Cheap Revolution

A Millionaire in One Hour

Do you think you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? Play The Millionaire Maker Game and prove it!

This newly released game was created by Loral Langemeir, a corporate coach and wealth strategist, and is based on her book "The Millionaire Maker Book: Act, Think, and Make Money the Way the Wealthy Do."

The game allows you to attempt to build your net worth as a business owner and takes you through the daily ups and downs of being a real-life entrepreneur. As the site states "kiss your W-2 job goodbye and live the life you want to live, not have to live. Model your dream business after a successful mentor's. Buy a six-unit apartment building. Purchase a share of an oil well. Get sued by a disgruntled employee. Like real life for an entrepreneur, the game is filled with opportunities and challenges."

The purpose of the game is to have the highest net worth by acquiring assets and making strategic business decisions – all in just 60 minutes. It's expensive to try, the board game sells for $179 on the site and there isn't currently an online version (Update: see comments for discounted rate). However, you can register on the site for the chance to play in person at a Barnes & Noble near you.

On a different note, there is something to be learned here on the way this product is being marketed. This is what I usually see with a new product > website > SEO (maybe). What's interesting about the way this product is being marketed is the buzz they're generating with their product. They did this by partnering with Barnes & Noble, a well-known bookstore, and holding live sessions where people get the opportunity to play in person with others. No longer was this being marketed by themselves, it was now a dual effort. It was also different, and these type of events and contests generate great word-of-mouth.

Another great tactic they use are the choice of prizes they give away. They're wealth building educational materials and training sessions, some of which include a) One year of millionaire coaching and mentoring with Loral's Big Table b) Admission to a Wealth Acceleration Coaching or Cash Machine Workshop c) and a complimentary one-on-one Action Strategy Session. Not only are these relevant to the game, they're also cross-selling at the same time by giving away services they normally offer. What can you do in your startup that's similar?

In addition, I saw they also have a blog. It's actually the first entry that appears in search engines when you search for the game. No surprise there - blogs are loved by search engines because of their fresh content. Blogs are also great ways to promote your product/service.

What I also liked about their website is the opt-in box they had for collecting e-mails. This is a great way to build up your listserv and promote your product continuously. Coming out with a new version? Send them a newsletter and so on. However, I would have preferred to see the opt-in box above the fold, i.e. on the top half of the screen. Adding this is a must have on new web sites as well. If your website is about to launch and all you have is a homepage for the time being, take advantage of the empty space and add one in as well.

Finally, the game dominates the first page of Google's search results in different ways. The most noteworthy is the free public release sites. There are a number out there you can take advantage of - the most popular being PRweb.com (Stay tuned for our Do-It-Yourself PR post, coming soon). Sometimes the press releases you write yourself (or someone you hire) get picked up by others and soon your product/service is marketing itself (case in point - what I'm doing!).

I hope these ideas/lessons can help you with your own startup!

By: Yasmine

Do-It-Yourself Logo Design

We first mentioned that Entrepreneur.com offers logo design through a partnership with LogoYes in September 2007, see "Cheap Resources from Entrepreneur.com". LogoYes has since added a new interactive feature that allows you to design a logo in five easy steps. Here's how it works:

1. First, you choose your image – High-Tech, Bold, or Flair. If you're not sure which suits you best, there's a description on each as well as an Image Calculator (see the picture below for an illustration).
2. Next, choose your Industry from 30 different options.
3. Icons of different symbols you can use to incorporate into your logo will appear. These can be pictures, numbers, or abstracts.
4. Type in your company name and tagline (optional). Based on the image you chose in the first step, a list of fonts are suggested for you. If you'd like to explore additional fonts, an array of options are also available. 

The last step allows you to play with the layout of your logo. This includes the symbol you chose, the company name and the tagline. In addition to testing out different positions for each, you can rotate, flip, scale, or zoom in and out of the screen. You can also try out different color variations for each component of your logo. Once your satisfied with your choices, click next to see a preview of the logo you designed. You can then either try to duplicate it yourself or you can purchase it for $99. Here's my attempt at redesigning our Cheap Revolution Logo. What do you think?

As a side note, these kind of fun and interactive features can bring a lot of traffic to your web site. Burger King recently scored big with their "Simpsonize Yourself" campaign. Their tool allows "The Simpsons" fans to upload pictures of themselves and see what they would look like as their favorite cartoon characters. In it's first three days, the site received more than 16 million hits and visitors were spending about 12 minutes on the site at a time. What can you do with your site to draw the same pull?

