Twitter Marketing

The majority of today‘s ―traditional‖ marketers use outbound marketing to reach their audiences. For message distribution, they use print media, radio, and TV advertisements. For lead generation, they use direct mail, cold calls, and email blasts. While these methods may have worked in the past, by using tools like TIVO/DVR, email spam-blockers, and caller ID, now consumers can easily block messages they don‘t want. People are in more control over how they consume media and what messages they care to hear. 

People are now engaging in conversations. Conversation is the new marketing.This means that instead of continuing to push marketing messages out, effective marketers must adapt to consumers ‘new behaviour by creating marketing campaigns that pull people in to their business. 

People are now engaging in conversations. Conversation is the new marketing and the best medium to have a conversation with potential customers is through Twitter, The benefits of having an active twitter presence are;

• ·   Participating in online conversations that shape perceptions about your brand
•        Building relationships with influencers in your field
•     Creating a community of supporters

 The basics are the following

1. Create a Twitter account

2. Include a link to your website in your settings

3. Include your contact information

4. Upload a logo or photo that is consistent with your branding

5. Include a Twitter background that suits your brand image

6. Include a description in your Twitter settings that include “key words” that are congruent with your blog topic that Google will like.

Choose your main goals

·         Generate traffic to the website

·         Enhance customer service

·         Engage with customers and potential prospects. Engagement includes conversations, getting them to click on your  links in your tweet

·         Enhance and promote the brand

·         Gain twitter followers to 1000 or more by the end of December

Finding and gaining your followers

·         We will begin targeting a demographic on twitter by first finding them using twello and proceed to following them. Twitter etiquette suggest that “if I follow you, you follow back” and vice-versa so the best way to gain followers initially is to become a follower of others just look at this guy (notice the amount of people he’s following and how many followers he has)

·         “Follow me on twitter” buttons and calls to action can be placed on your website to make it easy for people to join your twitter community.

Engaging Followers

·         Answer questions people ask you on Twitter

·         Ask questions of your Twitter followers

·         Recognize people on Twitter who retweet your tweets often using #FollowFridays or #FF

·         Your main twitter hashtag can be #YourBiz for persons to communicate with you so for example—after an experience with you and someone loves your service and tweets about it they may put “Loving these cookies from @thecookieshoppe #Gcookies all the way!”

·         Run contest where followers will have to use the #YourBiz hashtag to participate.

These are just a few of the many tactics you could implement

Monitoring and Measuring

Twitter doesn’t give us the luxury of having an analytics page like on Facebook to view our progress so we’ll be using hootsuite to monitor and measure our performance.

Facebook Marketing

The marketing plan will be broken down into three phases which are:

1. Acquire Fans
2. Engage Fans
3. Post Schedule

Acquire Fans

In the beginning of your Facebook marketing plan, you’ll focus on fan acquisition. To start building a fan base, drive organic awareness at no cost by making your fan page badge or Facebook URL which can be shortened, you’d have this url prominent on other web properties such as blogs, twitter, websites and editorial content. Offline, you can use events and seminars to let people know you’re on Facebook. Word of mouth can go a long way and most of your initial fans will be existing customers, but always give them a reason to visit your page. The number one reason a customer becomes a fan is to receive special offers or discounts, so create incentive with promotions.

Competitions:

• Referral Competition - How to Play: Invite your friends to like our page, after they like it they will have to put YOUR NAME on our wall. On Aug _ 20XX at exactly 11pm the person whose name appears the most, wins. But there’s a twist! You have to invite at least 100 people to have a chance! Good Luck everyone!

Prize: Of your choosing

• Monthly “Fan Of The month” prizes can be given with the use of this application called booshaka that automatically ranks your top fans based of how much they engage with your page via liking sharing and commenting.

Prize: Of your choosing

Paid Advertising:

Facebook Ads: If you’re considering digital advertisements, Facebook ads are a highly effective medium for acquiring targeted fans and building a solid fan base.

