lost Monthly Recurring Revenue
• New Monthly Recurring Revenue

I also added some metrics to track the size/growth of our customers:

• Users in each plan
• New customers today
• New Tints created today

In addition, I wanted to display some other information that I thought would be useful for us including:

• New user emails
• New Tint usernames

That way, if we see a potentially large client signing up, we could immediately follow up and find out their needs.

How we built our dashboard

Now, I had to find a way to build the thing.

In investigating solutions and resources to building a KPI dashboard, I came across a number of SAAS solutions for business dashboards:

• Geckoboard
• Ducksboard
• Lefttronic
• Cyfe

However, I didn’t want to pay monthly, my requirements were small, and I wanted more control over.

Luckily for me, I found Dashing, an open source dashboard framework made by the folks at Shopify. Check out their demo to see what a Dashing dashboard looks like. It’s easy to create a custom dashboard with Dashing, since the small framework handles all of UI and job scheduling. All I had to do was write two ruby scripts for pulling in data from Stripe and our own database, and in about a day and a half I had a finished first version of our dashboard. Tada:

Our dashboard allows one-click access to the numbers that matter.

Recent signup emails allows Tim to respond in seconds to potentially high-profile clients.

After building it, the next step was to get the team to bookmark the dashboard and have it replace our habit of checking Google Analytics for pageviews. Surprisingly, this habit-forming took longer than building the actual dashboard out. This involved a week of:

• Bothering teammates until they finally relented to putting the KPI Dashboard in their bookmarks bar
• Interjecting every time someone mentioned pageviews and making sure we all understand that pageviews = cost

Results of our KPI Dashboard

After two weeks of use, it is clear to us that our dashboard was well worth the 1.5 day development cost. It has already allowed us to TRIPLE our revenue this month, capture some larger clients (we always keep an eye out for users signing up with high-profile domains) and also allows us to realistically project how long it will take our business to break even. Instead of relying on vanity metrics that have exactly zero utility, our actionable metrics allow us to back up answers to questions such as:

• How much support do we offer to free/plus users?
• How much should we charge for the pro plan?
• Will we ever be a real business?

I hope this article helps other entrepreneurs and managers discard bullshit metrics and expose their truly important metrics. If you have any other advice, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments below!

-Ryo

The post How to Create A KPI Dashboard appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

With over 100 million monthly active users, 40 million photos shared per day, 8500 likes pressed per second and 1000 comments shared per second, there is no doubt that Instagram has a huge community for your business to tap into. But in order for your business to extract the most value from Instagram, you need to first get more followers on Instagram.

After studying people’s behavior and reading up a lot of blog posts about effective techniques to get more followers on Instagram, I wanted to share with you 8 simple and practical tips you can implement today. Here they are:

1. Share relatable, humanized photos.

One of the most important things I notice from popular Instagram accounts is that all their photos are personal, humanized, and relatable. What this means is to they take photos that their audience can emotionally connect with, including behind-the-scene shots, current activities they are doing, inspirational scenery, etc. The photos do NOT have to be perfect; the more important thing is to let the audience feel it was taken by another human being, not a “brand.” Social media is about connecting with your audiences, so if you give them great images they draw some sort of emotion to, they will like it, comment on it, and follow you for more great photos.

In other words, do not use Instagram as a platform for you to boast about things if you are looking to build a community of followers.

A beautiful image that captures people’s attention.

2. Connecting your Facebook account.

One of the simplest things often overlooked is to connect your Facebook account. Why does that matter? Well, since Instagram is part of Facebook, more and more Instagram activity gets streamed onto the Facebook wall with priority. That means everytime you take or like a photo, that story can be shared on your friend’s Facebook feed. That gets your brand account more exposure, and ultimately more followers.

Not to mention, Instagram helps you now auto-follow or find all your Facebook friends in seconds. By connecting your Facebook account, you make it easy for all your friends/network find you easily.

3. Use relevant, popular hashtags.

Every time you take a photo, you should hashtag it with a relevant or popular tag to get more exposure. Believe it or not, people search for hashtags on Instagram on particular topics. That being said, you should consider adding 1-3 hashtags per photo (more than that just looks like spam—and people don’t like that). When you do, you give the photo more opportunities to be found and interacted. The more people find and interact with your photo, the more likely they will check out your Instagram profile and follow you for more great photos.

Here are the top 20 tags on Instagram today:

#love

#instagood

#me

#cute

#tbt (throwback Thursday)

#photooftheday

#follow

#eyes

#beautiful

#happy

#girl

#l4l

#instacollage

#picoftheday

#throwbackthursday

#christmas

#instadaily

#nice

#like

Use relevant hashtags, but don’t over do it.

