Category: Business

  • It’s not easy. The end.

    I once again found my way to New York City, chilling with new and old friends and today I had the pleasure to meet Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur, angel investor and the guy that misspelled the title of his book “One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership” while of course, it should have been “The Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership”!

    I thought I hustled, worked hard, rocking it about 12/14 hours a day.

    Boy was I wrong… Gary hustles 18 hours per day, managing meetings, keynotes, social presence and so much more.

    And STILL… People doubt him. Does he really hustle that hard? Is he really the thriving force behind his company (vaynermedia.com) and is he really that good?

    I’m starting this post about Gary, but really – It’s about all of us. Who’s us? Entrepreneurs.

    Yeah – I’m that bold to call myself an entrepreneur. The similarities between entrepreneurs seem to add up for me at the moment. The more I talk with them, the more I find out that most have no degree.

    A lot of entrepreneurs experience negativity, people that don’t believe in them, tell them “you won’t make it” or “what you do won’t get you anywhere” and yet still they keep pushing to the max. Pushing to meet their KPI’s and goals while being pushed back by the people they care about.

    And you know what’s funny? When you make it, when you prove them wrong… They say they always knew you would.

    But that’s just life side of things… What about the actual business? The Hustling. Moving your product 1 by 1, hand to hand.

    Its not easy. You have to get used to people saying NO. NO. And guess what… NO!

    And when you’re just getting started – You don’t have a sales team. You don’t have a web team. You don’t have a designer. You’ve got you. Heck, I’m in this adventure with Sharon (sharonmeijer.com) for the past 2/2.5 years now and we still do EVERYTHING OURSELVES. Not because we can’t afford outsourcing, not because we don’t want to outsource… But because we love what we do. It’s just that simple.

    You can tell us a 1000 times that we won’t make it. We’ll look at each other, laugh at you as if it’s the last time we can ever laugh at anyone and continue. We’re used to NO 😉

    What the moral is of this story? I have no *bleeping* clue xD… It’s almost 11:30PM and I woke up at 7am so my train of thought is about to arrive at it’s final destination.

    If you have just .1% of entrepreneurial gut in you… Grow it. Build it. Get used to NO. Move your product 1 by 1 yourself and grow. That said…

    It’s not easy. The end.

    PS: Get Gary’s latest book “#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness” on Amazon TODAY!

  • The Price of Being an Entrepreneur

    For the last few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work from home alongside with my lovely girlfriend Sharon. Back in 2013, I launched a software that helps entrepreneurs generate traffic for their business at a great price.

    Immediately after launch, I dove into the world of online marketing and found that the online entrepreneur needs three things to succeed: A Blog, a Page Builder to create landing pages, sales pages etc and an Email Marketing System to manage leads, lead lists, send email campaigns and to configure their autoresponder series. A whole new world opened up to me, and I’ve been fortunate enough to use these very tools to build my business with Sharon.

    Email Marketing Tools

    While looking at these tools and systems, I noticed that the service providers took advantage of their monopoly positions in the industry. Looking at the email marketing tools, a few of the big players are Aweber, GetResponse and Mailchimp. Seeing Aweber the most, I dediced to look at their pricing structure… And got the shock of my life…

    Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 7.20.39 PM Being a developer, maybe I’m fortunate enough to realize that (looking at their most expensive plan at $149 per month) the prices these providers charge for using their service, are ridiculously high.

    Storing 25.000 leads for $149 is insane in my opinion, and far exceed most marketer’s list capacity (By now I personally have well over 500K leads) forcing them to contact Aweber in this case and I probably don’t even want to know what they would charge me to store ALL of my leads.

    See, people who are getting started online might not even have $149 per month to spend on a service like this and are basically forced to turn to a lesser service, which also means that they will run into issues getting their emails delivered!