Unlike traditional pay-per-click, more is not better with Facebook. The broader your reach the less relevant your ad units will be. Facebook is a social space after all, so it’s no surprise that Facebook users will be more inclined to click on your ad if it’s personally relevant to them

Using ads to acquire fans is extremely easy thanks to Facebook’s ad interface which allows you to drill down to the demographic profile of an audience you want to target, including interests, age, sex, location and education level. You can even target people who are friends with people who already “like” your Facebook page.

Sponsored Ads: Sponsored Stories on Facebook, which are similar to Facebook ad units in appearance. The difference is that Sponsored Stories promote organic user activity such as Page updates, Likes and Apps activity. It is a better use of advertising dollars to let your fans tell their friends about you rather than trying to reach those friends on your own.

Engage Fans

Actively engaging with your fans will in turn bring you more fans as the viral awareness arises. After brand invites/ ads, your current fans are the number two reason other Facebook users become a fan.

Once you have a fan base you’re probably wondering “now what?” It’s time to monetize and to do so you need take into consideration the nuances of Facebook and adjust your efforts accordingly. Facebook has an algorithm called EdgeRank that makes relationships with your fans the highest priority. This means that if your fans aren’t actively engaging with your page, then your wall posts aren’t making it to their newsfeeds.

• Use visual content for majority of posts as visuals resonates better with fans and produces more likes and shares. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco)
• Visual content drives engagement, in fact just one month after the introduction of facebook timeline for brands, visual content--photos and videos--saw a 65% increase in engagement. (Source: Simply Measure)
• Inspirational Quote in mornings
• Ask simple questions (such as a “fill in the blank” eg. The thing I hate the most about Mondays is _______ [fans will answer])
• Funny Content
• The most effective wall posts are those that are touching or contain emotional stories. Provocative posts or posts igniting a passionate debate will also solicit the highest engagement rates - 2-3x higher
• Receiving only a slightly lower engagement rate of 1.5-2x more are posts about sports wins or that ask the audience simple questions.For example: The thing I hate the most about Mondays is _______ [fans will answer])
• Keep this at a ratio of 80:20 meaning 80% post about interesting content to engage fans and 20% post about your actual product. The goal of social media overall is not necessarily to market your service but to build and maintain a loyal customer base, once you have a loyal customer base you cannot lose. Think LIME(treated us bad for years) vs Digicel(treated us good from beginning), Digicel has a more loyal following so LIME is always fighting an uphill battle.
• Additionally, the content that you post doesn’t always have to be on brand. You can talk about anything from current events to seasonal greetings. If content is interesting to your fans, you’ll receive the engagement that keeps your posts prominent in their newsfeeds.

Post Schedule

I suggest that you make 4-6 Facebook posts a day and nothing more in order to give previous posts time to circulate around fans timelines and newsfeeds.  These posts should be made between 9am – 9pm

• Monday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 7:10pm
• Tuesday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 7:10pm
• Wednesday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 7:10pm
• Thursday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 7:10pm
• Friday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 5:30pm, 9pm
• Saturday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 5:30pm, 9pm
• Sunday: 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 5:30pm, 9pm

Social media is the very fabric that holds Generation Y together, if you’re not utilizing it you're missing out on creating immense value for your business.

"People share, read and generally engage more with any type of content when it's surfaced through friends and people they know and trust"- Malorie Lucich; Facebook Spokesperson

History of Ecommerce

The history of ecommerce is short, but it is nevertheless interesting. Here's a brief overview of how ecommerce evolved from primitive interactions to the sophisticated interconnected world of business transactions that we take for granted today.

Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 66 percent of American adults online have used the Internet to make at least one purchase. However, even though ecommerce in its strictest definition means that a sales transaction has taken place online, if the definition is expanded to include product searches and research, the number of American adults engaged in ecommerce jumps to an astonishing 93 percent. The Internet does, indeed, provide varied opportunities and experiences when it comes to buying things.

