Stand For Tomorrow: Inspiring Change Across Canada

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

TOMS has always taken this famous saying to heart and was founded in 2006 on the very belief that we can build a better tomorrow, together. Now over a decade later, TOMS is expanding their One for One model by supporting and amplifying the work of emerging changemakers who are making a positive impact in their communities. Their Stand for Tomorrow campaign launching at the Buy Good. Feel Good. Expo in Toronto, Canada this coming April will celebrate, share, and spotlight the great work of three local change makers who don’t just speak up or speak out but stand up for change.

Who are these visionaries and unsung heroes mobilizing change?

Mac Madrigal from the Kickback & Co.

The Kickback is a unique initiative using sneaker culture as a spark for connection and a start to a conversation. Through sports, art, music, and culture, Madrigal has designed the Kickback in a way that activates inner-city youth to reach their full potential. With programs all across Toronto and even abroad in Panama, the Kickback has introduced creative arts, increased access to play, encouraging educational attainment, and cultivated collaboration in marginalized communities  – all while using sneakers as a jumping point.

Chef Jagger Gordon of Feed It Forward

As a chef and caterer, Chef Gordon witnessed first-hand the copious amount of food going to waste at the end of every day. In 2014, he founded Feed It Forward (FIF) and made it his mission to eliminate food waste while making a difference in the lives of Canadians who do not have access to nutritious food and regular balanced meals.

FIF encourages local suppliers to donate unused and unsold food otherwise destined for the landfill. That food is then prepared by Chef Gordon and through a pay-it-forward model, every meal purchased provides a meal for someone else in need. As Chef Gordon says, “Feed it Forward, eliminate waste, and help share our Canadian abundance.”

Jana Girdauskas of The Period Purse

After encountering a person experiencing homelessness while driving, but without anything to give, Jana began questioning what this individual would do during menstruation. Curious, concerned and committed, Jana was compelled to fill one purse with feminine hygiene products to give should she meet someone in need in the future.

That one encounter blossomed into the Period Purse, an official volunteer-run non-profit organization that now supports hundreds of menstruators living in Toronto shelters and other chapters across Ontario and even Saskatchewan.

Get Inspired – Meet the Change Makers!

After an open call for nominations all across Canada, it is these three exceptional change makers who have been selected for TOMS Stand for Tomorrow campaign. The Kickback & Co., Feed It Forward, and The Period Purse will all be at the Buy Good. Feel Good. Expo’s opening reception main stage on April 12th to share their inspirational stories. From youth empowerment to eliminating food waste and addressing food insecurity to menstrual health for the homeless, these changemakers are making a deeply positive impact in Toronto and beyond!

Nominate someone who is making real change today!

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How Kind Karma Launched Their Ethical Fashion Social Business (interview)

Interview with the founder of Kind Karma, Laurinda Lee

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In this interview we talk with the founder of Kind Karma, Laurinda Lee, about how she launched Kind Karma, lessons learned, and processes that helped her grow her social business.

The first few years running your own business are no easy task.

Laurinda started crafting jewellery when she herself was a youth but it wasn’t until last year that she decided to implement those skills towards building a business.

Surrounded by entrepreneurs, starting a business had always been a lifelong goal but for her, giving back and ensuring positive community impact were the ultimate motivating factors and so, she adopted the social enterprise model to craft her own form of change.

Today, Kind Karma Company partners with local organizations with similar goals to employ local at-risk and transitioning homeless youth to handcraft quality jewellery.

Proceeds from all sales are returned to employees to support their individual goals and aspirations with the hope that as these youth transform into successful adults, they too, will have the ability and motivation to continue to pay kindness forward.

How Gerard Adams Sold Elite Daily for $50m and Became The Millennial Mentor

Interview with Vincent Dignan: Pro Growth-Hacking Tips for Your Startup

Interview with Alex Jeffreys: Expert Marketing Strategies and Tips for Startups

 

How to Start Creating a Brand That Matters with Mona Amodeo

This article was written by Tobias Roberts and was originally published in Change Creator Magazine.

