Founders of Instagram Started Revolution

How the Founders of Instagram Started a Revolution

  In 2012, Facebook purchased a photo-sharing app called Instagram for the staggering sum of $1 billion. By 2019, Instagram was bringing in 25% of Facebook’s annual revenue, which means that one app was earning nearly $20 billion a year. For context, Google’s popular video-sharing platform YouTube was pulling in just $15.1 billion. How did Instagram get started? And how did it turn into the massive, revolutionary company it is today? Here’s the story behind the photos: Who Founded Instagram? Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram in a San Francisco co-working space on October 6, 2010. Systrom had been working on the project a year earlier under a larger concept called Burbn. When that failed to catch fire, he and his partner peered deeply into the data.   Kevin Systrom Systrom was born on December 30, 1983 to Diane and Douglas Systrom in Hollister, Massachusetts, which is part of …

content holding box

How to Become a Trusted Expert with Content Marketing

Traditional forms of advertising have grown less effective over time. Television, radio, and newspaper ads don’t carry the distribution levels or emotional impact they once did. Plus, consumers have grown savvier, less responsive to hard sells, and more likely to use the internet to do research before making a buying decision. Today’s buyers want to feel a sense of autonomy in their choices. These cultural changes have led to a realignment in marketing. Businesses are moving away from advertising and toward content marketing. Advertising vs. Content Marketing What is advertising? Advertising is a sponsored media production that is intended to convince the public to buy a service or product. Advertisers want to get their message in front of as many viewers as possible to maximize their reach. An advertising campaign usually includes billboards, commercials, banners, and brochures, all intended to tell people about a product or service. The decision point …

Sophia Amoruso Successful GIRLBOSS

Sophia Amoruso : From Odd Jobs to Successful GIRLBOSS

Most entrepreneurs don’t start with a string of high-powered connections and money to burn. At least, the ones in the most inspiring business stories don’t begin that way. Those entrepreneurs begin with the germ of an idea, a hobby that becomes side hustle, or a series of odd jobs that somehow coalesce into a company. They add a little snap to what they’re doing. A little sizzle to their efforts. Then after about ten years of incremental additions to their seedling idea, they get a break-though. And all of a sudden, everyone’s buzzing about their “overnight success.” Sophia Amoruso, the entrepreneurial former CEO of Nasty Gal & founder of GIRLBOSS, knows all about starting small and growing into greatness. Or as she puts it, “Each time you show up to work and work hard and do your best at everything you can do, you’re planting seeds for a life that …

Gain Free Business Exposure Podcast Guest

Gain Free Business Exposure by Becoming a Podcast Guest

Every small business faces the same key problem: no one knows who you are yet. The solution to that problem lies in getting exposure to prospective buyers in order to build awareness and credibility. Contrary to conventional wisdom, advertising will not solve your exposure problem. At the scale you need to get results, advertising will break your budget. Price reductions won’t solve your problem, either. People won’t buy from you at any price if they don’t know you exist. And if you’re already working hard on your publishing and social media platforms (and you should be), what other strategies can you implement? Audio. Gary Vaynerchuk, the oracle of the internet, says, “The future will be audio and voice focused.” Podcasts, the main audio medium, are growing fast, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you need to be on them. Once a niche market for hobbyists, podcasting has grown into a mainstream …

Call Recording Monitor Business Calls

Why You Should Use Call Recording to Monitor Business Calls

  “Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” Ever heard that line from a pleasant-if-robotic voice when you were calling a company? You may ignore the message after several repetitions, but there’s a very good reason that companies are recording your calls. And it may be about more than the quality assurance they claim it is. Savvy business owners and entrepreneurs know that recording phone calls is imperative for creating increasingly greater customer experiences.   What’s the Big Deal About Call Recording, Anyway?   Many people think call recording is illegal, and others wonder why companies announce that they are recording calls. While you might feel betrayed if you learned that a partner or close friend was recording your calls without your knowledge, why does it matter if a faceless company does so? And what does call recording really help a business learn about its customers? Is Call …