4. Types of filter matter.

The filters… the feature that made Instagram take off. Filters give beauty and uniqueness to each photo. By making your photo breathless, inspirational, or memorable, people will be more likely to engage with your photo, and want to follow you because they want more beautiful photos.

Did you know that the filter you choose says a lot about who you are? Check out the fun infographic below:

Fun infographic to see what filters say about you!

5. Timing is key.

Even if you snap the most beautiful photo in the world, it won’t matter or get any engagement if you share it in the middle of the night. After watching many people use Instagram for months, I’ve noticed that the two key times that people will check Instagram is either in the morning after they wake up or in the evening going home after work. (Why? My hypothesis is that at both these times, your brain is tired and all you want to do is see what your friends are up to and be inspired via photos—without needing to read or think.) According to the chart below, the best to share is on Wednesdays at 5-6PM.

You may want to consider sharing photos during these two times of the day because it will yield maximum engagement results. Other than that, you may also want to know that a typical photo on Instagram has a life of 3-4 hours before it gets pushed so far down the feed no one sees it anymore.

Wed. 5-6pm is most optimal time to share.

6. Have a call to action.

There are some very clever, yet subtle accounts that always have a clear call to action on all their photos. What I mean is that they post a photo and the commentary is something like “Double tap if you smiled…” or “comment with your favorite caption.”  When you lay out clear instructions for fans to follow, they are 2x more likely to engage with the photo/post.

Again, more engagement = more exposure = more potential to get followers.

Unique way to encourage engagement.

7. Engage by following others and liking their photos.

If you expect people to engage with your posts, they expect the same as well. That means engage, engage, and engage with other’s photos. The more active you are, the more exposed your username/account is to the owner and the owner’s followers. I’ve found myself go to people’s Instagram account and follow them because they liked a photo of mine.

The main rationale behind that is if someone liked my photo, I feel my work is appreciated and want to show my gratitude back by following them.

Like & comment on other people’s photos.

8. Combine multiple images.

You know how they say a picture is a thousand words? What happens when you combine multiple images together? It becomes that much more powerful. I would consider using tools like PicStitch to combine multiple photos into a collage and then sharing it on Instagram. The beauty of this is you are automatically telling a “story” with multiple images at once. It’s no longer one image at one point of time, rather multiple images at multiple points of time. It encourages more interaction, commentary, and ultimately following.

Great collage/storyline.

Bonus: Use Tint to display Instagram photos on your website.

If you want to extend the reach and lifetime of your Instagram photos by displaying them on your website, you can check us out at http://tintup.com to do just that. You can think of Tint as the way for you to automatically share your Instagram photos onto your website so more visitors can see it and follow you. Want to see what it looks like? Just see the sidebar on this blog post above!

What effective ways do you use to gain more followers on Instagram? Are there methods you use that aren’t listed above? Or are there ones listed above that work particularly successful for you? Let us know in the comments below!

-Tim, CEO

The post The Ultimate Guide on How to Get More Followers on Instagram appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

WHY USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EVENTS?

So why have corporate conferences, private weddings, school commencements, birthday parties, and large/small celebrations started using social media during their events now? Because if done correctly, it provides attendees an engaging and memorable experience, gives your brand and event free, extra exposure, and as a result, come away with happier attendees/customers. At Tint, we’ve been working with many brands to integrate social media and create a dynamic social hub/wall during their events. After learning a lot, we wanted to share with you why they do so, and what happens as a result.

HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EVENTS?

Let’s say you want to amp up your event experience for your attendees with social media. Here are a couple ways to do so!

1) Create a unique hashtag for your event and tell all attendees to tweet their thoughts with that hashtag. Then you could use Tint to pull all that together and display it on a large screen with a projector. What you’ll have is an interactive wall of dynamic tweets that will encourage people to share your hashtag  for the chance to show up on that display!

2) Create a unique hashtag for your wedding/concert/party and tell all attendees to take photos on Instagram with that hashtag. You could then use Tint to organize all of the photos your attendees take and display it on multiple TV screens set around the event. You’ll start seeing people get excited because they’ll have the chance to show up on a TV display. Happy attendees= happy hosts=successful event.

3) Combine 1&2 along with the host’s/official event’s Facebook & Twitter feed so attendees will always be in the know for new announcements/happenings.  Instead of making large announcements and hoping everyone heard it, you can update your own social feed and know that it will display on all the display screens around the event!