People in business know the importance of branding. Besides setting you apart from competitors, a brand can also promote company recognition and represents the unique promise you bring to your customers. From traditional logos and symbols, to video-based outreach on social media, and even to the unique customer service you provide, branding certainly transcends most aspects of how businesses function.

Mona Amodeo, founder and president of the IDG group, believes that building a brand that matters should go beyond simply improving the profit margins of your company. Instead of employing and promoting your brand for short-term business visions and purposes, Mona believes that successful brand development can positively impact your customers, employees, the community where your business works, and the wider world.

Who is Mona Amodeo?

Mona has a Ph.D. in Organization Development and Change, and works with several companies and organizations promoting Branding from the Core®, a multi-disciplinary approach to strategic brand development. She also is involved in helping businesses to become more engaged with their local communities and develop sustainable business operations while making corporate social responsibility an elemental aspect of business identity.

After working as part of a team at the University of West Florida making documentary films to tell the stories of people around the world, Mona gradually transitioned into finding ways to help businesses tell their stories as well. “I became interested in the power of organizations to be a force in the world in a positive way,” says Mona. She wanted to help organizations matter more to the people who work for them, the communities they are in, and the wider world, and believed that brands had the unique ability to do just that.

The Changing Face of Branding

“Everybody has a different idea of what a brand is,” Mona clarifies. “For me, a brand is simply the associations people make when they hear the name (of a business), and the meaning that people associate with that.” In a sense, then, branding is the intentional process of creating meaning.

A couple decades ago, manufacturing processes all made similar products. The early pioneers in the industry of branding relied on psychology and the need to create an identity to convince customers that their products were different. The history of branding, then, is closely associated with discovering how to tap into that human need to belong and to identify with something.

Over the years, the underlying principles behind the beginnings of the process of branding remain very similar. However, how we use those principles and what people are looking to identify with, is shifting as our society changes.

“I believe that we can use this idea of wanting to belong and of wanting to be a part of something to engage people in a different way of living,” Mona states. She goes on to say that business should utilize the desire for people to belong “to connect people to things that matter to them and to things that will leave the world a little bit better.”

Changing Consumer Demand

Branding is usually seen from a marketing standpoint. We want people to recognize the product or service that our company offers in order to develop a loyal customer base. However, Mona believes that people today are less interested in the sometimes trifling product differentiation and much more eager to attach their loyalties to businesses that tap into their wider sense of identity and purpose.

“With products and services,” Mona admits, “there is such parity…and very little real difference.” Without undermining the importance of product quality, she believes that people want to follow and be a part of things that they identify with and that reflect positively on that identity.

Businesses that promote the ideas of purpose and responsibility (both environmentally and socially) not as an add-on corporate social responsibility gesture, but as foundational to who they are and how they operate, will be able to capture the growing consumer demand for businesses that offer products and services that reinforce who they area.

If 86 percent of Americans will support a brand that advocates for a cause they believe in, companies that don’t actively attempt to tap into their customer´s needs for identity and purpose, might be losing out on business.

The Process

Mona says that the first step in building a brand that matters to potential customers is through helping leadership teams at different businesses identify their values and discover what their story is. “Every organization has to answer these questions,” Mona believes. “Who are you and why should I care?” The answers to these questions help consumers discover who you are, what you believe in as a company, and what you can offer that sets your business apart.

From a branding perspective, the most important element is not just how we tell our stories, but what those stories actually are. The difference that we want to make in our communities and in the world is what people want to be a part of in today´s society.

By aligning your business plan with a branding strategy that taps into the need for identification and purpose, businesses can build a loyal customer following.

“Creating a tribe of people who want to be a part of your business because it represents something they believe in is essential,” Mona states. “Branding is the vehicle for building meaning and for connecting people (as your most valuable resource) to create your most valuable asset (your business´s reputation).”

Shifting Business Culture

The process of creating a brand that matters, both to employees, customers, and the wider world, begins with businesses and organizations that are willing to change their company culture. “I like to think of culture as the operating system of a company,” Mona says. “It is what holds everything together. If that operating system is not correct, then there is nothing that will hold the system together.”

Actively changing a business culture begins with what Mona calls an identity narrative, which is what the organization says to itself.

“It is important for leaders to understand that this identity narrative cannot be forced down on people, but is rather created through dialogue.”

