The biggest survival skill a person can have is the skill of selling an object with his unique ideas and Innovation. According to 2021 Research, study says that sales skill is the biggest gift a person can have to change his life forever. Have you ever thought that thousand of products are launched in the market and after few months only a few survive after the great competition? For Instance, Amway the natural health product which was launched in the market with huge promotion but after few months that become totally out of the market. Companies will come and it gets shut down but their selling ideas decide for how many years they are going to survive. Mastering the Art of selling is not less than the boon from God. so what are we waiting for ?? let’s jump towards our today’s topic where we are going to learn the ways by which we can improve our sales skills and trust me by following these steps you are gonna be the Rockstar of the Market. 7 Important ways to improve your skills in sales. 1. Confidence -you are the savior You have the biggest responsibility that anybody can have because of you, customers get a solution for their problem. When a problem is solved by a product, it is the gift given to him which has changed his lifestyle. Confidence in the product and on you plays a major role. Start building your confidence by changing the attitude of seeing the challenges. start using affirmative words such as “I am the best, I am born to win, I am the savior” These will boost your confidence and your energy to sell a product. 2. Adaptability and Flexibility. The one who can adapt to the environment and change his attitude based on the pressure is flexible to the core. We find ourselves so pressurized that in some situations things go out of hand. The only way is that to stop getting tensed and start adapting to the changes. Markets keep changing every day with new problems but a good sales representative is the one who takes that problem has the opportunity to grow. The mantra of improving your skills is by changing the attitude of seeing the market. 3. Listening is an Art- Active listener is a master. Communication is the fundamental quality that makes a person more reliable, Accountable, and competitive. communication is not only about expressing our views and Ideas but it is to make ourselves Active Listener. There is a saying the Wise man always listens more than he speaks. The more you listen, the more you can understand the customer problem, and then you can act accordingly.  There is a misconception by many graduates that in Group Discussion, the one who talks more is superior but the winner is the one who listens to everyone’s points and then he keeps his part. Listening is an Art and the one who masters it is the next biggest personality in the world. 4. Empathy – Shines your personality Polishing your personality is the biggest gift you can ever give yourself. empathy is a very important skill which you can add to this.it helps you to connect with people emotionally and understand their problems very easily. This factor connects you to the customer directly and emotionally. You start gaining the trust of customers and they become your loyal customer too. Start empathizing and see the magic your product will start selling like hotcakes.  5. Spirit of Entrepreneur. When it is about ideas and innovation the one who thinks from every angle is the entrepreneur. He is always ready to find a solution to every problem. when we have the spirit of an entrepreneur we are at the self-improving stage. The self-improvement stage keeps you alive and better than yesterday. Start introspecting about yourself and about the market. Research about the market Analytics and keep an eye on it. Self-growth starts when we analyze our good and bad based on the situation we behave in and how we react.SWOT(Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)gives insight about yourself and if you are too conscious you will definitely work on your weakness and make it your strength. Get ready with the spirit to conquer the world. 6. Sell with purpose Keep your task pre-planned for every day. Make your day clear with targets and goals.it redefines your day into a productive one. The purpose of a particular task reminds us about the goal we want to achieve. Plan, act, execute. When you plan you get little confidence and when you act accordingly with clear intent mind and execution becomes simpler. The main focus is on customer needs, which generates profit and gains their trust easily. 7. Negotiating Wouldn’t be great if people get influenced by our words easily and when we crack a deal with ease then we have reached the skill of negotiation. You heard it right. Negotiating a product is very important for sales skills. It makes you impact and easily visible to your customer. Few important tips on Negotiating: you must have a close study about the product and deep study on market value and customer need. if customer need is at peak then your negotiating becomes easier. Always empathize with customers as it increases Accountability and trust for your company. sometimes some customer becomes like your family member. Start inheriting the negotiation with practicing on basic products. 8. Integrity: The very important factor is that being honest. You have to be honest to yourself as well as to your customer. The integrity is formed when you are loyal so that you get loyal customers too. Sometimes being honest is quite dangerous for you and the company as it may create a bad image but that is when certain details are not supposed to be disclosed to the customer, otherwise being honest is key to get real customers. Think about this and act accordingly. Here we are at the end where

Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) is the savior of any business. No business can run successfully without SEO. It serves as a honey for the digital marketing and brings a lot of bees (traffic) to your websites. If you want to reach your customers successfully online, then there is nothing better than SEO. Search engine optimization is a part of Digital Marketing, where you can retain in the market only when you utilize it in an effective way. There are plenty of techniques exist in the SEO to increase your rankings, you have to optimize the keyword properly and make sure it can be recognized easily by the users. You might have heard from most of the people that SEO is a difficult task, but it is a very simple task if the metrics collected by you is right and the keywords optimized is right to target the relevant audiences to convert them into the potential customers. If you follow SEO, you must be aware about how fast the things change. It seems to be little difficult to keep up all the changes. SEO is important because it keeps the search results fair and makes the user to use them efficiently. Users trust search engines, and your website being at the top means that it is credible enough to rank in the top. So, do you want to make your website rank in the first page? If yes, then scroll down to know more about the insights of SEO and make your business successful. Page Title: The page title plays a vital role in SEO, because the page title is the deciding factor for the users to get inside website or not. Your keyword optimization is the game changer here. As much your keyword is good, the chances of coming into the first page increases. Always make sure that the page title of your blog or article should not exceed more than 70 characters, as it will reduce the chances of website to come to the first page. URL of the content: The Next SEO insight you must consider is the URL of the content. The URL of the website’s page must include the first keyword that you use in your title. But make sure the URL of your website page is include when the URL is separated with few dashes. Meta Description: Meta description is another important best SEO insight. Your Meta description highlights the power of the blog. Whatever is the purpose of your content, you can pen down under the meta description and make sure that the meta description is less than 150 characters And keyword should also be mentioned in meta description as well. Try to add keyword in a natural way, and it shouldn’t look like you are doing it purposely. As this will make users to come back to your site as they have found your content worthy enough already. Page Content: Page content is very important, because this will lead your site into the first page rankings and make your website a credible page for the users. and gain information what your site or business is all about, right. So, to make your content more considerable, use the keywords at least 4 to 5 times in the blog.  You can also bold the keyword so that it could attract the user eyes. Heading Tags:  After Meta description, heading of the content also plays a vital role.It is necessary for every page of the content to have at least one or two headings (H1) tags. And those tags must consist of the relevant keywords mentioned in the header tags. Like keywords in the Meta description, your tags should also be in the natural way, rather than a forced one.To, make sure that you have engaged the users in a proper way. Internal Links: Links play a very big role in the SEO strategy. Internal links are the links of different pages of your own website. When you add internal links of the site in your content, it will take you to the web page which you have linked it. By this, it makes sure that you’re on their website for a longer period of time. Always Make sure you add at least 2-3 internal links in your content. But don’t add any random link to your website, always insert the links which are relevant in the blog and connects to the other blog as well, This also increases the traffic to your website. Images: Images are the next important insight which everyone should concentrate upon, but this is always ignored by the people. You should realize that the images can be more powerful than you could ever think. The site performance depends upon the images you choose for the blog. So, it is mandatory to select only the relevant images for the blog. If you’re making some mistake in choosing the blog images you are committing the hazardous mistake, as it questions the credibility of the page and makes the user to bounce from your website to the other.      While inserting the images in the blog, use image alt text as it is easier for the user to come to your website using the image. This is the reason behind using the apt images for the blog. Cross linking Page: Cross linking can also be said as linking one web page to the other. It is very profitable for you as it makes your work easier to be recognized easily with the cross-linking page. Because for the search engines, it gets very easy for them to rank, as when you have the different domains from the relevant keywords it makes the search engine to choose your website and make them appear in the first page, by doing so user get into your website and turn into your potential customer. These are the valuable insights that every SEO would definitely require to become successful in the marketing field. Without these insights it is impossible for any SEO to