By: Yasmine

25 Free (and Useful) SEO Tools

The Web is full of free SEO tools that you can do yourself. We've been bookmarking these tools as we come across them leading us to this post – a list of the top free, useful SEO tools we've found so far on the web.

Website Grading Tools

1. Website Grader measures the marketing effectiveness of your website. Input your URL and related keywords that describe your website and list websites of competitors – these are optional but highly recommended to measure your sites true value. It also provides basic advice on how you can improve your site.
2. OnStartups.com is actually a blog for software entrepreneurs. However, they offer a "Grade Your Startup Website" tool very similar to Website Grader.
3. SEOmoz's Crawl Test helps you quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website.
4. Web Page Analyzer provides you with suggestions on how to improve your page's load time. It determines your page size, download time and composition.
5. Google's Website Optimizer Tool tests the images and text on your site to help you increase your visitor's conversion rates and overall satisfaction.

Sitemap Generator Tools

1. XML-Sitemaps.com – Build your own site map online and submit it to Google, Yahoo, or any search engine so your site is crawled accordingly.
2. Google Webmaster Tools – Discover how Google's views your site, diagnose problems, and share your information to help improve your web site's visibility. You can also see how your site performs by learning what drives traffic to your site.

Keyword Tools

1. Google Keyword Tool – Find the best keywords for your website by finding out how popular they are.
2. Digial Point's Keyword Tool – Pulls results from Overture and Wordtracker to determine which keywords are searched most often.
3. GTrends from Wordtracker - Find up to 100 related keywords for your site and an estimate of their daily search volume.
4. SEOdigger - Determine which keywords on your site rank in Google's Top 20 and analyze your site, etc.
5. Keyword Discovery - Generate the top 100 keywords from a cross section of searches.

Online Marketing Dictionaries

1. Internet Marketing Dictionary – Not sure what SEO means? Need more information on affiliate marketing? Find out what these terms mean and more.
2. SEOmoz – Find out everything you didn't know about search engine optimization (SEO).
3. Aaron Wall's SEO Glossary - Another popular search engine marketing dictionary.

Competitive Analysis Tools

1. Compete – Perform competitive research with a statistical comparison of up to 5 different websites.
2. Quantcast – Allows you to view a site's traffic and demographic trends as well as other details.
3. SpyFu - Spy on your competitors by downloading their keywords as well as their Adwords.

Meta Tag Tools

1. Meta Tag Analyzer – Submit your URL and receive tips on how to improve your meta tags.
2. Meta Tag Generator - Get ideas on which meta tags to use on your site based on your site's name, description, and keywords.

Web Analytic Tools

1. Google Analytics – A web analytics tool that allows you to find out where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they're searching for to find you, and much more. View which marketing initiatives are working and which aren't and track online campaigns.

2. HitTail - See where your current Web site visitors come from, then monitor the results after you make changes to your pages. It helps you figure out which of your keywords are the most promising in real-time. Also suggests keywords tailored to your site and provides ideas for new content, blog posts, or PPC campaigns.

Other Useful Tools:

1. Xinureturns.com – An all-in-one tool that provides you with a web site's keywords, descriptions, tags, online time, rankings (such as Google PageRank , Technorati, and Alexa), social bookmarks, indexed pages and backlinks - A great tool that I've used myself numerous times.
2. Socialposter – Submit your link to 40 different social sites such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon, technorati, blinklist, and much more.
3. PageStrength – Assess your site's importance and visibility.

Let us know if you've found other free tools by adding a comment below and as always, you can find other free and useful marketing resources at our Cheap Zone.

30 things every entrepreneur should know how to do
Building Trust with your Online Users
Top Entrepreneurial Quotes
99 Free Online Classes on Business & Entrepreneurship
15 DIY PR Ideas

By: Yasmine

Find resources in Technology, Legal, Marketing, Management, Finance and Sales here.

Top 7 Constant Contact Alternatives including Mailchimp

Updated on 9/19/2017:

Choosing the proper email marketing software can be a pain to research as each program as its own pros and cons. After talking to some of our clients and browsing the web, I’ve compiled a list of seven competitors to Constant Contact with short snippets of their features, how they differ and pricing. 