Having people in your company critically reflecting on their values, how those values affect their behavior, and what sets them apart from their competitors has to live in the hearts of the people who are a part of the organization. This is what we call Digital Conversations™️ here at Change Creator. 

“A brand story is a co-creation,” Mona recognizes. “It is what you say to the world and what the world says about you. You have to be clear about where you want to go…and then translate that story and create a performance culture that reflects that narrative.”

Convincing Versus Connecting

Whereas traditional branding focused on convincing consumers that your product or service was superior to those of your competitors, this new type of branding that Mona talks about is more focused on connecting on a deep level with a customer base that shares vision, purpose, and identity that your brand communicates.

The best way to connect with customers is through the authenticity of the story that you tell to the marketplace. “You create authenticity by engaging people inside your organization with this narrative,” Mona says, “and connecting them to this sense of purpose and why we´re all here.” She goes on to say that collective purpose creates a level of performance that cannot be forged, and this in turn creates genuine motivation for people in your company to be a part of what the brand is attempting to communicate.

“When you tap into the inner sense of people´s desire to do something that matters…to have an impact beyond the moment, that’s a whole different level,” Mona believes. “When you tap into that, when you present people with challenges, innovation arises.”

A Few Important Business Lessons from this New Concept of Branding

Branding has a tremendous power to create connections because it is focused on connecting with people´s innermost sense of self. Through engaging in the process of changing the culture and forging a brand that matters, a business can not only prosper but also make powerful differences in the world. Below are a few key business insights that arise from the challenge of taking your concept of branding beyond a hip company name or a colorful logo.

Consumer demand is changing due to the interconnectedness of our digital world. Now more than ever people are demanding that businesses act ethically, and people are much more willing to show loyalty to a company that shares a purpose and an identity that they can connect with.

Branding is a vehicle to create a reputation. Instead of simply adding corporate social responsibility as an add-on, making it a foundational aspect of your business culture will allow your authenticity to shine through so that customers can connect with who you are and what your business stands for.

Creating a brand that matters and that is authentic begins with fundamentally changing company culture. This cannot be a top-down process, but rather has to be forged from internal dialogues that engage people who belong to the organization.

Creating a brand that matters is more about connecting with people who interact with your business than convincing them to purchase what you have to offer. From an employee standpoint, connections on a deep level allow innovation to arise. From a customer perspective, connections allow them to allow your company to forge a part of their identity.

Listen to our full interview with Mona here…

How to Build a Brand That Matters Today: Mona Amodeo, Ph.D.

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How Gerard Adams Sold Elite Daily for $50m and Became The Millennial Mentor

Interview with Gerard Adams

Subscribe to this show on  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

Gerard Adams is on fire.

He is full of inspiration, energy and strategic insights. This discussion was a blast and I know you’ll get tons of key takeaways from it.

In this interview, we talk about how he actually built the media company, Elite Daily, and then sold it for a cool $50m. There a lot to this story. Adams has gone through his own transformation after losing his first fortune. Only through hard work, mentorship and persistence did he get it all back.

Today he’s known as the Millennial Mentor helping others build their dreams.

A defining moment for Adams was when he spent time with Tony Robbins, a renowned speaker, entrepreneur, and mentor (issue 8 of Change Creator Magazine) who has had a world-wide impact. Tony says, “Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure.”

That statement has become a driving force for Adams. A materially rich life without purpose and fulfilment is an empty dream.

Want Adams to help you build your dream? Shoot him a DM on his Instagram and mention Change Creator.

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3 Ways to Implement Honest Marketing into Your Business Today

Have you ever stayed up really late and watched infomercials? You know the ones, the ‘hard sell’ products with three easy payments of 99.99? Yes. Well, we all have. In today’s world, we might not have as many infomercials running, but that doesn’t mean that we are not continually inundated with flashy promises, quick fixes, products that we’ll never need — digital noise. For many social impact leaders, marketing and advertising can seem shady or sleazy, but it doesn’t have to be. Anyone can implement honest marketing into their business!

We all know that we have to tell others about our business, but many of us don’t want to resort to the in-your-face marketing tactics and salezy lines that many seem to be doing. Our impact is our business. We’ve started this business for more than just profit; it’s our passion, our mission, why we get up in morning kind of business.