    Page Builder Tools

    The email marketing tools is just one part of running your online business. Being able to store leads and email them is cool, but if you don’t have a so-called landing/squeeze/opt-in page you’re not getting very far. This leads most people to services like LeadPages to build their pages with their drag & drop systems. Again, a big shock hit me!

    Looking at their signup page, people pay a whopping $67 per month (if the monthly payment option is chosen) to build their Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 7.35.20 PMpages. This allows them to build their squeeze, sales, opt-in, webinar pages and a few other types of pages that allows them to generate their leads and to provide a nice look to their pages without going through the hassle of learning how to code the page themselves.

    Again, I might have an unfair advantage, but looking at this pricing structure I would just feel ripped off. Hosting nowadays can cost pennies, and the web offers a wide variety of pre-built html pages that people can use to generate leads with rather then paying $67 JUST TO BUILD PAGES!

    There has to be a better alternative…

    Well… There wasn’t, unless you’re up for joining a MLM (multi-level marketing) company paying $100’s per month, being forced to buy into their higher level tiers by your sponsor and not having full freedom to doing exactly what you want…

    So I created it, and together with Sharon I’m proud to introduce you to: ToolsPlatform

    The biggest issue we see in the tools mentioned above is that you are limited in your creative freedom. Like a set limit of leads, pages and upload space. With ToolsPlatform, there are NO limits. You’re not paying extra for storing your leads, lists, campaigns or autoresponders and are in no way limited to what type of pages you want to make: You have complete control and freedom.

    As we have just launched this tools set, and want to start off with a bang, we’re allowing people to try ToolsPlatform for just $7. This trial is, as mentioned, in no way limited either giving you the full “All-In-One Marketing Suite” for you to try, use and abuse.

    After your trial (7 days), you’re paying just $49 per month to keep your suite up and running and you’ll never run into limits. We offer unlimited upload space and bandwidth within your site, again: no limits in uploading and storing leads, lists, camaigns and autoresponders and can write and publish unlimited articles on your blog.

    Best of all: It is all included in 1 dashboard, saving you the hassle of jumping around from site to site trying to connect it all together. ToolsPlatform is simply point, click and share it with the world.

    Try ToolsPlatform now for just $7, and see how our All-In-One Marketing Suite will help you generate an online income while keeping your overhead to the bare minimum!

    Let me know in the comments below what you think – I’m looking forward to your thoughts and opinions.

  • New: Affiliate Banner Graphics

    Affiliate Banner Graphics - Create Banners Without Photoshop!No no no this is not an ad… It’s a new project I acquired 😉
    See what I did there: project, not an ad 😛

    Seriously though, I ran across this system multiple times over the past few years and was finally able to snatch up the original domain name intended for the product: http://www.affiliatebannergraphics.com

    This new online app allows anyone to create beautiful banner graphics for any purpose. Whether you’re an affiliate of a product which does not provide banners, or you are a product owner looking to create banners to distribute – Affiliate Banner Graphics has you covered!

    I’m very happy with this new addition to the Aron & Sharon arsenal, and I hope it will be of good use to many.

    Let me know your thoughts below!
    Cheers,
    Aron

  • A little time off

    The last couple of weeks Sharon and I have been very busy with planning. The future, how we’re going to duplicate what we have accomplished so far but most of all: how can we give back? (We did this at the location seen in this photo: a villa we rented in Fuerteventura, Spain!)

    We’ve been very fortunate to launch our business and within a year be fully independent. With independent I mean no third party stuff. We do it all ourselves, in-house.

    Exiting times are ahead, and we can’t wait to share what we have coming. For the past 4 months we have been very focused on building our own blogging platform, creating training courses and converting recieved feedback to reality and creating what is in demand. 
    Stay tuned, we have some awesome stuff to share with you very soon.

    Take care! -Aron

  • The Business to Consumer Relationship

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCdHfdzzPmg

    I think it’s very important to be able to reach out to your customers directly. Whether its via email, phone or social media you need to be able to connect with them on a 1on1 level. Let me know what you think in the comments section below!