If you're switching from another service, this post on CANSPAM policies of the top email campaign solutions may be helpful to you. 

1. iContact

   – In addition to creating, sending and tracking e-mail newsletters, you can also create and send surveys, auto-responders, blogs, and RSS feeds. iContact offers a free 30-day trial without requiring a credit card and the next level starts at $14 a month. This service charges you on the number of contacts you have - not the number of e-mails sent or a flat fee basis. You can save 15% by signing up for their annual account. They have a cool custom design feature where their team will design a personalized template for you - even with their lowest price plan. They also have A/B testing and integrate with Google Analytics and Salesforce. In addition, they've partnered with a third party to improve how many e-mails get through to recipients. Look for the 20% discount if you're a non-profit. The service recently won the Web 2.0 Award for "Best Marketing Application."Click on the chat icon on the upper right of the page if you have more questions. 

2. AWeber 

   - The Company has been around since 1998 and works with more than 110,000 businesses, non-profits and agencies. They are known for their customer service and are one of the few services that displays their phone number. In addition, they have a setup wizard to help first-time users set up their account instead of leaving them to discover features on their own. Their popular features includes autoresponders, analytics, segmenting, split testing, and even social integration (e.g. collecting subscribers from Facebook/WordPress, etc). They have a free 30-day trial which provides full access to all features. Pricing is based on the number of emails and starts at $19 monthly for up to 500 subscribers and goes up to $149 for up to 25,000 emails. Something unique they do is also discount their plans if a user pays quarterly or yearly and they also providing discount pricing for students and nonprofits. 

3. Campaigner 

   - Tailoring themselves to small businesses who are new to email marketing, this company charges a monthly subscription depending on many email addresses you have on your list. The lowest plan is $19.95/month for 1000 contacts and the highest is only $549/month for up to 100,000 contacts. The features are up to par with the others with email templates, easy to use email editor, signup forms, A/B split testing, engagement scoring and tracking, etc. They also allow 3rd party ad content integration as well as dynamic content. 

4. GetResponse 

   - Praised for their top-notch customer service which is also available on weekends, they recently launched an iPhone and Android application to make it easier to use the service on smartphones. Their most prominent features are the unlimited autoresponders, broadcasts, and lists they provide. The analytics tool they offer under their Email Intelligence section makes it easy to track and compare campaigns.  In addition, they have 16 different ways to import your list which is probably what has helped them service more than 350,000 customers in 182 countries. Pricing is discounted by 18% with an annual subscription and 30% for a 2-year commitment. A list of 1,000 starts at $15 a month, $49 for 5,000 subscribers and $165 for 10,000 names. They also have an enterprise version for lists that are more than 100,000. Nonprofits get 50% off. You can try it for free for 30 days without a credit card. 

5. SendinBlue

   – Launched in 2012, SendinBlue is used by 100k+ customers and it's the cheapest option on this list. They also offer subscription and pay as you go plans with a free trial that allows you to send 9,000 emails a month. If you're worried about being gray or black listed, they have a unique service that allows you to optimize your deliverability by getting your own dedicated IP address. They also provide SMS marketing campaign for those that want to try another outlet (with more than 5 million text messages sent each month). Marketing automation is another feature. A unique aspect of the company is they offer customer support in 6 languages and they even respond to support questions on Twitter. Finally, they also offer integrations with WordPress, Google Analytics, Shopify, Salesforce, and others. 

6. MailChimp 

   - Offering a pay-per-email or a monthly plan option, MailChimp lets you customize how you want to be billed. The most notable difference is how they allow users to perform A/B testing of your subject lines. They offer a free plan for small email lists of 2,000 with a limit of 12k monthly emails. For unlimited emails, their plan starts at $10 for 500 subscribers. It goes up as high as you need and you can view an estimate by going to the pricing page and plugging in your number of subscribers. Pay-per-you-go pricing starts at three cents per email and decreases accordingly as more credits are purchased. For paid accounts, you can get a $30 credit by signing up with this link.  Note:  Do not be fooled by the free offer. The plan becomes more expensive than other services as you build your email list. Cheaper Mailchimp competitors for more than 2,000 emails are SendinBlue, iContact and GetResponse.