EXAMPLES OF BRANDS WHO USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EVENTS

We’ve been very fortunate to have worked with brands to launch interactive social hubs at their events. I wanted to share with you 3 of them so you can see how you could use a social hub/wallfor YOUR next event:

Social Media Hubs on Computer Screens Around a Conference

Hosting a conference? This brand used Tint to showcase their official Twitter/Facebook feed and their event hashtag to make sure all attendees would know what’s going on during the event by heading over to their support/help computers.

Social Media Hub on a Large Projected Display

Who said churches can’t be innovative with social media? This church used Tint to display their event hashtag in a grid theme to let others see what others were talking about/sharing for their week-long event.

Social Media Hub on a TV at a Trade Show Booth

This company headed to an annual conference to talk with potential clients. And instead of handing out free swag the traditional way, they told everyone to take a photo with their custom hashtag. People loved it because they not only got free swag, but also showed up on the TV display!

THE RESULT

Instead of me telling you the results, I’ll paste in direct feedback from the hosts/event planners themselves:

“…it provided a great way to showcase our social media stream on real-time during our main event of the year.”

“We got questions and comments from our clients regarding which tool/vendor we were using for the “Social Hub” or “Social Dashboard”. It definitely provided a visual impact on web visitors and audience during the event.”

“Yes [we would use use it again for] our corporate event to keep showing our social stream.”

“It exceeded our expectations and we received only compliments.”

 —

Have you been to an event with a social hub/dashboard? If so, did it get you to engage more sharing more? Are you an event host that has incorporated a social wall before? How did it go and did it get your attendees to socially participate more? Let us know in the comments below!

-Tim, CEO

The post How to Effectively use Social Media for Events appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

Improve SEO 

This is a graph of the organic search traffic for my startup, Tint. Copied straight from google webmaster tools.

In January, our splash page was getting 602 monthly visits from search. In March, it had grown to 15746 visits. An SEO improvement of 2600%! What happened in between?

If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering “what ingenious way to increase traffic did he use?” That’s exactly the kind of mindset I had when I tried to increase the traffic for our previous product, Hypemarks. Want to see the results from trying to find an ingenious way?

Sad.

We tried virality loops, open graph actions, publicity stunts, and press pushes. All of these techniques provided spikes, but the next day traffic would always fall to the same low levels. The graphs speak louder than words:

The truth is that the most “ingenious” way to get traffic is actually to stick to the boring basics.

How did I go from the second graph to the first graph? By creating a multi-faceted long-term SEO strategy and taking the time and effort to spend about an hour a day executing it. What was my boring, yet ingenious SEO strategy? Keep reading to find out!

The orange line is the organic search traffic to our splash page. The Blue line is the total. As you can see, organic search has been a major component of our growth.

We started out barely ranking for the name of our company, and ended up with high rankings on important keywords, and healthy inbound traffic from blog posts like this!

4 Steps to Improve SEO

Here are the steps I ran through to improve Tint’s SEO.

Step 0: Do the homework.

• If you have no experience with SEO, I highly recommend taking a couple days to immerse yourself in basic SEO concepts and techniques as a prerequisite to everything else. There are many SEO myths that continue to spread as there is no definitive formula to ranking highly. Arm yourself with knowledge.
• Check out SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO. A highly recommended guide for beginners that breaks down key SEO concepts in an easily digestible format.
• Google provides an SEO Starter Guide that demystifies what Google looks at when ranking pages.

Step 1: Find keywords.

• Pretend you’re a customer for your own service. Which keywords will you search for? This is a question that could be considered even before naming your business, but assuming that your business is already named, start by asking yourself what keywords you would search for, and get in the habit of asking your customers how they found your site.
• Find out what keywords your competitors are using. Some good tools for this are SpyFu, Alexa, and OpenSiteExplorer.
• Write them all down in a big list and then use the Keyword Explorer tool to figure out which ones are high in volume and low in competition. Selecting the keywords that you should target is more of an art than a science and will require enough customer feedback to give you an intuition as to how “ready to buy” customers will be who are searching for certain terms.
• Search for the keywords you are targeting and see how you stack up against the competition. Only choose keywords that you think you can actually rank highly for. You must look for weak competition. Weak pages usually don’t have the keyword in the title, are from a untrustworthy domain, or the content doesn’t exactly relate to your keyword. Strong pages include easily recognizable brands/domains, keyword optimized landing pages, and pages with great content / social validation (articles with lots of tweets/shares).

Step 2: Optimize site for keywords.

