Will adding a baked-in share feature where customers can have the option to share vs. paying for an add-on service send me the same exact referrals?

Here are some answers for you that I believe will help you. 1. You should implement a long term and short term strategy right at the beginning. What I mean is that there are essential parts to your marketing like SEO and content marketing that you need to implement right in the beginning, but will take a while to filter through, but these are essential if you want to have organic traffic. That would be L-T. The best for Short term for a newly launched site is ad's. Word of warning though. Know your customers demographics such as age, income, education etc, know your competitors demographics and then find the platform (such as social media channels) where your ideal customer is based on those researched demographics and then roll out targeted ad's for them. 2. You have to implement social media strategies right from the beginning of course, based on your demographic research. 3. Get busy Blogging - start with content marketing now. 4. Sweepstakes - start a giveaway to get traction with clients and create awareness. 5. Make sure you collect emails as these are like gold dust for future email marketing. 6. Video marketing is essential for competitive retail space and very powerful to get found on search engines like Google. Prior to me launching my digital marketing business 5 years ago, I built an online retail business and made many expensive mistakes. And they can be costly if not implemented correctly from the beginning. So in summary: SEO - very important, Ad's, Social Media, Sweepstakes, Blogging, Video & email marketing. I trust this will assist you. Let me know if you wish to have a call to discuss these or have follow up questions. Regards Kenneth

Hi there! In few words, the launch date does not matter a lot as long as you are following with a continuous marketing plan all the year. It is better to tune your lunch date according to your marketing campaign than connecting it to the seasonal event. The timing of your launch only matters if your website is already ranked or has a good authority associated to it. Launching a website is not like opening a local shop. The launch date is defined by the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. In other words, your question must be rephrased as: "When is the best time to launch my first marketing campaign for my newly created website?". In that case, you will need to describe in details what kind of website you have and how are you planning to market it. I would be able to give you a more accurate answer if you explain to me what kind of website are you planning to launch or what products mainly are you selling. Hope that helps!

There are three ways to grow any business: 1. Increase number of clients 2. Increase average sale amount 3. Increase frequency of sales If your company is already fully booked, I suggest that you start by simply raising your prices. You might lose some clients, but usually when a business raises prices, the clients they lose are the most troublesome ones. Refocus sales & marketing efforts on attracting higher-end clients or doing more work for your best existing clients. You can also typically boost your short-term bookings by pre-announcing the price hike and get some potential clients "off the fence" with an offer to sign now at the old rate. To avoid adding unnecessary overhead as the company grows, dedicate some time to building strong, repeatable systems and to automating processes where possible. The most important place to do this is in your sales systems, so that your revenues become predictable and you can scale them at-will by adjusting your sales & marketing expenditure. If your sales systems are already pretty solid and you want to boost your production capacity to keep up, again look to systematize and automate as much as possible. Break the whole production process down into steps: sale, concept, script, taping, editing, post-production, review, delivery, collecting payment, and so on. Write down each logical step, and then write down all of the physical actions that need to take place to get the desired result. Who can perform each of those actions? Is it something that could be partially or fully automated with software (e.g. project planning)? Something that you could outsource (e.g. video editing, bookkeeping)? Or is it something that is your "secret sauce" or otherwise requires specialized in-house talent (e.g. creative work, executive management)? By really getting down to exactly what roles must be performed by your employees, you can calculate how many employees you're going to need in a given role, for a given workload. Now you have a hiring plan. A highly-scalable organization will focus on doing what they do best, while automating, outsourcing, or eliminating as much as possible of the other work involved in performing their business. OK, last topic: Culture. People much smarter than me have written entire books on this topic. The best advice in regards to culture and employees largely boils down to: 1) Be *intentional* about creating the company culture. Decide up front what you will value as a company, and communicate this throughout the organization. 2) People REspect what you INspect. Trust your people, but verify. For example, if your organization is highly customer-service oriented, then make darned sure that your clients feel like they were treated just as you expected that they would be treated. Call them up personally. Make sure your employees are aware that you're doing this. 3) A new hire's indoctrination into the company culture begins the moment they first enter your world, and first impressions matter. Do your website, interview and hiring process, and new-hire orientation all reflect your intended company culture perfectly? Or does a new-hire get mixed messages because current standard practices or employee behavior is inconsistent with your stated values? 4) Hire people based on whether they are a cultural fit. Have each candidate interviewed independently by multiple people, all of whom are evaluating that person on cultural fit. If you're small enough, have the entire company interview them. If you hire someone who doesn't fit your culture, you have just eroded it. 5) People who share your company values almost certainly associate with other people who share those values. Leverage their networks to find great candidates. Even if they're not looking to make a move, or you're not hiring, or not hiring for a position they could fill, make the connection anyway, and keep in touch. The easiest way to fill a job in the future is when you already have a list of pre-qualified people who'd love to work for you. 6) The only way someone should be able to get fired is by violating the norms of your company culture. And if someone does commit a serious violation, they need to be let go--immediately. And here's one last strategy that can increase your profits without taking on much of any extra overhead at all: Think about what else your clients need—even things that you can't offer them directly. You already have a relationship with them, and if you're doing things right, it's a *trusted* relationship. Figure out what they need, find a partner who can deliver that for them, and then make an arrangement where you sell those products or services to your client and have them fulfilled by your joint-venture partner. They do all the work, your client gets what they need, and you and the JV partner split the revenue. For example, are your clients hiring you to produce videos for marketing purposes on the web? Maybe they need help with their website? Or with getting traffic to the videos on YouTube? Partner with a web marketing agency. You can even work this both ways, so that they send their high-end clients to you when they need a video produced. I hope I covered that as best I could without knowing the specifics of your business. If you have questions that I could answer for you on these topics, I'm happy to set up a call.

Anyone who calls themselves something fancy like that is probably one of the 99% in the industry that have no idea what they are doing and will make you hemorrhage money. Find a MARKETER with a proven track record and use them to build an empire. If you don't want an empire and, instead, want to make your friends jealous by bragging about "new hires," then hire a "growth hacker" or "assistant of hardcore development" or "rad visualization chairman" or whatever other stupid position all these failing startups get caught on.

I don't even know how to answer this. Do you know what the difference between McDonalds and the local burger joint that is filing for bankruptcy is? It's marketing. McDonalds is worth billions of dollars not because of the quality of their food, but because of their marketing. Marketing is not an expense. A janitor is an expense. Your computer is an expense. Marketing is an INVESTMENT. Would you shop around for the cheapest heart surgeon? Of course not. Because you would likely end up dead. Why, then, do you shop around for a marketing expert? Are you ok with your company going bankrupt? Is that worth the small savings to you? No. Of course not. Hire someone who is good at marketing. Hire someone who knows what they are doing. Buy yourself a Lamborghini with your profit the first quarter. Get a beach house in hawaii. Grab a yacht. Or, try to find your business the cheapest heart surgeon you can and then spend the next five years wondering why such a solid business idea failed in the first 6 months. I'm passionate about this exact topic because all those statistics you read about "70% of businesses failing in two years" are solely because of horrible marketing.