Corporation The chick becomes the chicken or rooster and so does your startup grow into the corporation with the scaling and ramping up of operations. Legally, of course, both are companies, it’s just the particular stage of life cycle that is different.  A corporation is a distinct legal entity, separate from its owners. Just like individuals, it has the power to borrow or loan money, enter into contracts with other parties, pay taxes or own assets, etc. An interesting feature of corporations is limited liability. Through this, while shareholders partake of the corporation’s profits from dividends or stock appreciation, they aren’t personally responsible or liable for its debts. Corporations may also exist without the sole purpose of making profit, like charities. The Creation of a Corporation Shareholders, by virtue of the stock they hold, are the owners of a corporation that is created for the purpose of achieving a common goal.Whilecorporations can exist for non-profit as well, mostly they strive to generate a return on the shareholders’ investment. There can be one shareholder or many for a corporation. Corporations can be private or public. For public corporations, there can be several thousands of shareholder owners. Just like individual citizens of a country, corporations have to abide by corporate laws prevalent in the country of their operation. Let’s look at some corporations of the world:  Amazon Established in 1994, American corporation Amazon is an undoubted leader today in the world of e-commerce.  Almost singlehandedly, it has rewritten the fate of physical stores (and not for the better) by making products appear at everyone’s doorstep. The variety of products on Amazon’s shopping site for any country is probably more than what the world’s largest mall or physical retail space could offer. It’s come a long way since inception and is now a blue-eyed, much favoured contender on stock exchanges. Microsoft Microsoft founded by Bill Gates in 1975 revolutionised the word Windows and the world of operating software for home and office computers. Office applications under MS Office followed with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other software that made everyone’s life easier. These are used daily by billions of people all across the world whether they are professionals, homemakers or students. Today, Microsoft is under the leadership of Satya Nadella and doing extremely well generating revenues in hundreds of billions every year. Founder Bill Gates and his spouse Melinda Gates have stepped down from overseeing the company and focus more on philanthropy with their foundation called Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are both involved in many social causes around the world to alleviate poverty, hunger, as well as health problems. Apple Steve Jobs, in 1976, founded the corporation Apple and today it is a venerable tech giant. The iPhone, Mac computers, iPad are some of their iconic products that have become status symbols among millions of people worldwide with queues awaiting new launches, both offline and online. Also in the hundreds of billions of dollars of annual revenue category, it keeps growing even bigger year after year. Google Google founded by students Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 is known today for its powerful search engine and the multinational tech giant it is with worldwide offices. So popular, it is also commonly used as a verb. How many times have you heard the question – “Why don’t you Google this?” Google has since forayed into other internet services and has many apps like Gmail, Google maps, YouTube, etc. Today, it also provides advertising services, cloud computing, software solutions, etc.  J.P. Morgan Chase Going way back to 1799, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is one of the oldest financial institutions still standing in the United States of America and one of the biggest financial corporations in the world. It has customers in diverse sectors like corporate banking, trading desks, investment management, underwriting, risk management, etc. 3M Based out of Minnesota and started in 1902, this corporation is known for its many innovative patents and products such as reflective materials, printer and mobile phone circuits, dental supplies, medical-related products, safety products, and industrial materials like tapes, adhesives, etc. Their products are known to deliver effective solutions for existing consumer needs. Domino’s Pizza Guess the name of that familiar pizza delivery shop you see, no matter where you are in the world. Which pizza lover hasn’t heard of Domino’s ? This global pizza chain corporation started off in 1960 in Michigan and today has over 8000 stores worldwide. With a brand value that runs into billions, it is clearly here to stay and possibly keep dominating the pizza world. Exxon Mobil One of the world’s largest oil companies in the world today, American corporation Exxon Mobil, headquartered in Texas, is involved in oil and gas. With its refineries supplying to over 100 countries, as well as other products, it is a ubiquitous presence at almost any gas station in the world with brands like Exxon, ESA and Mobil. General Motors Corporation The Chevy is a well-known brand of car instantly recognized almost anywhere in the world and it belongs to automobile giant, General Motors Corporation or GM. Founded in 1908, Detroit, this corporation is ranked among the top 10 Fortune 500 companies today with some of its popular brands being Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Holden, Isuzu and Opel among others. It has a presence in over 35 countries worldwide and has sold more than 10 million vehicles. All of these giant corporations of today were once startups. Among other factors that helped them grow manifold to the successes they are today is an innovative marketing strategy. 