• If possible, start by putting keywords in the name of your business or in the url of your site. For example, if I’m selling Dog Food in Dover, your domain could be doverdogfood.com.
• Tailor your title and description of your pages to contain these keywords. Don’t be overzealous, as Google can sense when content is too stuffed with keywords, so sprinkle them into your content so that it is still easy to understand as a customer and doesn’t look spammy.
• For keywords that are very valuable to your business, build landing pages that target those keywords specifically and then build backlinks to them to push those pages as high as possible in the ranking for those keywords. For example, if I wanted to promote Tint for Events, I build a landing page tailored to customers who would be searching “social media for events“.

Step 3: Set up and commit to a long-term SEO strategy.

• Learn about content marketing. Start a blog for your business, but keep in mind that your blog should be catered to your customers! So put some effort into your content! Google tracks how long users spent on your page in order to determine how useful the page was to them, so the better your content is, the higher you rank. Many businesses make the common mistake of using their blog as a place to dump their boring press releases. Your customers don’t care!
• Great examples of company blogs include SproutSocial Insights, SEOMoz’s blog, and the Mint blog. These companies are doing it right!
• Also, check community sites like Quora, StackOverflow, and Reddit for questions or topics that you can contribute to, especially questions regarding problems that your customers often have. (protip: Use the content from your blog posts to answer their questions.)
• Other ways of generating backlinks are getting press, guest blogging, and conducting webinars.
• If you’re a regional business, closely track your regional competitors’ rankings and keyword targeting efforts. For regional keywords, you don’t have to have the best Italian restaurant SEO ranking in the world, just the best one in town.

A long-term strategy for SEO should include a diverse selection of inbound traffic from a number of sources including social media, blogs, and Q&A sites.

By following the steps above you can begin your journey from SEO Zero to SEO Hero, the boring way.

Ranking high is hard work. It requires significant long-term effort that can take months, and unfortunately it’s not as easy to track SEO performance as it is to track the performance of other aspects of your business. However, it really can be the difference between life and death for businesses depending on search customers. If you follow the steps above I guarantee you’ll start seeing incremental improvements in your SEO. Keep putting in consistent effort in getting quality backlinks and providing quality content, and the results will compound!

Let us know if you have any other SEO tips in the comments below, we’d love to hear how other people are finding ways to grow.

-Ryo, Dev

The post Improve SEO: How we increased search traffic by 2600% appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

Being a first time salesman responsible for acquiring customers at Tint, I had done thousands of cold emails and had the same results: emails get ignored and not knowing what to do next. After many failures, I have learned some tips and used some tools that I want to share with you so you can soon close big brands and large clients in a matter of days, not weeks. All it takes is these 3 steps on how to cold email effectively.

Step 1. Finding the email

Read this post I wrote on how to find anyone’s email in less than 2 minutes.

Step 2. Crafting the message

After you find the person’s email you want to speak with, this is where you need to spend some time: crafting an email message that will get the other person to respond. If there are 3 things to remember whenever you are crafting a cold email message, it’s this:

• Keep it SHORT

Keep your message short. People are busier than ever today and get tons of emails today. If they see your email and open it, only to find 5 paragraphs they need to read through, you can expect them to delete your message immediately. No one has time to read an essay today, so do NOT craft an essay.

Keep your message short and spaced so the message is perceived as easy to read. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to get through the email in 30 seconds.  Again, your goal is to get the person intrigued enough to email you back.

• Stay RELEVANT

This is how you stand apart from all the rest of the world’s cold emails. In both your subject line and first few sentences of your cold email, do NOT make your email look like a spam or a template. Worst mistake ever if you do. If someone sees it as a template, the first thing they will think is “this person had no decency to spend some time to craft me a relevant email, so why should I spend time answering them back?”

That being said, put the person’s brand in the subject line, with something along the lines of “Love what ______ is Doing…Possible Chat?” Next, in the address, actually put the person’s first name. Whenever I see Dear Sir, or To Whom It May Concern, I instantly know it’s a template and press delete. Again, if you don’t want to spend time finding my name, I don’t want to spend time chatting with you.

Lastly, in the body of the message, mention about how you found them (referral? blog post?) while mentioning their brand as much as possible. The more relevant you can make it by including their name or brand name, the more the person will know you didn’t just spam them and took time to address them.

• Make it ACTIONABLE

No email is worth answering if there is no call-to-action. At the end of every email, there should be a reason why the other party should reply back to you. Do you want to schedule a meeting/call, or do you want them to check something out? Specify it loud and clear at the end of your message so there is no confusion on next steps.