In the beginning: EDI and ARPAnet

The history of ecommerce basically starts in the 1960s. At this time, businesses used computer interaction for electronic transactions. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was the way that businesses could share information electronically with each other. This type of exchange became increasingly important as credit cards became a part of the commerce landscape. Eventually, though, Edi was replaced by ASC X12, a protocol developed by the American National Standards Institute in 1979, designed for sharing business documents and information electronically. Additionally, ARPAnet was being developed by the military for communications purposes. ARPAnet was the source of the "dial up" mode of accessing a computer system.

However, everything up to 1982 was soon replaced by Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP – now you know what those letters mean) Instead of sending signals individually along one route, TCP/IP uses packets, sending information along different routes. Packet-switching technology is the key to today's modern Internet and one of the biggest developments in the history of ecommerce.

Shopping online – ecommerce emerges

The first instance of true ecommerce from the standpoint of individuals connected to some sort of computer Internet system, occurred in the middle of the 1980s. CompuServe (the first popular provider for home PCs) began offering a connection to 110 different merchants through the Electronic Mall. It didn't catch on as much as CompuServe hoped, but it serves at the first examples of ecommerce in a form similar to what we have today.

The real progress of the Internet as we know it today came in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee, in conjunction with CERN, developed the WorldWideWeb (WWW) using hypertext and an Internet browser that was user-friendly (the first widely distributed browser, Mosaic, appeared in 1993, developed by Marc Andreesen). But, still, businesses could not operate online until a year later, in 1991, when the ban was lifted on commercial businesses operating online. You can imagine how ecommerce began to take off from there.

Other developments that contributed to the development of ecommerce include:

·        1994's Netscape release that included SSL, the security protocol used to ensure privacy and protection during online transactions.

·        Third-party payment services in 1994 and 1995 (First Virtual and CyberCash) for credit card payment processing over the Internet.

·        Digital certificates and IDs developed by VeriSign in 1995.

Amazon and eBay revolutionize the way we buy

Amazon and eBay are the main pioneers when it comes to selling online. The history of ecommerce owes a great debt to Amazon and eBay. These companies revolutionized the face of the Internet, as well as the way we buy things.

Amazon was the first worldwide merchant. By the end of August 1995 – just a month after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sold his first book from his garage in Seattle – Amazon was selling in all of the states in the U.S., and to 45 countries. Bezos realized that the Internet made it possible to easily take and process orders, and to ship them. It also provided a way to coordinate inventory by taking orders, and then buying direct from the publishers.

eBay allows just about anyone to be an online merchant. Founder Pierre Omidyar started eBay when he developed AuctionWeb, a site from which he offered a broken laser pointer. It sold – to a collector of broken laser pointers. The idea was that the Internet was the great leveler. Since its beginnings in 1995, eBay has developed a sophisticated system that allows anyone to set up a storefront and sell merchandise.

Today, the history of ecommerce moves forward. There are a number of payment options and abilities, from PayPal to eChecks to credit cards to systems of barter. Online buying is not restricted to consumer items and novelties: There are even ecommerce Web sites where you can order groceries for home delivery, and you can order tonight's pizza dinner online as well. With so much available, it is possible to find specialty items for almost anyone, making it possible to find nearly anything you want, and have shipped directly to you.


Social Commerce

With the rise of social media came the next natural innovation in e-commerce which is social commerce lead by companies such as Groupon, Gilt City and Fab.com. The innovative side of social commerce is that it is built and tailored around a social psychology that makes a website more prone to get purchases from visitors.

The future looks promising for e-commerce as different start-ups pop up everyday that are always pushing the envelope

Summary Of Lean Start-Up/ Lean Startup Methodologies

A few months back I stumbled upon a book that as a budding entrepreneur, would change my outlook on the process of building and running a company. I was a bit happy to know there is a scientific method to what I consider the wild Art Of Entrepreneurship, this scientific method is known as The Lean Startup pioneered by Mr. Eric Ries. This book makes you feel like a young wizard learning new magic tricks within every chapter, but it can be quite a long read and you may forget all the important points outlined in this great book.

So here's a summary of what I consider to be the backbone of lean startup methodologies.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build- the thing customers want and will pay for as  quickly as possible.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The key to operating under these conditions is to gather a group of people and investors that can make the build-measure-learn cycle as fast and effective as possible.