We all have studied marketing in high school as “Marketing is the process of promoting your product or services to the customer and getting your products known to customers using different advertising tools”, but is it that everything we’ve to know about? Of course, not, marketing is a vast ocean in which digital marketing occupies 80 percent of the ocean. Anything which utilizes the internet or digital platforms to promote goods or services is known as digital marketing. We all are aware of digital marketing. You might have come across a lot of digital marketing strategies, but the whole digital marketing is all about only these two categories: Organic and paid marketing. Both marketing strategies are required in the business. Understanding the difference between organic and paid marketing can help you identify the reason behind the success or failure of the business. So, if you’re confused about which one to use you should consider using bit of both. Fortunately, both can be combined for the betterment of the business. To utilize the best strengths of organic and paid marketing, you should know to differentiate these two. Let’s get into more details about organic and paid marketing, and make your business reach a new height. Organic Marketing: We can simply define organic marketing as the “Act of getting your customers to come to you organically (Naturally).” Here, everything relies on continuous effort and high-quality content. “Content is the King” it takes time for the people to know about your product compared to the paid marketing. In case, if you’re well confident about the content you provide can gain you more customers, but that doesn’t mean that you can avoid paid marketing. Everything has its own place in digital marketing and so does the paid marketing too. Organic Marketing include: Maintaining your Social Media AccountsBuilding your E-mail listsImproving your SEOCreating “Evergreen” content Organic marketing is also known as inbound marketing. Which has the ability to pull the customers to your company and create a lasting relationship. 90 percent of organic marketing depends on quality content. Your content should have the ability to attract, engage, nurture and convert them into prospective customers. In simple words, organic marketing means, “The customer is ‘earned’ not bought”. Therefore, the focus of organic marketing should be placed on educating the consumers with the optimized high-quality content. Instances of Organic Marketing: Blog PostsSocial Media CampaignsSEO web pagesInfographicsE-books When your content is enough to impress the audiences out there, you’re all set to take your business to a new height. The only thing you should focus is on the considerable effort which has to be taken to set things right .try to get as much traffic on your website, as that will say how well is your on-page SEO working and find out the mistakes which have to be improved. Benefits of Organic Marketing: 1.      Permanent traffic: A well-written blog or guest article has the power to attract traffic to the website and convert them into potential customers. 2.      Low Cost: You can gain traffic free of cost or with a very low cost. 3.      Builds trust with customers: content created for organic marketing is often educational for the audiences and helps them to learn something which has a very fewer sales initiate in the blog. Due to which, customer build the trust on the brand and be a potential and loyal customer. Paid Marketing: In simple words, paid marketing can be defined as “where marketers pay for the online traffic”. Paid marketing is a quick way to get eyes onto your product or services easily by just spending few bucks. The main goal of the paid marketing is to get website traffic by paying them and converting the viewers into customers immediately, rather than spending a lot of time and continuous effort on the same thing again and again.  You can target specific audiences and pay them to view your posts. Paid Marketing includes: Achieving solid Return on investment (ROI) and Return on Ad spent (ROAS)Driving valuable impressionsObtaining quantifiable resultsHitting specific sales goalsOptimizing ads in real-time to achieve specific goals Paid marketing allows businesses to target, reach, engage, and convert their business directly and quickly. Instead of wishing someone to find your blog posts through organic search, here you can “push” the content to the customer and make it happening. It is done mainly in the form of ads to target specific audiences and create potential customers out of them. It’s more much of a sales-forward and is focused on driving specific actions for the customers to make a purchase. Instances of Paid Marketing are: 1.      Pay per click (PPC): it is a marketing tool that shows the power of the precise keywords to work for you by giving you the targeted traffic from the keywords you choose. 2.      Posting ads on social media like Facebook ads, Instagram ads. 3.      Influencer marketing: here the business collaborates with an influential individual (with lots of followers on social media accounts) to promote their business or product. The main disadvantage of paid marketing is the website traffic that comes from the paid marketing isn’t stable. It will stop as soon as you stop running your ads. To maximize the return on investment, your ad campaign should go really well and satisfy the customers.  You have to be well versed in these things to get the utmost results of paid marketing. This should not result in “All for nothing case” Benefits of Paid Marketing: 1.      Quick results – As soon as the ad account is created and the ads are published, you’ll start getting a lot of website traffic in no time and engage the audiences in the content to turn them into the customer. 2.      Direct Marketing – You can identify your specific group to be targeted and reach them through the special targeting tools available in the ad campaigns. 3.      No-Limit – You can buy traffic as long as you have money in your pocket. If you’ve large advertising

