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There is no Minor League in business.

A cruel truth about business: different to the world of sports there is no fairness. 

If you start a company in your garage - you don’t compete with all the garage companies in the town or the country…

From the first day on you swim with the sharks. 

All unicorns, Fortune500 enterprises, old money, the syndicates and undercover organizations, … - they all operate right next to you. 

Most of the times you might get away by being overlooked. But once in while you might find yourself eye to eye… 

Try to be aware of - but not intimidated by that.

How to still have a chance:

don’t panic.

find your niche and exploit it.

understand your customer better than anyone else.

be fast and really good.

build a love band.

Understand staying in business as a form of success. 

Your m

(via successentials)

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A little light-hearted hump day tom foolery.

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Gotta love fall.

Portland Japanese Garden by Jim Lewis

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Why Use Google Analytics?

When it comes to running an online business, it is important that you have visibility into the performance of your site, particularly how your customers interact with your site. Luckily, there is a free tool out there called Google Analytics that will help you do this. Below is the purpose of Google Analytics, as well as some of the key features and capabilities.

Purpose of Google Analytics:

Understand Your Audience

Sell and Convert

Make Business Decisions

Understanding Your Audience:

Know Your Audience

Audience Data and Reporting - This feature allows you to dissect your audience: the kinds of people they are, where they come from, how they find your content, and how loyal and engaged they are.

Advanced Segments - This feature allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic, like organic traffic or visits that led to transactions.

Filters - This feature allows you to limit and modify the traffic data that appears in any given report view (Ex: You can exclude traffic from certain domains). 

Trace the Customer Path

Traffic Sources - This feature allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your referring sites, direct traffic, social media platforms, organic (unpaid) search keywords, and custom campaigns.

Map Overlay - This feature allows you to see your visitor stats broken down by continent, country and city, which will help you understand the real origins of your traffic and find the best places to invest for new opportunities.

See What Your Audience Is Doing

Behavior Reporting - This feature allows you to see new vs. returning visitors, how frequent visitors come to your site, how long visitors are staying on your site, etc.

Flow Visualization - This feature lets you see and analyze the path a visitor takes on your site. See where they came from, the pages they moved through, and where they exited your site.

In-Page Analytics - This feature allows to see how users really interact with your pages (Ex: see where are users clicking the most on your homepage).

Sell and Convert

Reach Your Performance Goals

Ecommerce Reporting - This feature allows you too see the performance of your products. Trace transactions right down to specific keywords, understand shopper behaviors, and adjust your shopping cart to build loyalty and improve sales.

Goals - This feature allows you to measure your sales, downloads, email signups, conversions, or define your own business goals.

Reach Peak Capacity

Real-Time Reporting - This feature allows you to see how many people are on your site right now, where they came from, and what they’re viewing.

Alerts and Intelligence Reports - This feature will call attention to any abnormal behavior happening on your site (Ex: A huge spike in traffic coming from a particular city or traffic source).

Site Search - When visitors can’t find what they want on your site, they search. This feature allows you to see what your visitors are really looking for, spot missed opportunities, and speed up time to conversion.

Site-Speed Analysis - This feature shows you load times across your site, so you can fix slow pages and make your visitors happier.

Make Business Decisions

Based on the information in Google Analytics, you will be able to make educated decisions regarding the following:

Product success and determination

How to better target and sell to your customers

Marketing and advertising strategies

Improved website design

Cool concept. Keep your minds open and sharp !

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Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

The long read: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

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Solarpunk Business Model: Co-ops

Growing up in southwestern Minnesota, I was exposed early on to farmers’ co-ops, and I’m shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you! – that the Solarpunk movement hasn’t embraced this already.

Co-ops are awesome. Basically, everybody who has a hand in production also gets a share in the profit.

In farming communities, this means everyone gets money from the corn they grow, while the Coop sells that corn to the big businesses that need it.

In Duluth, we have this grocery store called the Whole Foods Co-op that is owned by people in the community who shop there, and they actively do business with regional farmers.