You can only learn if you can validate your learning with data or experience. So product development is not a department within a company, but a series of hypothesis that you need to test. The minimum-viable-product is the basic learning tool that you test your hypothesis on; it is the most stripped down version of your product that will help you learn what you need to know. After BUILDing the MVP you MEASURE and LEARN from it and make adjustments where necessary.

No matter what hypothesis you test, don't forget to test two hypothesis:

1. The Value Hypothesis tests whether a product/service really delivers value to customers once they are using it.
2. The Growth Hypothesis tests how new customers will discover the product.

Asking yourself these questions before adding more features:

1. Do customers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?
2. If they was a solution, would they buy it?
3. Would they buy it from us?
4. Can we build a solution to the problem?

Success is not delivering a feature. Success is learning how to solve the customers problem. You can't do this without A LOT of customer interaction.

MEASURE: first establish a baseline of relevant metrics with an MVP- conversion rates, sign-up rates, trial rates, payment rates etc. Second, adjust the product to improve these rates. Thrid, if the product features/marketing can't be adjusted to make these rates into a business, PIVOT.

Tools to help measure: Cohorts help you figure out what customers are doing what on your site. the more granular the data, the more actionable it can be to figuring out what features you should add whether to pivot. Split testing means putting different versions of a product to sets of customers to test whether a different feature has a desired effect. 

For organizational purposes make sure measurements are actionable, accessible and auditable. If not there will be a gridlock, in difference or dispute.

Actionable: when an employee sees a report about a specific metric, it's essential that they have some idea how to replicate the result in the report. 

Accessible: Everyone in the company understands how to read them, everyone in the company has easy access to the latest data.

Auditable: It should be possible to translate the summary numbers in the report back to actual customers who generate them.

PIVOT: You built, you measured, you learned and the relevant metrics aren't getting any better. It's probably time to consider a pivot. Options are the following

1. Customer problem pivot. In this scenario, you use essentially the same product to solve a different problem for the same customer segment. Eric says that Starbucks famously did this pivot when they went from selling coffee beans and espresso makers to brewing drinks in-house.
2. Market segment pivot. This means you take your existing product and use it to solve a similar problem for a different set of customers. This may be necessary when you find that consumers aren’t buying your product, but enterprises have a similar problem, with money to spend. Sometimes this is more a marketing change than a product change.
3. Technology pivot. Engineers always fight to take advantage of what they have built so far. So the most obvious pivot for them is to repurpose the technology platform, to make it solve a more pressing, more marketable, or just a more solvable problem as you learn from customers.
4. Product feature pivot. Here especially, you need to pay close attention to what real customers are doing, rather than your projections of what they should do. It can mean to zoom-in and remove features for focus, or zoom-out to add features for a more holistic solution.
5. Revenue model pivot. One pivot is to change your focus from a premium price, customized solution, to a low price commoditized solution. Another common variation worth considering is the move from a one-time product sale to monthly subscription or license fees. Another is the famous razor versus blade strategy.
6. Sales channel pivot. Startups with complex new products always seem to start with direct sales, and building their own brand. When they find how expensive and time consuming this is, they need to use what they have learned from customers to consider a distribution channel, ecommerce, white-labeling the product, and strategic partners.
7. Product versus services pivot. Sometimes products are too different or too complex to be sold effectively to the customer with the problem. Now is the time for bundling support services with the product, education offerings, or simply making your offering a service that happens to deliver a product at the core.
8. Major competitor pivot. What do you do when a major new player or competitor jumps into your space? You can charge ahead blindly, or focus on one of the above pivots to build your differentiation and stay alive.

Where does growth come from?

1. Word of mouth
2. As a side effect of product usage
3. Through advertising
4. Through repeat purchase or use

Three Engines Of Growth

1. Sticky Engine: you add existing customers at a rate that exceeds the rate at which they leave. Key Metrics: Customer Adds, Customer churn
2. Viral Engine: New Customers bring more than one new customers to service. Key Metrics: The viral co-efficient.
3. Paid Engine: The cost of acquiring customers is less than each customers value to you. So you spend money on services like advertising to drive growth. Key Metrics: Customer acquisition cost/customer value. The lower the number, the faster you will grow.