Yet, when we hold back from telling others about our business, or ‘marketing’ what we do, we hold back from our full potential as an impact entrepreneur. If you want to grow your impact, you’re going to have to grow your business and friends… that means people are going to have to find out about you. And that means you are going to have to advertise.

What does marketing mean for us?

So, now what? For impact entrepreneurs, there can be only one way to push through the digital noise out there and sell our products (and our mission) and that is what we like to call ‘honest marketing’.

What is honest marketing?

Honest marketing is authentic marketing. It’s a way of sharing what you do with those who will value it the most. We all have unique values, desires, and needs — it’s why we started these mission businesses in the first place.

Connecting to those people who most align with our values and who need our products is what honest marketing is all about. We can all strive to be honest, ethical, and honest in our marketing and advertising by showcasing the real value behind our products, our mission. When we build honest, transparent, authentic connections with our audience, we don’t have to ‘hustle hard’ or beg for people to love our product! Doesn’t that sound great?

Here are 3 ways we can implement honest marketing into our business:

1. Tell YOUR unique impact story right from the start.

Don’t be afraid to talk about YOU, yes you, the founder of your impact company. Sharing your story will help you find those people that are going to support your mission and buy your product. Take it from Kelly Belknap, co-founder of Adventurist Backpack Co. who didn’t spend a dime on marketing but found their audience (and got some amazing PR) in the early days of their company:

“We started Adventurist 16 months ago, and have been fortunate enough to grow quickly and have our story/brand featured on the Travel Channel, Forbes, Woman’s Day, Mashable, ABC, Radio Disney, CBS, Fox News, and more, enabling us to provide over 50,000 meals to families in need in our first year. We sell minimalist backpacks that give back. For every backpack sold, we provide 25 meals to families in need across the U.S. We provide the meals through our partnership with national non-profit Feeding America as part of its Enterprise Society.

All of our marketing has been free – whether through social media posts/content, free articles in the press, setting up at events, or through word of mouth from any combination of the first three.

We think that telling the story of how you got inspired to give back through business, as well as why your brand does the things it does, is the most important aspect of a social impact business.

Our advice would be to figure out how to tell your story in the best way possible, so that other people can understand the why and how behind it, and have a reason to share it with others. Since customers expect authentic brands and products, this, of course, means that your story and values have to be authentic as well. But if you have an authentic and interesting story, it’s just about having it heard by the people who care and want to listen.

So our practical marketing example and tip would be to refine your story to the best it can be, authentically, and then spread it via press, social media, e-mail, events, and more. Whether you share it via letters on a page, photos, or word of mouth, this is the ultimate marketing method for social impact business hoping to change the world for the better, with a positive story to share.” You can see their story and impact company here.

2. Build authenticity with ‘real life’ customer reflections of your company.

A great way to build authenticity is to let your customers reflect your company, starting with publishing their photos of your product on social media.

Here’s a simple, yet effective way you can honestly brag about your company (and build a loyal audience too!):

“While most of our product photos come straight from the manufacturer who took great care in making sure their photos exhibit their product in the best possible light, we also allow our customers to upload real world pictures of their orders directly to the product page they ordered from.

This ensures that our future customers won’t make their decisions solely on the alluring marketing photos that come from the manufacturer but instead have a chance to see the product with a more realistic appearance. While the customer photos may not always be as enticing as the manufacturer’s photos, we feel it’s important our customers see the full picture and have the opportunity to share their own results after the order has been delivered.” Jake McKenzie, Content Manager, Auto Accessories Garage.

3. Avoid the social responsibility trap and do what’s right because it’s right, not because it sounds good in your ads.

“Our role as advertisers and marketers of our products to stand with integrity and offer transparency about the products we sell. For businesses to properly support organizations, it needs to be authentic and it needs to be sustainable. We never want social responsibility to be a trend so we need to adequately support our message with thoughtful storytelling, adequate vetting, and accessible information.” Ryan Roff, Owner, CEO, boldSOCKS.com

How are you implementing honest marketing into your company? We’d love to hear from you!