Now what happens when you do all this perfectly and you don’t hear anything? That’s where good follow-up skills and key tools come into play.

3. Following up

It is very common that you will not hear from the other person after you cold email them for the first time. That’s why you need to follow up with them. Here are some tips and tools I do and use that have increased my conversions on getting people to email me back.

Follow up message:

1. After your first cold email, wait at least 2-3 days to give the other person some time.
2. If they don’t get back to you, follow up with a short, respectable email along the lines of “Hey ____, I just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on my previous email. Would love to chat whenever you have time and am super excited to see what we could potentially do with you.”
3. If that doesn’t work, wait until you have some significant news like how you landed one of their biggest competitors as a client and you want to help them too or how you launched a new feature/product line that they’d love.

Whatever you do, do not email every day asking them to respond to you. You will come off needy, desperate, and not fun to do business with. Usually if they don’t respond, it their way of saying “no” to you. Tough, but the harsh truth.

But you want to know why they didn’t respond? Was it because it got lost in their inbox? Or was it because they read your email and was not interested? If it were the latter, you know you should move on. But if it were the former, you have to keep following up! This is where these tools come in handy.

Follow up tools:

I saved the best for last. These two tools (compatible with GMAIL), recommended to me by a good friend at Groopt (check them out!), have saved me from going insane and close deals DAILY.

1. Yesware

Yesware is your key to knowing if your email was opened and forwarded to another person. It even tells you if someone clicked on a link you attached in the email. A huge perk is that it lets you know which device they opened it on, where they opened it, and when they opened it.

Use case: If someone opened my email and never responded, I know to stop wasting my time. If someone never opened my email, I know to follow up with them. It’s that simple.

2. Boomerang

Boomerang is your best friend when you need to send an email later or remind yourself of an email you need to follow up with.

Use case: I need to send an email out to someone in New York at 8am because I know he will be checking his email at that time with no distractions. However, I’m in California, and don’t want to wake up at 5am to send it to him. I can use Boomerang to schedule that.

Better yet, let’s say I sent a cold email out and want to be reminded to follow up with this person 4 days from now if they didn’t get back to me. Boomerang will do this for me by putting this email on the top of my Gmail at the exact time I need to follow up.

Now if you use these two together, it’s quite powerful. I can now send a cold email out, be reminded 2 days from now to follow up. Once I get that reminder, I can check my Yesware to see if they opened it or not. If they didn’t, I know the email got lost, and I am now sending a perfect follow up email at the perfect time. Both these tools have free trials, so give them a try and let me know your thoughts!

What it all looks like together. Boomerang on top and Yesware in middle.

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Do you have any tips or strategies you use to send cold emails not mentioned above? Feel free to share them below. Also feel free to share your experiences if you tried these 3 steps and 2 tools I recommended!

-Tim

CEO, Tint

The post The Ultimate Guide on How to Cold Email Effectively appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

1) Use a Relevant Profile & Cover Photo

The first step to get more Twitter followers is to make sure you have a clean, high-resolution logo for your profile photo and relevant cover photo. This way no one thinks you are a spammer or fake user when they are deciding if they should follow you. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of thousands of spammers on Twitter today, and you can usually tell because they never bothered uploading a profile photo. Don’t be mistaken for one of them!

 Example of a fake account with no profile or cover photo.

2) Have a Unique Twitter Bio

When people are deciding they want to follow you or not, they will scan your Twitter bio to see if what you will be tweeting will be relevant to them. A good formula to follow is stating out what you do, where you work, and what industry you’re interested in. This will quickly allow potential followers to gauge if you will be sharing relevant information they will want to follow. Optimizing this can get you more Twitter followers because people are always looking for new people to follow.

Great Twitter bio example.

3) Tweet Consistently; Not Excessively

Maybe the most important tip, it is crucial that you tweet consistently to engage your followers and new followers because no one will want to follow someone who last tweeted 10 weeks ago. A good habit to follow is about 3-5 tweets per day spaced out in between a few hours each. This will remind your followers who you are. Don’t be a person who keeps sharing every minute because you will clog up your follower’s newsfeeds—which will get you one ticket to an “Unfollow.”

TIP: If you need to reply to a bunch of people, just make sure you have the @username as the first thing in your replies. Having the @username ensures that all your followers don’t get spammed with all your replied conversations.

4) Tweet with Opinions or Questions

It is key to not just tweet for the sake of tweeting. When you do tweet, attach a witty opinion or a genuine question with it to get your followers engaged. The more they engage, the more viral your tweet goes—which leads to more exposure and more Twitter followers. If you just tweet an article title or a bland statement, it seems like you don’t care and your followers won’t care either.