"The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage."- Steve Blank

Principles of GOOD Design: braun vs apple

In today's world of business, design is just as important as whatever magic your product can do, it adds tremendous value to a product and it captures a buyer's attention better. Companies like Apple due to the strict rule of it's legendary founder Steve Jobs and his right hand man John Ive have inherited design as a core function in their products if I can say so following always a minimalist view on design and has been copied by many companies who wish to emulate their success. So nowadays people expect to see a well designed product whether it be a physical product like a phone or not physical like a website, good design sets you apart from the pack and increases your value proposition to your customers.

But even the great Apple had to learn its design principles from someone, and that someone is legendary German industrial designer Dieter Rams. During his tenure Mr. Rams outlined that there are indeed principles that you have to follow in order to create what he dubbed as "Good Design" and these principles come in the nice round number of 10.  They are as follows

1. Good Design Is Innovative : The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

2. Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

3. Good Design Is Aesthetic : The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

4. Good Design Makes A Product Understandable : It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

5. Good Design Is Unobtrusive : Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

6. Good Design Is Honest : It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept

7. Good Design Is Long-lasting : It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

8. Good Design Is Thorough Down to the Last Detail : Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

9. Good Design Is Environmentally Friendly : Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

10. Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible : Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

"Things which are different in order to simply be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different." - Dieter Rams

"My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage." - Dieter Rams

Stages Of Start-Up Life Cycle

The goal of a start-up is to figure out the right thing to build, the thing customers want and will pay for as quickly s possible. The main aim is to build a repeatable, scalable and profitable business model, on the way to this goal a start-up will go through a few phases.

1. Discovery


Purpose: Start-ups are focused on validating whether they are solving a real problem and whether and whether anybody would be interested in their solution.


Events: Founding team is formed, many customer interviews are conducted, value proposition is found, minimum viable product is created, team joins an accelerator or incubator, friends and family funding round, first mentors and advisors come on board.


Time: 5-7 months


2. Validation


Purpose: Start-ups are looking to get early validation that people are interested in their product through the exchange of money or attention.


Events: refinement of core features, initial user growth, metrics and analytics implementation, seed funding, first key hires, pivots (if necessary), first paying customers, product market fit.


Time: 3-5 months


3. Efficiency


Purpose: Star-ups refine their business model and improve the efficiency of their customer acquisition process. Star-ups should be able to efficiently acquire customers in order to avoid scaling with a leaky bucket.


Events: Value proposition refined, user experience overhauled, conversion funnel optimized, viral growth achieved, repeatable sales process and/or scalable customer acquisition channels found.


Time: 5-6 months


4. Scale


Purpose: Start-ups step on pedal and try to drive growth very aggressively.


Events: large A round, massive customer acquisition, back-end scalability improvements, first executive hires, process implementation, establishment of departments.


Time: 7-9 months




"The primary objective of a start-up is to validate its business model hypothesis (and iterate and pivot until it does), then it moves into execution mode. It's at this point the business needs an operating plan, financial forecasts and other well-understood management tools. "- Steve Blank

Business Models Of The Web

With the exuberant amount of internet start-ups popping up everyday, one of the top questions each founder gets asked is "what is your business model?". Business models are many amongst start-ups, you have the freemium model being used by companies like dropbox or subscription type services like spotify. No matter the type of business model across the web, they all spawn from one of or are a combination of one or more of 9 main business models of internet companies.

They are as follows.

1. Brokerage Model- Brokers are market makers; they bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions. Eg. Amazon, Ebay

2. Advertising- The web advertising model is an extension of the traditional media broadcast model. The broadcaster, in this case the website, provides content and services (like email, IM, Blog) mixed with advertising messages in the form of banner ads. Eg. Forbes, NYTimes, Yahoo!