Acceleration – Scaling A startup cannot continue to stay a small entity. It must be made to grow. Once the decision is taken to make it grow, the next challenge is how. Scaling your business is what you have to think about.  Even if you do manage to sell like crazy, you’ll soon have another problem if you don’t manage scaling, that is, how to deliver to all those new customers, not to mention being on time. So how does one manage scaling? It’s all about correctly estimating if you have the capability for a particular capacity. A question you must be ruthlessly honest and answer is whether your business does have a capacity to grow or not. And, if it does, then will your existing systems, in terms of infrastructure, processes and manpower be able to handle that growth. If an increase in orders causes chaos in your company due to lack of sufficient manpower, lack of clarity on processes, rampant breaks in communication, inadequate production capacity, or faulty delivery systems, then you are not scaled for growth and stand to lose face with customers. You have to ramp up from the short-chain process enough for small orders that are typical of a startup. If you don’t, it won’t be smooth sailing. There will be a lot of worries in trying to get orders to go through.  And most of the time, you’re not likely to meet targets either. So, scaling a business essentially involves rearranging things to give more elasticity to grow bigger without stretching at the seams. You would need to do some general planning, set your financial channels, figure out manpower needs, and set all your technology and system processes to allow for expansion. You also need to set up logistics and delivery. Steps to scale your business Assess before planning Keeping aside all sentimental reasons, objectively and clinically look at your business inside out. Is it ready for expansion? Is there room for growth? If not, how would you make that room? For your planning to be fruitful, you’d have to gauge your correct baseline first and then build upwards.  Ask and answer questions like, what if my sales increased 10X, how would it go? Are there enough resources and manpower to handle it? Will the current technical setup be enough for the increased numbers?  Do some number crunching. Deliberate on market demand for the particular category. What is the sales forecast? What does it mean in terms of new customer numbers? How much sales revenue are you looking to generate? What does it translate to in monthly figures? How accurate your assessment is will determine how effective your planning will be. After this, work on the expenses forecasting, factoring in the added changes to infrastructure, technology, systems and manpower. Examine the profit & loss sheet in detail. Carefully estimate possible areas that expenses could increase and how it will impact the revenue forecast. Include worst-case or contingency expense scenarios as well in your assessment spreadsheet to bring about better planning. Money Matters Expanding the business by scaling it means expenses too. You’ll have to loosen those purse strings a bit. Hiring more people, upgrading technology, increasing facilities, investing in a better management information system (MIS), all cost money.  So, if you don’t have it, how exactly do you score some cash for the business expansion, legitimately, of course?  Here are some options: Bootstrapping means relying on yourself and improvising, but this obviously could take a very long time. You could find someone in your personal circle willing to fund you. Entering some kind of cash contest to support small business owners that is organised by your local chamber of commerce or private parties is another option. Partnering with some startup incubator program is a path taken by many. But you would have to examine the clauses as to how long they would incubate you. A line of credit from the bank or taking out a business loan is another path you could explore. Sales Team If you’re taking the pains to scale the business, it is obviously so that you can make more money by selling more. So, you would need to take a look at your existing sales channel.  Can they generate more sales?What is the process in place to secure lead generation, tracking and managing those leads?Do you need to increase your sales force to collect and manage orders?Will the current invoicing system support the increased orders quickly and efficiently? Technology takes you there faster Investing in the right technology is one of the best investment decisions you can make. Automation and smart processes bring down costs and keep manual manpower requirements to a minimum.  Integrating systems cohesively can cut costs significantly as well as making management of communication and processes through the organisation hindrance-free. Shop wisely for innovative solutions that will bring you savings on both the turnaround time as well as overheads as you expand capacity. Marketing automation, accounting, inventory, CRM, manufacturing, sales management, payroll are some areas where you can consider. Phase out unwieldy hardware in favour of more efficient ones where digitalisation is concerned. In other words, buy better computer systems, printers, servers, storage, etc. Managing manpower Having the best technology can only get you so far. At the end of the day, you also need to have the right people to manage it, and more. Check out competitor setups. How many people do they have managing their sales or customer service efforts? What about other processes such as inventory, manufacturing and delivery? What is the industry standard for each of these functions? HR recruiting, competitive pay and benefits need to be according to established industry benchmarks so that you can find the right kind of staff quickly and retain them. As your business grows, you can’t be the one-point contact for everything that you could have been when you were a fledgling startup. Managing the business might have to be delegated so that you can focus on the big

Now what is the correlation between common sense and Research & Development? Common sense is the self-actualised, untaught ability to understand and weigh in on situations like most normal people would do with no high-level application of complex education. At the heart of every R&D exercise is a basic common sense approach to solving a problem or making something better than it was before. The particular technical innovation may require the complex education alright, but the core of it revolves from the common sense approach. For example, let’s look at a common staircase. The staircase itself is an innovation to get safely from one floor to another. But one brilliant mind thought, what if I can make the staircase move? Then people wouldn’t have to, but would still be able to get from one floor to another. So, the common sense approach is used. The technical complexities in executing involve specialized knowledge and R&D, of course. But the idea does not. It is purely common sense. Common sense does not always have to result in the