7. StreamSend

- With clients like Monster.com, Barnes & Noble and UPS, StreamSend is an enterprise solution suited for medium to large businesses. Their pricing starts at $19.90 for 2k emails and goes up to $209.90 for 150k emails. One feature that stuck out to me is their Email Analyzer where they preview your email in 30 email clients as well as test it with 9 spam filters. They also offer professionally designed custom templates for a fee and they also have a free30-dayy trial although it's limited to only 200 emails a month. 

If you’ve encountered or use a service we haven’t mentioned, please share your experiences with us by adding a comment below.

Alternatives to eLance, Guru.com, ODesk, etc.

Guru.com is a great source in locating freelance talent in website design, programming, graphic design. If you’re looking for an alternative source, here’s the complete list of similar sites we’ve added so far:

•  eLance - Another popular source in finding freelance talent. Find and hire people "on demand"
• oDesk - Hire, manage and pay remote contractors as if they were in thier own office

(We can compared eLance vs. Odesk in this updated post on February 2012) 

•  ScriptLance - Connect with programmers and outsource web projects
•  The Freelance Nation - Find freelancers for accounting/finance projects, marketing projects, programmers and much more. The only one I’ve seen that doesn’t charge transaction fees
•  GetaFreelancer.com - Join to find freelance programmers, web designers, and copywriters. Also provides outsourcing opportunities to India, Romania, Ukraine and other countries
•  RentACoder (Now vWorker)- Find coders to build your custom software in an international marketplace

Updated (as of October 3, 2011):

These relevant sources were derived from our readers' feedback, thanks everyone!

• AuthenticJobs - Post your project here to find freelancers and full-timers
• AssistU - Find Virtual Assistants trained and coached by the leaders of professional trainers
• JERPAT Virtual Assistants - Another site where you can find Virtual Assistants
• GetFriday - Provide remote executive assistant services to small businesses anywhere in the world
• FreelanceWebMarket - is an online resource for freelance professionals, companies, and individuals from the USA, UK, Canada, India, Romania, and many other countries

In January, 2010, we added a post evaluating oDesk vs. eLance vs. getafreelancer vs. vWorker. Check it out and let us know what you think! In addition, we also published an entry about the advantages of virtual teams. 

By: Yasmine

An Evaluation of LogoWorks

There are thousands of online logo design sites on the Internet. One that stands apart from the pack is Logoworks. It is a popular online logo design firm that claims to have a 98% satisfaction rate from over 65,000 clients. We recently purchased one of their design packages and decided to write an evaluation based on our experience.

An Evaluation of Popular Project Management Tools

We were recently given the task of evaluating different project management tools for a client. They were in the midst of using BaseCamp and wanted a tool that was more robust. Due to a lack of expertise with MS Project amongst the team and the need to share the tasks internally, we embarked on an evaluation of six different project management tools to find a more suitable tool for their needs. With a few referrals and a Google search, we decided to evaluate BaseCamp, goplan, WebOffice, DotProject, Microsoft Project, and Zoho Projects.

 
We assessed these tools based on a number of criteria the client viewed as necessary. They were: 

• Making sure it was a shared tool – i.e. making sure it was accessible to the team from the office/home
• Making sure it included an alert/notification feature
• The ease of inputting and changing data
• The ability to assign priorities to tasks
• Ensuring the tool supported task dependencies
• The ability to comment on tasks
• Security features
• Gantt charts feature
• The ability to assign roles and responsibilities 

Other nice-to-have features they were looking for included:

• The ability to sort by project or person
• A task completion feature
• Information regulation - i.e. the ability to control who modifies the information
• Multi-resource assignment - i.e. allowing more than one person to be assigned to a task
• Sharing documents with clients 

Despite our client's dissatisfaction with BaseCamp, it is a popular project management tool used by over one million people and small businesses. It’s easy to use with a minimum investment required in money and training. However, it lacks many of the features listed above. Out of the necessary features our client was looking for, it did not allow tasks to be prioritized, dependencies, task comments, Gantt charts, sorting by project or person and it lacks heavy duty security capabilities. Other aspects it did not include are a task completion feature and multi-resource assignment. 

GoPlan was just released this past March and has similarities to BaseCamp. Their plans range from free to $100/month. While it had most of the necessary features in the above criteria (excluding the priority tracking and Gantt charts), it did not possess any of the nice-to-haves. 

WebOffice is a virtual office with collaboration features. Pricing starts at $59.95/month and go as high as $2,500/month. It included most of the features listed above with the exception of dependencies, task comments, Gantt charts, sorting by project/person, and sharing documents with clients. 