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How Zoetica is Helping the World Go Waste-Free

Interview with Zoetica Founders, Karen Hoskin and Elizabeth Smith.

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In this interview with Zoetica founders, Karen and Elizabeth, we discuss their mission to free society from convenience trash and plastic. Learn how they came up with their innovative solution and run operations from the ground up. In this discussion, you’ll hear helpful insights about starting a social good business and how to manage e-commerce, especially during the early years.

Karen and Elizabeth know that once you begin observing, you notice the crisis of convenience trash everywhere around you. Stand outside any office buildings in downtown San Francisco, LA and New York and observe first hand how many disposable coffee cups, to-go containers, plastic forks, straws, and plastic bags are used and tossed every day, all day. We had to ask ourselves the hard question: who is going to fix this?

They decided they couldn’t sit around waiting for some politician to pass an ordinance. No, they took action to solve the problem themselves in their own way. In comes Zoetica! Lifestyle change has never been easier.

About Karen

“I began traveling for work in 1991. Every day for years, I was heaped upon with throw away trash: plastic shopping bags, coffee cups, cutlery wrapped in plastic, to go containers, straws, plastic water bottles. I began to feel like the Native American in that old 1970’s commercial with the tear streaming down his face. The trash cans filled with single use waste hurt me. The litter left around the airport lounges and hotel lobbies hurt me. I needed to make a change. Today, I refuse an average of 19 to 20 pieces of single use trash each day on the road and 5-6 when I am home. All it took was making a pledge, reorganizing my life with systems and sticking to the Zoetica zero waste lifestyle – no matter what.

I have been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years. I am currently the owner and founder of a craft distillery called Montanya Distillers. Zoetica is my first social entrepreneurship project and my first time partnering with another female business owner. It is an incredible blast and so empowering. I believe one day Zoetica will come to represent a lifestyle that we all live to keep our planet habitable for our children.”

About Elizabeth

“I am fortunate to have spent time in many beautiful places on this planet. I enjoy exploring wilderness areas and diverse cultures in this world. Travelling has awakened me to so many issues affecting our planet. Watching the destruction of our planet is heartbreaking for me. I am often left with a feeling of helplessness in not being able to change what we are doing to our only life-support system.

In those moments, I remind myself to examine my own life and the choices I make on a daily basis. It all begins with being the change you want to see. Convenience trash such as plastic water bottles, utensils, coffee cups, and straws are literally choking our planet. Every piece of plastic we have used is still here. Plastic just gets broken into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually penetrating our oceans, our soil, our food chain, and our drinking water. The production and disposal of these products are affecting our planetary health worldwide. This convenience trash is not going “away”. There is no “away”, and no one is going to clean it up for us. It is up to each of us to create solutions and find new ways to make a change. Convenience trash is not the only issue facing us but it is one problem I can take on as an individual.”

Start going waste-free and check out Zoetica here.

 

4 Reasons Your Marketing Strategy Isn’t Making Impact

Are you feeling stuck, constantly comparing yourself to the competition, wondering why they seem to be doing so much better than you?

Are you lying awake at night wondering where your next customer is coming from or how you’re going to survive the market uncertainty the current political climate is creating?

Has the constant pressure to create more content and get more social media engagement left you feeling burnt out?

These might seem like perfectly natural obstacles to overcome in the daily life of an entrepreneur, and many business owners accept these worries and pressures as one of the sacrifices they have to make to live the entrepreneurial life they dream of.

However, with the right marketing strategy driving your impact brand, these concerns can be lifted. you can feel confident about where your next customer is coming from. When you’re marketing strategically, you’re working proactively instead of reactively, so your business growth is consistent and not tied to the number of hours you put in.

When you take a strategic approach you can weather the market storms, stay adaptable and be confident that you’ll survive. Social media and content creation feel like an effective tool for business growth, not another draining chore or obligation.

Most social entrepreneurs know they need a marketing strategy, but get so busy with the tactics that they lose sight of their goals and quickly get overwhelmed. If this picture of the calm, confident and in control business owner feels a million miles away from where you are right now, it might be time to take another look at your strategy.

