Who is Neil Patel?

Neil Patel is just an average Joe. I love eating Taco Bell, hanging out with friends and watching movies. In addition to that, I live in a small condo located on the outskirts of downtown Seattle.

As for my business background I started out an entrepreneur when I was 16 years old. My first startup was a job board that failed miserably. My second startup was an Internet marketing agency, that ended up doing all right. And after those two startups, I did around a handful more.

Currently, I am spending all of my efforts of KISSmetrics, which is an analytics solution that focuses on conversion tracking. KISSmetrics also has a sister product called KISSinsights, which an online survey application that helps you get actionable feedback from your customers.

How many ventures have you been involved with?

I have been involved with a lot of ventures. I personally have invested in 15 businesses and I am the co-founder of KISSmetrics and KISSinsights.

Do you have a favourite and why?

My favorite business is KISSmetrics and KISSinsights. The reason I love those two businesses is because I am passionate about web analytics. The current analytic solutions in the market place provide tons of data, but not enough actionable insights.

What’s your daily schedule like?

My daily schedule involves me spending most of my time on the phone and responding to emails. Other than I attend a handful of conferences each month and speak about web analytics and how companies can make better use of their data.

You are known as one of the best Internet Marketers and you’ve worked with a lot of big companies. What is your favourite technique to drive traffic to a site?

Creating a good product or offering exceptional service is the best way to drive a lot of traffic to a website. Anyone can market a website, but you won’t be able to drive a lot of high quality traffic unless the company has a good product or service.

When it comes to a technique I love search engine optimization. If you want to learn more about that, I recommend reading the Beginners Guide to SEO. http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

You have had both success and failure. What was the key to your success and would you recommend it to other entrepreneurs?

Sadly, I have had a lot more failures than successes. Nonetheless, the key difference is that I was able to pivot and learn from my customers faster with the successful companies. It is all about execution and you have to be able to move really quickly.

Last word for the Define community?

If you are going to be an entrepreneur, learn to focus all of you energy into 1 company. I have made this mistake one too many times. If you spread yourself too thin, none of your businesses are going to be doing well.

Define Magazine is a free online magazine. To be successful in this space, you need to find a voice and make it an extension of yourself. As an entrepreneur, you always want to see your service/product do really well. We’ve always received a decent number of visitors but nothing to brag about.

We’ve sat down, brainstormed and came up with ideas to make Define relevant.

Our format is changing and it will be for the better. I thought back to when Erin and I came up with Define Magazine. We wanted to inspire and affect our readers in a positive way. Erin and I would like to continue working toward these goals and we believe we have the right set of writers to do so.

Our writers are not only terrific people but they are my friends. Anyone who helps me, I always try to take care of them and make sure they are happy. A new goal of mine is to be able to compensate these amazing people. It will be a challenge but I believe if we all push together, we can achieve greatness.

New things you will find on here:

Featured Article

If you are pretty big deal within the community, let’s spend some time together and share your awesomeness with the everyone. Vancity Buzz was our first one.

Follow Friday

We wrote this down during the summer but we’ve been neglecting it until we found the right writers. It should be self explanatory but if it isn’t, we thought it would be fun to interview a person a week and ask them fun questions. Elim did our first one and she featured Midwest Couture.

I felt owed everyone an explanation of what happened to Define Magazine. We fell off the chart. We attempted to make a comeback but we were too slow at processing the articles. We weren’t consistent but we’ve been working internally on improving our procedures. One thing to know, we don’t give up! If we screw up, I’ll be the first to admit we messed up. But just know that we will work towards perfection.

Thanks for taking the time to to read this!

We came onto the scene with a bang! We had quality content. We had traffic. But something was missing. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t you, it was us.

Our old style wasn’t tickling your brain, challenging you, provoking thought. Know that we value the time you spend on our site and for that, we are continuously finding new ways to improve.

Our writers understand our passion and, in turn, it has become their passion to help us achieve this very same goal. What could feel better than impacting thousands of people every single day?

New look

We’re like a fine wine, we get better with age. Having a good experience comes from having good presentation, and that’s what we’ve achieved. We want to present our information to you in the best way possible.

The most important question we ask ourselves is, “Is this layout/content something I would enjoy?” We want to create a space where our readers can interact with each other, share information and learn, so we invite you to comment and engage.