 Example of having an opinion and question in tweet.

5) Tweet with Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are words with a “#” behind it. They usually represent a topic your tweet is about. If you are tweeting an article about social media, use the hashtag #socialmedia because there are thousands of people searching for content related to #socialmedia on Twitter daily. By hashtagging your tweets, you’re exposing your brand in front of millions who are actively searching about that topic. If they find their answer with your tweet, they will most likely follow you because they respect and want to receive more relevant content in the near future. Use it wisely and get more Twitter followers; abuse it and people will see it as spam and unfollow you.

Everyone searching #sharktank will now see my tweet as well and possibly follow me.

6) Spread your Twitter URL

Attach your Twitter URL on your Facebook profile/page, business cards, email signatures, and your websites. Since you will be actively sending out emails or business cards, people will naturally want to see what you tweet about and most likely give you a follow since they just met you.

One of the easiest ways to get more Twitter followers.

7) Retweet Others

A retweet is when someone finds your tweet interesting and wants to share it with all their followers (with your Twitter username attached). There’s no other ecstatic feeling when someone loves your posts that they are willing to share it with all their followers. The same goes for others. If you retweet other people’s tweets, they will most likely follow you as a sign of appreciation and return a retweet at a later date. Retweets are the easiest way to get in front of tons of new followers/customers.

Retweeting others show you care about what they say and want to give their brand extra exposure to your followers.

8) Follow Relevant People

One of the quickest ways to start getting more Twitter followers is to first follow others so others know you exist. But don’t follow random people; follow people you’d like to actually follow you. The reason is that they will most likely find you or your brand relevant to them and want to follow you after. One word of caution is to not follow hundreds of people before you start getting followers yourself. If you follow more people than people follow you, people start to question your legitimacy. A good rule of thumb is to have a 1:1 ration of following to followers. For example, to start finding relevant people, just search on Twitter “social media” if you want to find social media gurus/consultants/enthusiasts.

 Searching “Social Media” shows you all the relevant people in the social media space.

9) Engage, not Promote

Last, but certainly not least, whenever you tweet, remember one rule: Tweet something you’d be excited about if you saw it. Offer your audience engaging content that they can be excited about. Many brands make the mistake of using Twitter as a promotional megaphone—constantly marketing their brand with the intention of getting more traffic. You would hate that if a brand did that to you, and the same applies to all your existing and potential followers. No one will want to follow a brand that constantly tweets “check out my site, check out my store, check out my brand…”

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Building a large Twitter follower community takes time, but if you follow these steps and invest time into conversing and engaging your audiences, you will get more Twitter followers on a daily basis in no time.

Have any other tips or advice you’ve found effective to get more Twitter followers? Let us know in the comments below!

The post 9 Dead Simple Tips to Get more Twitter Followers appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

Step by step instructions on how to make a Facebook fan page:

Go to Facebook: Create Page and select the kind of organization you are representing with the page.

Facebook Page Profile Photo Best Practices

• Choose a profile picture for your brand that can be recognized even in very small dimensions. Your profile picture will show up most often as a thumbnail on Facebook, so make sure you keep this in mind when deciding on a picture to use.
• Use an icon if possible. Icons are more recognizable in small sizes and can be readily used because they are often square.
• Resolution matters! Your image has to be at least 180px wide, but if it is even larger, it’ll make a better impression if anybody clicks on the profile picture.

Facebook Page Description Best Practices

• Make sure to include important keywords in your description. If you’re wondering what keywords to use, check out Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Given a word or phrase, it’ll help suggest which keywords relate to your business and how popular those keywords are searched on a monthly basis.
• Adding your official websites are critical if you want your brand’s Facebook community to interact with or purchase from you. It adds an element of authenticity as well.

Facebook Page URL Best Practices

• Choose a URL/username that you can easily type in if somebody told you about it verbally.
• Your customers will be able to find you through search easier if your brand’s name contains important keywords relevant to your business or organization. Ex: “seomoz”, “pepsicola“, etc.

Facebook Advertising Best Practices

• To learn more about how we optimized our Facebook Page advertising, check out our blog post: How I Got 10,000 Likes For My Facebook Page in 4 Weeks

How To Delete Your Facebook Page

If you want to remove your Facebook Page, follow the step by step instructions below:

Go to your Facebook Page and click “Edit Page” -> “Manage Permissions”

Click on “Permanently delete (your page)”

Let us know how building your Facebook Page went and if you found any other neat tricks below in the comments!