DotProject is an open source program (i.e. its free, but hosting is not included). It allows you to manage several projects at once across several companies, something not offered by any of the other project management tools. DotProject also includes all the features mentioned.  The program even allows you to attach files to tasks and projects. For a more detailed evaluation, visit http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/06/28/1956238&tid=74

Microsoft Project is another popular management tool and it included almost all the features listed above.  The standard use of MS Project is on a user’s desktop. As a result, it is only considered a shared tool with Project Server and Project Web Access. Microsoft project does not support document sharing by itself and does not provide any advanced security features.

Zoho Projects was the last tool we evaluated. Pricing ranges from free for one project to $80/month for unlimited projects. The features it did not include were dependencies, security, ability to sort by project/person, the ability to regulate information, and multi-resource assignment. 

As you can see, there are a number of interesting new entrants in the project management and collaboration space. This is good news for project teams looking for the right formula to match their needs. However, as one can see from this analysis, it’s difficult to find comprehensive, shared project tools that meet the specific needs of today’s distributed teams. The recommendation for our client might be different from your needs, but this should give you some ideas on how best to proceed in your evaluation.

Note: In the end, our client chose DotProject.

Update: Another tool we at Team and a Dream started using is Huddle. It has almost all the features above and the company is rolling out with new features and updates regularly. This month customers can get 5% off at Huddle for Life by using coupon code: UHGFDX. Offer valid until 28th February 2011 on all paying subscriptions or free to paid upgrades at Huddle. 

For evaluations on other tools, check out Web Worker Daily's post and Emilychang.com. Be sure to look over the comments as well, they list even more tools!

Written by: Yasmine Mustafa

The Perfect Web Application Partner is found!

After the last several weeks of pain-stakingly grinding through the creation of the "just right" job description, reviewing nearly 40 vendor responses, outlining 2nd and then 3rd levels of screening questions (see recent posts), I had narrowed the choice to five vendors.

I layered in a round of detailed information about the project specifics, the budget and their proposal. None of the vendors had seen the project details until this point. The project is to complete the development of a community web-site called WineInvestor.

Of the five vendors:

• Only one of the finalists never responded - an Indian company of 150 people, never responded.
• Another, smaller Indian firm (10 people) responded that the author of the email had recently undergone surgery and could not respond at this time.
• Three of the finalists (two Indian firms and a Pakistani firm) submitted competitive bids - with the lowest bid coming in at 71% of the highest.

However, only two of the bids (the lowest two actually) had any detail about the project.

One of the responses provided a breakdown of project into major components (a database and subscriber management system, a community forum, a blog, etc.). I was satisfied with the response and liked a lot many of the qualitative elements about this small firm in Pakistan of about 10 people.

The other response provided a detailed spreadsheet of tasks, phases and and project elements. It was a rigorous analysis engineered to exude confidence! The sales person represented 150 person firm and, incredibly, worked only 2 hours from where I lived. (Both of these finalists had a state-side sales presence.)

I had found my winner! - or so I thought.

During my interview with the confidence-exuding engineering firm, I asked about a "match guarantee" that he offered in his original response to my project. He said he would consider it.

This is where the proverbial handoff turned into a fumble.

While I considered this a step in finalizing our terms, but never thought of it as a show-stopper, he interpreted it as a deal-breaker if he could not answer affirmatively.

After nearly daily correspondence and phone calls, I didn't hear from him for 3 days.

Long story, shorter. . . I called my other candidate, who quickly emailed me four references (I asked for three) and worked out final terms inside of 36 hours. I was really thrilled as this seems like a really solid group to work with. All four references reported five star reviews.

Forty two days from July 4 until August 16. Next time will be a lot faster.

Stay tuned for more about this partner and the WineInvestor project!

 

Are there dangers in going "Cheap"? Pixelgirl warns about one service.

This article was sent to me by a designer who is worried about questionable practices from online Logo firms like Logoworks.  I can say that I've used Logoworks with decent success.  While I didn't choose their design for my Team and a Dream Logo (www.teamandadream.com), I did use their Logo for the Business Services Network page.  Check out http://www.teamandadream.com/Services.htm.

The Team and a Dream logo was created by Brad Bookler as part of the Team and a Dream Logo Design package. 

The Logoworks article follows:
Article about Logoworks from Pixelgirl