cut and dry, brass tracks alone overview. It can also lead up to applications that build on imagination, provided you let curiosity play a little. This will slowly progress to a research mindset that, in turn, will produce the white papers. White papers are the internal blueprinting that any organised setup will come up with as a step-by-step documentation of what has to be done to achieve the goal set out with the product or service. And so, the process starts. Incubation in the context of startups is the process of maintaining favourable conditions for the development of the business idea to its final form. Just like a chick hatching from an egg in an incubator, which provides the necessary conditions for it to do so, a startup is thus born; a small entity, with the white-paper as their roadmap. The small entity can grow big or go bust from their initial first stages of operating. The determining factors will be market demand, effectiveness of solution in terms of the product or service offered and how cost-effectively the operations are managed. These must be assessed carefully by you, the entrepreneur. Do not be swayed by emotions here. Do your homework carefully. It is important to be able to ride the momentum that a new launch typically offers and use it to evolve into a sustainable model that will ensure a practical demand-supply for the startup to not go bust. There are no fixed rules as to when you graduate from a startup to mainstream as such, but mostly when you’re no longer flailing to stay afloat, have a steady supply of the product or service you’re offering and a stable revenue stream that is enough to continue the process you’ve established, you can safely say you’re there.   A startup may not seem to be a big-boy contender, and you could feel like it’s not as glamorous a place to be in compared to big-spender launches with all the bells and whistles, fancy office spaces, thousands of square feet of production units, a big manpower team, etc., but know that you’re making an impact. You are playing a significant role in the economic growth of your city’s business & employment ecosystem, either way. Plus, your added advantage that the big guys don’t have is the easy maneuverability that you have, to change the whole market scenario overnight. With a typically small setup, startups are in a position for quick turnaround from ideation to implementation, and can bring in that one smart innovation quickly to the market. This means the startup has the power to stir up the market, change the dynamics overnight where competition may be concerned. Consumers would benefit too as providers scramble to one-up on the innovation. So, startups positively impact the economy, people of the towns or cities they set up in, as well as consumers. We only have to see the examples of once-startups like Infosys and how they almost singlehandedly changed the IT landscape of Bengaluru, how Alibaba brought Hangzhou onto the economic world map, how Microsoft changed the fortunes of Redmond and the way Google completely transformed Mountain View, California. While they were small when they started, eventually, they transformed the places their operations were based out of. Work opportunities were created both for those starting out in their careers as well as experienced professionals. More people came in for the employment opportunities and other sectors such as housing and local businesses boomed as well.

Obstacles are not the blockers. Every block in life has the potential to become a giant corporation. Microsoft, Google, Face book, and Instagram became giants as someone did notice the block and used their common sense to take a hammer around that problem to get a solution. Giving some undivided attention to what is around us can help to spot the obstacles. Sometimes, it can be very difficult to spot the obstacle like the rock we talked about in the previous section. Once the obstacle is noticed, all we need is guts and common sense to remove the block. Bigger the problem, bigger the opportunity. How big a corporate can grow depends upon how much of a problem we solve and for how many people. The evolution of the search engine concept is nothing but a pragmatic solution to a major obstacle in the digital technology revolution, how to make information available instantly anywhere in the world. With it, the right information could be made available to the right people and at the right time. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google search engine are examples of people who saw opportunity in an obstacle. Once Google was born in the dorm rooms of these PhD students, it attracted the attention of not only the academic community worldwide but also investors who could take it to place it deserved. And the rest, as they say, is history. So, if you have that one idea, or that one innovation, but don’t have the capital, worry not. If it’s a good idea, the investors will queue up for you. So to clue you in on the secret to success where obstacles are concerned; do not fear obstacles. Welcome them. Hidden in them lie various opportunities. All you need to do is perhaps alter your view point or perspective just like in the story and you will suddenly glimpse that opportunity. After that it is about perseverance in pursuing your goal with a dedicated single-mindedness.

Google meet is Google’s video conferencing app that’s available to everyone who has a google account. An online meeting is easy to set up whether you’re an individual getting together with a couple of friends or a small business meet. It is something that most of us are using now, especially in this covid situation where we weren’t allowed to go out and was stuck in our houses in the lockdown period. Google meet was like a savior in that time, cause the video meets made the distance shorter to meet our friends and family. Students are using it for the classes. You’re allowed to have up to 100 participants and can be in the meeting for as long as 60 minutes. How to gain access and start a meeting? To access Google Meet as a regular Google user (for example, someone who uses familiar apps such as Gmail, Google Photos or YouTube), all you need to do is sign in to your account. You can also access Google Meet via your desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone. For a computer or laptop, there’s no need to download anything. Just navigate to Google Meet via your web browser. With a tablet or phone, download the Google Meet mobile app and you’re set. After you sign into your Google account, go to meet.google.com. If