The post How to Make a Facebook Fan Page appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

I believe that every company needs a strong founding team to be successful, however, I feel that “strong” needs to be complemented by “different.”  If the senior team has the same views, or is too close to one another, I feel there will not be enough thoughtfulness on both strategy and execution towards success, especially when you first start a company.

Hiring people that have different skills and strengths than you (as a founder, CEO, or any member of a team) is very difficult, but important, to get multiple viewpoints.  The hard part is not getting people with differing viewpoints; it’s integrating those multiple viewpoints into better decisions.  Often times people with differing perspectives also have different styles and different approaches to things, and that can cause flare-ups and anger.  The way to have those different styles, viewpoints, and approaches lead to 1+1=3 is to build mutual trust and respect for the different and differing members of your team.  THAT is easier said than done, but THAT is when true greatness is achieved.

Mutual trust and respect cannot be dictated, but must instead be earned.  There are many ways to earn trust, but almost all of them take time, and take vulnerability.  It might even require coaching, to get people to a place where they can truly see and hear another’s point of view, and then see how that point of view can be mind-opening and expanding, rather than mind-closing and threatening.

In the past several decades I have started more than 100 companies, and more than 40 have had successful IPO’s and acquisitions, and 25 are thriving, but that means 35 have failed.  When I look back on the biggest distinguishing factor between success and failure, it was almost always a harmonious executive team, with broadly differing viewpoints and perspectives, but with a leader that was always able to get the best out of everyone – and not always please everyone – but always include everyone’s thinking in the major decisions and direction of the company.  I have seen this type of teamwork matter more than the idea, more than the timing, and even more than the capitalization of the company, and thus I believe it is one of the most, if not the most critical factors in success.

The post Why You Need a Complementary Team of Different Skills When You Start a Company appeared first on The Tint Blog - .

I have to admit it: I watch Shark Tank religiously. Every Friday, instead of going out, I turn on my television and glue my eyes to the show, sometimes humming along to the Jaws-like music.

Why am I addicted to this show? Because not only is this show a constant reminder that there is so much to still learn in the startup world, but also it was this show that taught me how to pitch to investors and secure funding for my startup, Tint. I thought I’d share with you those 3 lessons so you can draw new perspectives the next time you watch the show and apply it to your own experiences.

1) The Preparation — Focus on those who have smart money.

A classic mistake: An entrepreneur has a once in a lifetime opportunity to pitch to the sharks and they are willing to take any deal that comes their way.

Every time I see this, I shake my head. The reason? I would turn down a 100% guarantee deal from a non-relevant investor any day to try and secure a deal with the investor who has the connections I want and the expertise I need. I’ve seen many entrepreneurs on the show go around the room asking each investor if they be interested.

I learned that by doing this, 1) you seem desperate and 2) you don’t know what you’re looking for. Instead, if you are a web tech/scalable/product-that-solves-a-niche-product-but-can-expand-into-other-verticals, target Mark Cuban and Robert Herjavec. If your company is in the fashion industry or needs manufacturing help, target Daymond John. If you’re going for a licensing play, there’s no one better than Kevin O’Leary. If you have a product that targets the mass consumer, hone in on Lori Greiner. And lastly, if you need unique distribution methods, focus on Barbara Corcoran.

(The notorious Sharks)

The same method applies in the real world. When I needed to raise money for my startup, I first brainstormed which investors I want to target. This meant studying up on each investor I wanted to get in touch with. I then read their interests, found out who they knew for access, scanned through their other portfolio companies, and talked with some founders of companies those investors had invested in.

Even though this took a long time to set up, it allowed me to get a better chance of investments because think about it: very few real-estate investors would have interest in something tech-related. At the same time, how frustrating would it be if all your investor offered was money and no connections or expertise? That’s what I call dumb money, and dumb money can really ruin your company’s potential. Once I figured out the right people to target and secured a meeting with them, then came the pitch.

2) The Pitch — If you’re early, sell yourself. If you have traction, sell the numbers.

Some of my friends who’ve never watched the show sometimes ask me how in the world did an entrepreneur score a deal if they had the ‘WORST’ idea in the universe! But after watching all the episodes, I quickly saw that if those entrepreneurs never sold their product. They sold their vision and passion. Since they were very early in their company, they needed to sell themselves as entrepreneurs. Sell their passion. Emit their drive. Emphasize on their hustle. Mention about their previous successes. Stress their vision. Guide investors through their story. Since they had really no product traction or proof, the investors that invested were purely betting on the entrepreneurs and their won’t-stop-until-it’s-over mentality. (This usually is the case with Mark, Daymond, and Robert.)