So how would this look in a Solarpunk setting? Imagine a bike shop owned by the very people you see at the shop who are making and repairing the bikes. Or a fashion boutique where people can become members by contributing something (food? fabric? currency?) and the designer heavily marks down the prices for them. Or a bar where the bartenders and the regulars each have a stake in the place doing well.

We need more co-ops in our Solarpunk, people.

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15 LIFE & BUSINESS LESSONS FROM CHINA'S RICHEST MAN - JACK MA

He is the recently named China’s richest man - the man who took Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce business, to the biggest IPO in US history. His name is Jack Ma. 

There is something interesting about successful Chinese entrepreneurs and leaders. I always find them to be much deeper and more humble than their American counterparts. After reading several articles about Jack Ma, I particularly admire him for starting out as an English teacher earlier in his life with no technical background, but great foresight, ambition, and determination.

Here are the 15 Life and Business Lessons from Jack Ma (translated from Chinese to English).

Your attitude is more important than your capabilities. Similarly, your decision is more important than your capabilities. 

You cannot unify everyone’s thoughts, but you can unify everyone through a common goal. Let your colleagues and employees work for a common goal.  

A leader should never compare his technical skills with his employee’s. Your employee should have superior technical skills than you. However, a good leader should have more foresight, higher tenacity, and higher endurance for failure than his employees.

Giving up is the greatest failure.

Only fools use their mouth to speak. A smart man uses his brain. A wise man uses his heart.

The world will not remember what you say, but it will certainly not forget what you have done. Don’t make complaining or whining a habit.

Adopt and change before any major trends or changes.

Your attitude determines your altitude. 

A great opportunity is often hard to be explained clearly. Things that can be explained clearly are often not the best opportunities.

“Free” is the most expensive word.

When starting a business, you must have the ability to see, the ability to understand what is going on, and the ability to keep up with the pace.

When you’re small, focus and use your brain instead of your physical strength. 

If you have a different mindset, you will have a different outcome: if you make different choices from your peers, your life will then be different from your peers. 

The most unreliable thing in this world is human relationships.

Starting your company means you will lose your stable income. But it also means your income will no longer be limited, you will use your time more effectively, and you will no longer need to beg for favours from people anymore. 

< This article was originally published in Chinese and was translated into English. Please share if you find this helpful.> 

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Find Your Hacks & Workarounds

No matter what type of business we are running or what goals we chase - we all face apparently insurmountable difficulties - as for example 

building a user base for your app although there is no interaction yet,

having to postpone some to dos although they are all crucial and diligent, 

finding investors without having finished that prototype yet 

or hiring the great but still affordable talents that help you to get done all that work

… 

The Dutch bicycle manufacturer VanMoof had such a problem as well:

They sell almost 90 percent of its bikes online. 

But as they shipped the custom made bikes to customers, it found that they were often arriving severely damaged.

The damage reports were a major problem for the company because the street bikes that it manufactures are at the high-end of the market… But even with the best brand and great marketing you CANNOT WIN, if the products is delivered to the customer in bad shape or even in pieces…

But then the company came up with a genius solution - dropping shipping damage by over 70 percent!

What was the trick?

Printing a graphic of a flatscreen television on the side of the packaging box - making shippers think that they were transporting flatscreen televisions.

(Source: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/25/13048668/vanmoof-shipping-damages-dutch-bicycle-design)

A highly effective but yet cheap way of fixing the problem and giving the business the push it needed…

Innovate like VanMoof!

Always look out for solutions like this - practical, easy to apply, affordable but effective. Dare to try new paths, unconventional solutions, be creative. Find your hacks and workarounds.

your m

Frost had it right: Taking the road less traveled makes all the difference.  ... Always Mind Your “Business”. Follow me.

We are apart of the YPR. We are not normal. We are dreamers. We are leaders. We are future corporation owners. We are trend setters. We are entrepreneurs. With great payout comes hard work. Some people just don’t have the mental capacity and others just don’t have the heart. So do not judge them when they can’t comprehend what we are doing. We are the YPR. If you are a dreamer, a leader, a trend setter, a business owner, a go-getter, a maverick, then the YPR is probably the place for you. Be apart of the revolution. Emmanuelagyeman.vemma.com Agyeman@me.com