Alex Rodriguez Talkroute

Alex Rodriguez : Baseball Shortstop Turned Entrepreneur

Experience is a great teacher, but she charges a high tuition rate. Just ask Alex Rodriguez. The baseball star turned entrepreneur told his audience at the 2019 Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala in Phoenix that his 2013 suspension from the sport had cost him more than $45 million, but he said, “It was worth every penny.” While most entrepreneurs haven’t lost — or made — anywhere close to $45 million, small business owners everywhere can identify with going through tough experiences that taught costly, painful lessons but that set them on the right track. Alex Rodriguez just did everything in a bigger way than most people do. Rodriguez, known as A-Rod, created an impressive athletic record as a 14-time All Star and a World Series champion, but in addition, he’s a true entrepreneur with his hands in many businesses along with taking on a role as a media personality. Through …

Pay-Per-Click Advertising PPC

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Everything to Know About PPC

If you’re already doing email marketing and SEO optimization, then you’ve nailed down two of the most fundamental internet marketing strategies every small business should know. But these two strategies alone are not enough to comprise a viable marketing initiative. For one thing, email marketing requires you to maintain an address list. Once you have that list and use it, you’re marketing to the same customers with each email. If you aren’t regularly adding new names to your list, then your email strategy will eventually fold from natural attrition. And SEO, while essential, is far from enough. Since 2014, Google and other search engines have been returning paid results alongside free ones. Since paid results provide a wide revenue stream to the companies behind internet searches, you can expect to see pride of place going to those paid options more and more while organic results get shuffled to the side. …

Solve Common Problems with Your Business Phone System

How to Solve Common Problems with Your Business Phone System

  Once you get your business phone system solid and running just the way you want it to for the company, you probably aren’t going to have too much go wrong with it, but things do happen from time to time, so it’s good to know what you’re getting into when that occurs. We’re going to address most of the issues that you will run into in this post and provide some real solutions that you can employ to resolve it. With this knowledge, you may not ever have to call your service provider or carrier because it’s possible to solve it yourself. Keep in mind that this applies to a virtual phone system, although much of this can also be applied to conventional systems, as well.   Forwarding Phones Not Ringing   This can have a variety of different causes, and like many similar problems, it can either be …

Bethenny Frankel Skinnygirl Founder

Bethenny Frankel: Skinnygirl Founder & Killer Businesswoman

Growing up as the daughter of a mother with an alcohol problem and a father who left before childhood got started sounds like the plot of a pop teen romance novel instead of background for one of the world’s great business stories. But that’s exactly how Bethenny Frankel got her start in life. After a childhood she herself described as “difficult,” Bethenny grew up to found Skinnygirl, appear on numerous reality shows, and launch an organization dedicated to helping people affected by natural disasters. None of it came easy for her. “You cannot show people only the petals and not the thorns,” Bethenny would later say. “It’s not fair to them.” Certainly, her entrepreneurial journey and background have included both petals and thorns. But for entrepreneurs, and female entrepreneurs especially, Bethenny’s approach to her life and business endeavors has a lot to teach about knowing what you want, dreaming big, …

Reduce Business’ Fulfillment Shipping Costs

5 Ideas to Reduce Your Business’ Fulfillment & Shipping Costs

  With the many factors that contribute to devising a plan for fulfillment and distribution of your product, as cheaply and efficiently as possible, this can be a real challenge for businesses. If you approach it with a keen eye for details and explore every option available to you, though, it’s completely feasible for you to find ways to reduce the cost of distribution and streamline the process to a high degree. This post will give you factors to consider as you create a plan to manage your distribution; this doesn’t necessarily calculate specific costs for you. Here, we will provide 5 tips for factors and ideas that are good places to start for managing your fulfillment and shipping costs.   1. Large or Small-Scale Production & Shipping   The question is, how much space do you need to pack & store your product? Of course, the space required depends …