you are hosting a meeting, click on start a new meeting. You’ll have the option of starting a meeting right away (instant meeting) or creating a meeting for later. You can then send the meeting link to the participants. If you have a meeting link, you can enter it into the space provided—it’s that simple! Features of Google Meet: Google meet comes with tons of free features that you can use to make your virtual meeting even better. The best part of having a google meet is you can hold as many meetings you want, as often you want. Participants just need to sign to their google account to join in. Thus becoming a great tool in the market for easy meetings. Let’s get into the exciting features that we have in google meet. Live captioning: Live captions are fully automated and allow anyone to follow along in real-time. All you need to do is click on the three dots located on the Google Meet screen to find the option.Device agnostic: Simply put, Google Meet works on any device, including desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. It will work with both Android and iPhone. You can even join a meeting using Google Nest Hub Max. If you have a conference room setup, there’s Google Meet hardware available for that, too.Screen sharing: You can share your whole screen, a singe chrome tab or a single application window with meeting participants. This lets you share and collaborate with ease.Message during the meeting: You can instant message any meeting participants during the meeting. This makes it possible to share links, files and more with other participants.Preview screen: When you’re going into a meeting, you can use the preview screen to make adjustments to your camera and mic. You can also see who has already joined the meeting.Adjust layouts and screen settings: The default layout for Google Meet shows the most active meeting participant, but you can adjust things any way you want. Just click on the three dots on the Meet screen to access this feature.Host controls: The meeting host is free to mute, remove or pin participants. However, due to privacy concerns only a participant can unmute themselves.Full integration: Google Meet also integrates with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, which means you can access meetings directly from your calendar, even if it’s not the Google calendar. Google meet is Fully secure and Compliant Whenever people use Google Meet, whether as a meeting host or participant, they want to feel safe. That’s why Google Meet ensures full privacy, security and regulatory compliance. Users enjoy full data protection and a privacy commitment that’s part of all Google Cloud enterprise services. In addition, Google Meet offers: In-transit encryption: All video meetings include in-transit encryption that complies with IETF security standards. Anti-abuse features: This includes anti-hijacking controls to keep meetings safe. Participants must sign into the meeting with a PIN and the meeting details can be changed at any time. No one can join a meeting without an invite or requesting to join. Regulatory compliance: Google Meet, along with all Google products, is regularly reviewed independently to verify privacy, security and compliance controls. It’s nice to know that google meet has given you all the features to enjoy. With all the features google meet offers, you can be confident that you can meet with anyone at any time with ease.

I’m Karthi Easwaramoorthy, co-founder and CEO of TicketGoose.com. An online bus ticketing e-commerce company, I built it from ground up by raising 5M USD from investors who mostly live in America. It quickly became a success and crossed the 100+ crore turnover mark in no time. As CEO of TicketGoose.com, I’m responsible for all the decisions on strategy, product, technology, digital marketing and investor relationships.  Before co – founding TicketGoose.com, I worked at TIBCO Software Inc, USA, and Sun Microsystems, USA, as a software engineer. Prior to Sun Microsystems, I was a software consultant in Oracle Corporation, USA, which is located in Redwood City, California. Before going to America in 1997, I worked for Hewlett Packard, Bangalore, as a software consultant. I’ve lived and worked in California for 15 years. During my time in the United States, I successfully launched a regional language FM radio station at the Stanford University Campus, California, which later became the best known radio station for the Indian community living in the Bay Area, California.  I am also one among the founders and chairman of the non-profit organisation IndiaTEAM.org, which operates out of California, USA. This organisation was established in the year 2000. Since then, it has aided thousands of government schools in various states of India, as well as helping students pursue higher education. Every year, IndiaTEAM.org conducts one of the biggest volleyball events in California to raise funds, while also having regular donors. In India, we formed the “TEAM Green” chapter as part of IndiaTEAM.org to build self-sustaining forests based on the Miyawaki concept.   It is while building TicketGoose.com that I grew a serious passion for marketing, especially for digital marketing to build brand and traffic to websites, mobile apps and YouTube organically. Digital marketing means knowing how to use search engines such as general search engine Google, video search engine YouTube and image search engine Pinterest to build organic visits to digital properties like websites, mobile apps, mobile websites, etc. These search giants can make or break your business. So, ranking your site on these platforms is absolutely critical for your business to thrive. Social media plays a major role in reaching out to target audiences, engaging them, building referral traffic and eventually converting them into loyal customers. Another very important area of digital marketing is to use social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to build a solid community around your product, service or content to build the brand. Branding helps to distinguish you from the crowded market. This book intends to teach you how to use search and social media to build a brand for your product, service or content. The third important area of digital marketing is how to use communication tools like email and SMS to build your brand and sell your products. The fourth area of digital marketing is how to use messaging services like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp to build your brand and sell. The fifth area of digital marketing is how