(This entrepreneur sold her story and passion spot-on.)

They didn’t fret over their small numbers or convince investors that they were notable. Early entrepreneurs who did do this saw the investors judge their company’s worth based on those insignificant numbers. That closed the opportunity for the entrepreneur to sell their vision because all the investors heard was a big fat “my product has no sales or traction.” (Kevin O’Leary will usually be the first one to mention that).

What you can extract from this is to prove that YOU are the entrepreneur who will take your idea from inception to millions in sales. Even if you have the ‘worst’ idea in the world, the investor is betting that YOU will quickly figure out your product-market fit, even if it means pivoting your product. All that doesn’t matter to them because they trust you and that you will do whatever it takes to return their money, if not more .

Now that’s the complete opposite if the entrepreneur’s company is taking off, has purchase orders, and is growing at an uncontrollable rate. If that’s the case, you can see that the ones who secured a deal focused on the numbers and how they’ve grown. They confidently described what the next steps were to take their company from Point A to Point B. They meticulously discussed how they could scale, bring costs down, and increase their company’s valuation with the help of the investor’s connections and money.

(This company was taking off  in growth and focused on the numbers throughout the presentation.)

As for me, I am your classic first time entrepreneur that had no reputational success, barely knew about the industry I was entering, and had no product traction whatsoever. BUT I took what I learned and pitched my potential investors that I would do whatever it took, learn whatever I needed, and execute on what needed to be done to build traction and succeed. I was the one they could trust to be the entrepreneur they could not miss out on.
In other words, when those investors told us to build a feature because it would help grow our product, our team did it. That showed we were flexible and open-minded. And when our investors asked to prove we could get traction, I got our product in front of Mark Cuban, Tim O’Reily, Steve Case, and other notable influencers. I sold my passion, hustling mentality, and most importantly, my vision. Following that strategy paid off and looking back, I could believe those answers were right in front of me watching Shark Tank.

3) The Negotiation — It’s all about leverage.

Now comes the most intense, nerve-wrecking process for the entrepreneurs—hearing the verdict. I’ve seen this a whole lot where the entrepreneurs now stay quiet, be passive, and not have a game plan at all. And through those mistakes, I’ve seen and realized that it does not have to be nerve-wrecking or intense at all. What I’m saying is that if they strategized correctly, they could have gotten the sharks fighting each other for a piece of their company. How?

 (This unforgettable duo played the leverage game perfectly.)

I always say that getting an investor agreeing to invest in you is equivalent to you trying to get that girl to say yes to your high school prom. To catch her attention, you need to be talked about or hear other girls dreaming of getting asked by you. But if you’re the math geek that no one knows about (which most of us are in the startup world), you can still strategize and get her to say yes. This means building leverage. Do something that captures buzz around the school, get other girls talking about you, and show that you’re “hot” and wanted.

The same can be applied to pitching investors. Go get some purchase orders from large customers, build some buzz around your brand from influencers or big press, or show that other investors are interested. Here’s an example. Let’s say an entrepreneur REALLY wanted Daymond John to invest in their fashion startup, but by the look of his face, he doesn’t seem too impressed yet. Instead of waiting for the inevitable “no,” they should do their best to get 1 or more of the other 4 investors intrigued with their business.

 (Mr. Daymond John)

If one bites, this signals to Daymond that he is probably missing something the other investor sees. All of a sudden, you can use that offer to leverage and get Daymond by saying something like “Daymond, I really like Robert’s deal, but I am looking for a partner like yourself who is very well-connected and knowledgeable in the fashion space. Would you be willing to either come in or offer something that we could work out?” You have leverage and you are going after smart money.

After I saw this on Shark Tank, I tried it myself, and to my surprise at that time, it worked. Basically you want to play this strategy to either raise your valuation to get better terms or want to close a deal quicker than the usual long process. The key here is also to be as humble, considerate, and transparent as possible. As soon as you come off arrogant, needy, or stuck up, you will lose all interest immediately as investors do not want to work with those types of people.

The basic premise is to get other people interested in “going with you to prom” and get the “one you want” jealous or see the urgency in “saying yes” to you. It’s all about the leverage.

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Do you watch Shark Tank? Have you learned things that you have gone off to use? Do you agree or disagree with what I said? Let me know in the comments section below!

The post How Watching Shark Tank Helped Me Get My Startup Funded appeared first on The Tint Blog - .