As a marketing strategist and business mentor, I’ve coached many entrepreneurs through this overwhelm and there are some common mistakes I’ve observed which often hold people back from a strategy that truly serves them:

#1 You’re overwhelmed and distracted by too many different techniques.

There are so many different techniques to raise brand awareness, grow your audience and convert them into customers – from blogging to social media, email marketing, pay-per-click ads and more.

As impact business owners we’re lucky to have the opportunity to connect with collaborators and customers all around the world (often for free!) thanks to the internet. But the pressure to be “always on” across all the platforms can leave us feeling overwhelmed.

There are algorithm changes to keep up with, content to create and new platforms to master. When you’re feeling overwhelmed and getting distracted by all the different things you could be doing, you end up falling into the trap of “churn and burn” marketing – trying (and often ditching) different techniques instead of doubling down, building on what works for you and growing momentum long term.

No technique will work in isolation. Nobody is going to see a post about your product on Instagram and purchase it then and there, unless they already know, like and trust you.

Without a strategically planned customer journey which builds and nurtures that relationship sitting behind the techniques you’re using, your marketing will be less effective.

It’s knowing the right sequence these techniques should be implemented – and how to tackle them with confidence – that allows you to grow your business in a meaningful way.

That’s what a marketing strategy will achieve for you, but too many entrepreneurs confuse their marketing plan (the list of techniques and content to try next) with a strategy, leaving them confused and overwhelmed.

#2 You’re on too many platforms.

You’re feeling the pressure to be on all the different social platforms at once. They all work differently and you don’t fully understand what you’re doing, so growth is slow and you feel guilty for not spending enough time creating content and engaging online – even though you feel like you live on social media!

You know you’d probably get better results if you focused on one platform and learn how to use it properly and invested your time in creating quality content and building your audience there – but you don’t know which one to choose what’s right for your brand and you’re scared of getting it wrong.

The best place to start is with your ideal customer – what problem do you solve for them? What content can you create to help them? Where are they hanging out online and likely to see that content?

Your marketing strategy should include a detailed customer profile to help you make strategic decisions about what content to create and where to post it.

Plus your strategy will save you time by identifying ways you can repurpose content across platforms (when you choose to expand your online presence) to make your social media marketing easier and more impactful.

#3 You’re stuck in the DIY danger zone.

In the past, marketing meant buying expensive advertising space to raise brand awareness. With the rise of the internet, the cost of growing a brand has fallen and it has never been cheaper to market yourself.

Anyone can start an email list, blog or social media account and business owners can learn how to market their own brand – often for free, with the help of online experts sharing their tips in blogs and podcasts.

But with so much advice out there, it can be hard to know who to follow and where to turn, and the accessibility of these platforms means everyone else is doing it too. When you rely purely on free courses, mini training and sporadic information from a range of online experts, you end up piecing together parts from everyone else’s strategies.

In the short term these techniques might work, but without a targeted strategy of your own underpinning what you’re doing, your marketing won’t be as effective as it could be and you’ll struggle to stand out from the crowd.

Hiring an expert and developing your own strategy will give you access to a tailored plan designed with your business goals in mind and created for your ideal customer – making your marketing more effective and increasing your return on investment.

This will actually save you time and it’ll give you a competitive advantage over everyone else who’s doing marketing DIY!

#4 You’ve been given bad advice.

The internet is full of experts and “gurus” dishing out advice in an unregulated space. Anyone can call themselves a marketer or a strategy expert, but there’s still so much confusion about what a strategy really is that often these “experts” are doing more harm than good.

The latest trend seems to be “do as I did” techniques, where someone who has set up a business for themselves gives you the “exact blueprint” so you can replicate their success.

When choosing a marketing strategist to work with, look for someone who has successfully implemented tailored strategies time and again for different brands, products, and services in different niches. Your strategy needs to be as unique as your business – a cookie-cutter approach isn’t going to work.

If you’re following someone who’s track record of success is entirely based on their own business growth, you’re likely to fall for the same mistakes they did at the start because nobody begins with a watertight strategy in place.

Without a background in strategic marketing, it’s hard to foresee the pitfalls of different techniques and remove the trial and error from your approach.

This is the real value a professional strategist can bring, so choose who to work with care and always ask about their track record with products or services in your niche.