to use every growing streaming server and OTT platform like Hotstar, Amazon Prime, etc., for your business. The sixth area of digital marketing is how to use affiliate networks to promote your products, services or content. The seventh area of digital marketing is to use influencers to build your brand for you. This is just like using celebrities in traditional marketing media such as newspapers, radio and TV to build brand credibility. In this book, we’ll also look at what an affiliate network is and how to use it to your advantage. Having built TicketGoose.com and having handled product development to strategy to marketing and digital marketing to investment to engineering to customer support, I was fortunate to be involved in every functional group of the company. Having run TicketGoose.com for 10 years as a member of the board of directors, President and CEO, I thought of sharing my views on innovation to marketing to perseverance to build the company. I am extremely proud to say that I handled digital/online marketing, ranging from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), SMM (Social Media Marketing), and Google Analytics, ad campaigns, affiliate marketing and content creation in our company to build the brand and sell our bus tickets online. As I am passionate about training and mentoring people on startups, digital marketing and sales process setup, I decided to put together this book to help potential entrepreneurs and existing businesspeople to take their company to the next level. While I was building TicketGoose.com, I encountered several challenges on the marketing front because, well, it was a startup. I burned my fingers in terms of money and time by outsourcing to mediocre digital marketing agencies. As they were largely unable to achieve what I sought from them, I decided to take a bold step, learn on my own, and take up the entire responsibility of digital marketing on my shoulders, so that I could succeed as an entrepreneur. Everything that I learned along this journey is what I am sharing here in this book. It is not theory from existing publications nor theoretical research off the internet, but rather a practical hands-on, step-by-step approach based on my own learning and experience that you will find here. I have another passion, and that is to speak and share my experiences with fellow entrepreneurs, student communities and aspiring entrepreneurs. While touring and talking to various such enthusiastic people, I found many who actively need guidance and mentorship, though they have that fire in the belly that is undoubtedly necessary to succeed. Based on my interactions with many of these people, I was inspired to write this book that answers most of their frequently asked questions. A gentleman I met at one such seminar asked me a rather interesting question; he wanted to know the difference between entrepreneurs and businesspeople. He further mentioned that he wasn’t really sure if he was an entrepreneur or businessman. Here’s what I told him: If a person inherits a business from their parents or continues a business started by someone else, they

During one of my student interactions at a college in Coimbatore, one student shared this with me, “I would love to start and become an entrepreneur or a business icon but I don’t know what to start or how to start ?” So, how do people identify an idea for a startup?  You don’t need to be a mastermind to be innovative; innovation comes from wanting to make things simpler. Here’s a short story with a compelling message. Once upon a time, in a busy city, many different people kept passing by a huge rock right in the middle of a roadway. Almost all of these people somehow moved either along the left or right, just about managing to avoid the rock. They never cared as to why that rock blocked the roadway or to think of how to remove it to make passing through that road easier. Similarly in life, most regular folks get busy with day-to-day activities and just take that metaphorical diversion to somehow pass, leaving that stone right in the centre of the road. When days and months pass, people forget that there ever was a straight road once, and that there is a stone blocking it. This stone becomes invisible. People adjust to the new normal and become comfortable in taking that diversion. Sometimes, in life, the diversion you take could be longer and not a proper road either. But things become “comfortable” when you start using them for some time. This is how pain and obstacles can actually become comfortable for some people. While 99% of the people passed without complaining, one guy stood in front of that rock and asked himself, why is this stone blocking the road? Why can’t we remove this? If we remove this stone wouldn’t we save people’s time, fuel and money? That one person had the guts to take a hammer and slice right through the stone to make a path. While that one person hammered away, other people ridiculed and laughed at him. Why was the fool hammering the stone when there was a diversion to cross that obstacle? Some stopped and advised him not to waste his time. One fine morning, this man singlehandedly finished creating a wide path through the stone and made the road “straight” again. People started to take the straight path instead of the diversion around the rock. This young and curious mind established a toll booth and started collecting money to use the straight pathway, saying it saved people’s time, energy, fuel and money too. Slowly, people started to pay money as the straight pathway was comfortable and convenient. This one person, who had the foresight and determination to take the hammer to smash that stone, is an entrepreneur. While everyone was busy merely passing by, he was able to identify an opportunity in the form of the obstacle rock. So, to start something, you don’t need to be the next Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison. You have to carefully observe the things around you and your reaction to these. If you’re sick of something, don’t complain. Or, don’t just simply take a diversion as a workaround for that pain. Instead, think about how you can remove the source of pain. Once you start to work on finding a solution or improving the existing solution, you’ve got yourself an idea for business. Understanding personal pain and its impact on your emotions is the key to start something. So, innovation doesn’t really need complex thinking. Anyone can bring out the innovator (an entrepreneur) in them by simply trying to make things easier in their everyday life!