3. Infomediary- Independently collected data about producers and their products are useful to consumers when considering a purchase. Some forms act as infomediaries assisting buyers and/or sellers understand a given market. Eg. Double Click, Yelp

4. Merchant- Wholesalers and retailers of goods and services. Sales may be made based on list prices or through auction. Eg. Amazon, iTunes Store

5. Affiliate- In contrast to the generalized portal, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, the affiliate model, provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives to affiliate partner sites. Eg. Amazon, Groupon

6. Community- The viability of the community model is based on user loyalty. Users have a high investment in both time and emotion. Revenue can be based on the sale of ancillary products  and services or voluntary contributions; or revenue may be tied to contextual advertising and subscriptions for premium services.

Eg. Wikipedia, Facebook

7. Subscription- Users are charged a periodic-daily, monthly or annual fee to subscribe to a service. Eg. NetFlix

8. Utility- The utility or "on-demand" model is based on metering usage, or a "pay-as-you go" approach. Eg. Slashdot

9. Direct- The manufacturer or "direct model", it is predicated on the power of the web to allow a manufacturer (i.e., a company that creates a product or service) to reach buyers directly and thereby compress the distribution channel. The manufacturer model can be based on efficiency, improved customer service, and a better understanding of customer preferences. Eg. Dell

For a look on how to clearly explain and create a business model

The Business Model: 9 Building Blocks

Every entrepreneur must know how and be able to clearly explain their business models to well...anyone. Thanks to Alexander Osterwalder you can explain not only your business model but the business model of any company/school/individual using the 9 building blocks outlined in his book Business Model Generation. After getting to know these 9 building blocks the business of explaining business models will come easy to you.


I'll go into these 9 building blocks and also use "Newspaper XYZ" a local newspaper company as an example and highlight how their business model works. Here We Go.

1. Customer Segment: These are the persons your business is creating value for, your most important customers, the ones who will be paying for your services.


Eg. Newspaper XYZ would be creating value for two main groups; Readers (General Public) and Advertisers (Businesses/Marketers) 


2. Value Proposition: This is the actual value you are creating for your customer segments. Meaning what problems are you solving for them? how are you satisfying their needs?


Eg. For readers Newspaper XYZ is satisfying their need for the latest news across a wide array of topics (sports, entertainment, news, etc)  and they do so with clear and concise articles written by a professional team of writers and editors. They give advertisers the chance to place ads amongst those articles hence showcasing their business to Newspaper XYZ's large community of readers.


3. Channels: This is how you communicate and deliver your value propositions to your customer segments. 


Eg. For readers Newspaper XYZ would deliver their value proposition through the physical newspapers which would be distributed through newspaper stands, supermarkets, subways etc. Newspaper XYZ also has a website XYZ.com that readers can also get news from.


4. Customer relationships: What type of relationship does each of your customer segments expect you to establish and maintain with them?


Eg. Newspaper XYZ may have an active social media community across Facebook, twitter,Google+, etc that it uses to maintain a healthy relationship with its readers. Advertisers are able to maintain relationships through Newspaper XYZ sales reps.


5. Revenue Streams: These are the areas in which you expect to generate cash for your business. 


Eg. Newspaper XYZ generates cash from 2 main sources; 1. Readers purchasing paper, 2. Advertising in print and online version of paper


6. Key Resources: What resources are necessary to create and deliver your valu proposition? these can be either physical, intellectual, financial or human.


Eg. Newspaper XYZ's key resources include Distribution network and logistics, writers, editors and website.


7. Key Activities: What Key activities do your value propositions require? your channels? customer relationships? revenue stream?


Eg. For Newspaper XYZ these would be writing and producing a daily paper and of course distribution.


8. Key Partners: This is the network of suppliers and partners that make the business model work.


Eg. Newpaper XYZ's key partners may include Printers, distributors, advertisers and Freelance reporters.


9. Cost Structure: These are the costs you'll incur operating your business model . i.e. can be easily found after defining the key activities, resources and partners (KR+KA+KP)


These 9 building blocks can be sketched out on a Business Model canvas which is a visual map of your business model to be decorated with the beloved post-it notes as you explain and at times alter your business model.