Is it time to revisit your marketing strategy?

If one or more of the roadblocks above resonated with you, it might be time to revisit your marketing strategy. Give yourself some time to do this without the daily distractions that come from working in your business, so you can reflect and think long term.

Start by revisiting the problem you solve for your customers, the impact you make and the big vision you want to achieve – this should act as your North Star, and your marketing strategy should become the roadmap for where you want to go.

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SEO Tips for Low-Budget Startups: Get Started Today!

As people create blogs pages and other websites, their main focus is always to become the leading site in the organic searches. Being in the first three on every search engine gives you an upper hand of being picked by the users. Many users tend to choose from the top just because they believe that no one would ever get to the top without giving a quality answer. These assumptions are correct since organic ranking does not happen until someone shows consistent adherence to the set guidelines.

The best way to climb the ladder of ranking in a relaxed and sure way is through Search Engine Optimization. SEO has analyzed the requirements of search engines such as Google as these engines do not interpret the content as a human being regardless of how intelligent they are. SEO guides one on the different ways to optimize their websites to ensure they correspond to Google’s preferences.

SEO myths from other startups

Without shared knowledge on SEO, a beginner might get lost and assume that SEO is just but a fluff. There are debunking excuses that might mislead you before you even begin. Some of them are;

  • SEO is very expensive. If you don’t have excess money to use on a professional, avoid SEO like the plague.

My take- if you want to take the smallest of the risks to get the best B2B marketing channels, try SEO. You don’t need to spend money on agencies and other consultant firms on how to optimize your website. All you need to do is have some patience and focus as you execute the process.

  • It is competitive. This is a place for no commoners; the big fishes have already occupied the top positions.

My take- the main question is; what is not competitive in business? SEO is very competitive. The good news is, you can start any time since search engines don’t offer priorities on who appeared first. Don’t wait too long for your competition to move to the next level. Start as early as now.

  • You will wait forever to get results. Never invest in SEO because, by the time you get leads, your competitors will be many steps ahead of you.

My take- in every field, there is always a more comfortable escape plan. However, you are already on low budget negotiating on how to spend your last dime on optimization. Do you have to pay channels like PPC to get free leads? In the real sense, these leads do not last as they get forced in your site. Paying channels for startups can be quite expensive as the moment you fail to pay them; the leads disappear to the thin air. If you are patient enough to follow SEO, you will start seeing results after 4 to 6 months.

Steps to SEO Success for a Startup

Before you immense your efforts and focus on SEO, you need to define several things first. These are;

1. Have your desired goals in place.

  • In this, you need to clarify on ways you want your business to operate and how you wish to get your money. Setting goals are essential as one has something to follow even in situations they feel they don’t have to.

2. Have some measurement strategies.

This depends on the foundation you want to lay. An example has Google analytics, mapping out different metrics, automating reports, and having conversion tracks. Always use keyword ranking tracker to check your website’s rating on SERPs.

3. Crawl your website.

  • These are tools that crawl your site to check for any technical errors. Since a starter has a small site, this might take a brief period to execute. During this process, one corrects errors such as duplicate content, improper redirects, 404 pages, broken links, load time, and many more.

4. Check SEO On-Page Optimization.

  • The optimization is all about using the right keywords to make a buyer’s journey quite simple. The remaining checklists are title tags, Meta descriptions, content, URL structure, internal links, and image optimizations.

5. Stay updated on SEO or Google trends.

In case an update happens, you should always have a way to get the news way before it is too late. Nevertheless, you can get updated by different pages such as Search Engine Land, or SEMrush.

You might also want to read our article, Keeping Up with Google that provides some insights on one of the latest major updates to Google and how that can impact you and your organic traffic growth.

Conclusion

SEO is can be overwhelming, especially if one starts with less money. However, never make attempts to pay for cheap services just because you want quick results. The best way is to play low in your league since there is no way in this world you can wake up and play with Goliaths who’ve been in the market way before you. It is all about patience and focus.

Don’t miss this: The Best SEMRush Alternatives — 6 choices!

