“Forbes – Too Many Competitors And Other Top Reasons Why Start-ups Fail”
1. Your business is facing too many competitors.
2.Your sales are poor
3. Wondering how you can convert your social media connections to
customers.
4.You lack effective digital marketing know how
5.You dream BIG
6.You enjoy learning new ideas
7.Your current education isn’t suffice for digital marketing
8.You spread yourself thin through multi-tasking
I understand your pain …
The memorable year was 2007. Then a generous friend called Thando helped
me get employment as a Sales Negotiator at a real estate agency.
People only told me about how much money I would earn as sales
commission but nothing about what needed to be done to earn the commission.
The property market had and still has vicious competition. I was not prepared
for it. I was just a school leaver who only knew poem writing.
I still have fond memories of my masterpiece Wilderness Wanderer which talked about a beautiful girl searching
for true love. Indeed, I was equipped with a table knife for a gun fight. I
lost the fight because I was eventually fired.
I joined another estate agency. This time I wasn’t fired but the agency
owner simply told me the words, “maybe selling real estate isn’t for you.” I
left on my own.
Ultimately, I had to answer one question, “How can I improve
my sales?”
I wasn’t prepared to quite yet. Being penniless and at the deep end I
tried to make do with what was there.
So I managed to turn poem writing into property article writing. Noticing
the new development my friend helped me set up a blog.
I am forever grateful for this because the blog published my property
articles on the internet thereby marketing myself to a wider audience at zero
cost (blogger is free).
A
turning point …
The year 2014 was a turning point because after years of try and error
the new approach finally paid dividends as I earned USD 1 000.00.
It all started when I wrote an article titled,
This article resonated with a Harare lady. She had just purchased a Msasa
(Harare) house from a seriously-ill seller and there was an outstanding
balance.
After reading the post she decided to clear this balance by selling another
property - a piece of land in Madokero (Harare).
I was the real estate agent she commissioned to do the job on her
behalf. Finally, I had discovered the winning formula!
Success happened when I was at my last real estate agency. Of course I
wasn’t fired this time but I left with full honors!
Failure can impede concentration
thereby sabotaging future performance. When we fail once, we are more likely to
fail again at the same goal. We are told to learn from our failures so we
fixate on them. Failure causes stress and long term stress can literally “kill
brain cells” writes Don Goewey author of The
End of Stress, 4 Steps to Rewire Your Brain.
But prevention is better than
cure. As a start-up owner or entrepreneur for the sake of health and wellness
it is important to know the top reasons that makes new businesses fail and
figure out how you can work on them. According to Forbes, CB Insights has shown
that 70% of start-up tech companies fail.
CB Insights delved into a
compilation of start-up failure post-mortems by founders and investors to shed
light on why many ventures grind to a halt. The following list shows the top-20
reasons for failure with Getting Outcompeted being one of the top four
with 19%.
This resonate with a research by
the World Bank on challenges facing Zimbabwean micro, small to medium
enterprises which identified Too Many Competitors being one of the challenges
given by entrepreneurs. Here is the full list by Forbes;
No market
need 42%
Ran out
of cash 29%
Not the
right team 23%
Get
outcompeted 19%
Pricing/cost
issues 18%
Poor
product 17%
Need/lack
business model 17%
Poor
marketing 14 %
Ignore
customers 14%
Product
mis-timed 13%
Lose
focus 13%
Disharmony
on team/investors 13%
Pivot
gone bad 10%
Lack
passion 9%
Bad
location 9%
No
financing / investor interest 8%
Legal
challenges 8%
Don’t use
network / advisors 8%
Burn out
8%
Failure to pivot 7%
1. Not marketing your website or blog
Many believe
that once a site is live it will market itself and visitors will flock to it in
their millions. This is not true. Why ? Because without real efforts to
distribute your site’s content especially on social media and search engines
your site is wasted resource.
There are
over 1 billion websites on the internet today so what are the chances of
someone stumbling upon yours?
2.
Having unrealistic expectations
Sometimes
this is caused by the assumption that online initiatives have overnight
results. Yes there are cases of exceptional success but these are rare at best.
If you are wise you don’t base strategy on exception but on rule . The rule is
that online success is built upon hard work not shortcuts.
3.
Engaging in shady practices
A programmer once
told me he could improve my blog’s ranking on Google for certain key words.
When I asked him to explain how I discovered that his methods were what Google Inc
call SEO spam or black hat methods that may involve tricking the search engine
into giving you a better search ranking for certain key words.
Google has
invested millions for combating SEO spam that is why they have developed Google
Penguin a software dedicated to punishing websites involved in what it may deem
black hat methods.
Being penalized
by Google is something difficult to fix.
4.
Marketing to everyone
Many
companies erroneously measure a website’s success by the quantity not quality
of visitors. For start-ups, micro and small enterprises successful marketing is
usually niche marketing.
A site require the right visitors because at
the end of it all you need visitors who will convert to customers.
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