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How Edovo is Disrupting The Prison System in a Big Way: Brian Hill, Founder (Interview)

Interview with the founder of Edovo, Brian Hill

I was sitting in what could be considered a lounge area at a conference in 2018. There was this guy sitting on a little ottoman next to me. I decided to bullshit with him a bit and see what he was working on. That’s how I met Brian Hill, the founder of Edovo, and learned about the amazing work his team is doing.

Brian is not the kind of guy that is worried about being in the spotlight or news. His focus is to change an old broken system that is doing more harm then good – the prison system.

Every year, 12 million people in the U.S. will see the inside of a jail or prison cell. Although education and communication with loved ones are well-documented ways to keep people out of jail, most prisoners don’t have regular access to programming on the inside.

Edovo builds technology to support positive outcomes for incarcerated individuals and their families. We offer a digital platform to meet the education, communication, and rehabilitation needs of justice-involved people and their loved ones.

We are passionate entrepreneurs, technologists, operators, and educators with a firm belief in a smarter, safer justice system for everyone. We work with empathy, integrity, and collaboration to champion this vision.

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How Social Entrepreneurs Must Communicate for Maximum Impact

How social entrepreneurs must communicate the purpose of their organization to generate greater impact.

Greg Deeds, a prominent university professor and recognized for developing the topic of social entrepreneurship as an academic field, argues in an article for the Harvard Business Review that social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to change the direction of their field. They are visionaries, but also realists, and they are ultimately concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else. This description of a social entrepreneur seems very accurate because what it reflects is that a well-defined purpose moves social entrepreneurs and this motivates them to fight against any obstacle in order to see that purpose accomplished.

Social entrepreneurs create organizations, companies, and projects around their purpose. The problem is that in many occasions, the purpose is not transmitted correctly to employees, partners, customers, and any other actor that could contribute to the achievement of that purpose, so the potential impact that the organization could be generated is limited.

Communicating the purpose correctly to all the stakeholders of the organization generates:

  • Greater commitment on the part of employees, who feel more motivated to achieve the organization’s purpose.
  • Improve the processes of income generation, such as fundraising, sales, and even makes the organization more attractive to potential investors.
  • The attraction of potential allies, such as other organizations, governments, international cooperation agencies, among other actors that can contribute to scale and enhance the impact of the organization.

How can social entrepreneurs then correctly communicate their purpose?

Unlike the traditional business world, the trend of social entrepreneurship is relatively recent, so there is not much literature that provides social entrepreneurs with tools and knowledge that are actionable mainly in the fields of marketing and communication. Faced with this gap in knowledge, I took on the task of collecting concepts and theories from different sources, such as the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University, the blog of Hollister Creative, and the experiences of social entrepreneurs of the VIVA Idea network, in order to establish a logical framework that helps social entrepreneurs to better communicate their purpose.

The result of this investigation is the following scheme:

Purpose / Driver of the organization: In this section, the organization’s reason should be detailed as simply and clearly as possible. The declaration of purpose should not occupy more than 300 characters.

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Audiences and their contribution: Here, we must describe the audiences that the organization wants to address, what the organization expects to obtain from them, and what the audiences are willing to give to support the purpose of the organization, be it time, money, or influence (recommend the organization to others, sign petitions or perform digital actions). This section will clarify the organization to determine if the statement of purpose is convincing enough to motivate the public to take the expected action.

The value offered by the product or service: Being clear about the value proposition of the organization using the theory of the 2-way value proposition will help reinforce the purpose statement, giving a broader view of its contribution and impact to the public of interest and the world.

Social ventures must place the purpose at the center of the organization and use it as a northern star to guide each of their decisions on how employees are hired, how they collaborate with other organizations and, above all, how they communicate to all stakeholders. An organization where the purpose is internalized by all its internal and external stakeholders transcends the figure of its founder, which allows it to continue generating a positive impact and scaling up its work even when the founder has to leave the organization for some reason.

Simon Sinek in his book Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team states that: If we want to feel an undying passion for our work or if we want to contribute to something bigger than ourselves, we all need to know our WHY. So if social entrepreneurs want to have an organization formed by a committed and passionate team, the purpose must be communicated correctly.

Check out our ultimate Storytelling Guide: How to Tell a Brand Story!