Our Obsession

We love creating content that does a few laps around the Internet. How do we achieve this? We spend most of our day in front of a computer, researching, sharing and discussing.

By working with top sources online and sharing what they have to offer, we will push our information as a group and provide only the best the Internet has to offer.

Rather than trying to create the culture of your business, try creating an environment. If you create the right environment, eventually it will create the culture.

Asking someone to change their personality in order to fit a particular defined culture is as effective as asking a leopard to change its spots.

If you provide your employees with a great environment, then the energy in the room will get the best out of your staff.

Remember, you can teach skills, not personality.

By building an environment, it will naturally evolve into a culture, creating a more enjoyable and productive workplace.

While these are good tactics at first, they are not a way to create sustainable clientele. Lowering your price may work for a short period of time, but eventually, as a business owner, you’ll want to raise your prices back to their original rates.

This creates a problem because you don’t want to drive away your clients. It’s always harder to raise prices than it is to lower them.

Basics never change

As a small business, you don’t have the capital to throw into a huge marketing campaign. But, defining your business core, focusing on what your business is about, that is free, and invaluable.

Work on improving what you already have – refine your customer service, go that extra mile; do things that set you apart from your competition that don’t cost much money.

Making a client feel welcome and being attentive to their needs will make them come back.

Creating a returning client is valuable because they will help promote you through word of mouth, something much more valuable than a $20,000 marketing campaign that doesn’t affect your clients at all.

Marketing is not a department!

One misconception is that marketing is a department. IT is a department. Finance is a department. But marketing isn’t.

Marketing is your receptionist, your assistant, your intern, anyone who interacts with the public. Focus on how your employees represent themselves and your company to the public.

Stop lying! We can see right through it!

Many businesses have Mission Statements. They hang them proudly so that their clients and other members of the public can see them. The problem with this is that people don’t connect to the words that they see.

Rather they connect to the experience they have with your business. These mission statements show that a company has a philosophy for what they do – but how much do they actually live by it? How much should they live by it? 80% of the time? 100%?

Everytime you up your game with your customer service, that’s the best marketing and PR you could ever invest in.

Focus on the basics because the basics never change.

Naturally, the first solution is to hire someone to help you. The trouble is, how do you know if you’re going to hire someone who’s going to do a good job?

You want someone who will require little training and that you are comfortable trusting them to do a good job.

As a business owner, you want to be remarkable. You shouldn’t have to settle for anything less than that when you’re looking to hire new employees.

You’ve worked hard to get where you are, so make wise decisions. Keep your business lean, hiring the wrong person is just adding fat. So before you go and hire someone, stop, and do it yourself.

By knowing exactly what you want done, what skills and requirements you need in your employee, you will be able to hire the best person.

For example, if you’re looking for someone to maintain the social media for your business, you need to narrow it down to what exactly you want them to do, since there are so many facets of social media.

Do you want them to create brand awareness? Convert your online followers to customers? Or just help you market your product or service?

When we think of social media, we don’t think about specifics, about what exactly social media encompasses.

Once you’ve struggled, you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for – someone who will excel where you’ve had problems.

Hire right, hire less.

What We Are Trying to Achieve

Step 1 – Create the Container

First, we need to create a container for the ads. This way, we’re confident it will fit in our sidebar.

<div id="ad_125_container"></div>

Step 2 – Add the Ad Slots into the Container

What we want to do now is add the ad elements inside the container

<div id="ad_125_container">
     <div class="ad_125">Ad 1</div>
     <div class="ad_125">Ad 2</div>
     <div class="ad_125">Ad 3</div>
     <div class="ad_125">Ad 4</div>
</div> <!-- #ad_125_container -->

Step 3 – Style the Container

We need to tell what the container’s max width will be.

#ad_125_container {
     width: 275px;
     float: left;
}

Step 4 – Style the Ad Slot

We want to give the ad slot a width, a height, border, and margin. The margin will determine the space between each other.

.ad_125 {
	width: 125px;
	height: 125px;
	border: 1px solid #eee;
	margin: 5px;
	float: left;
}

And there you have it! Ad space for advertisers! ]]> http://definemag.com/technology/how-to-create-125x125-ad-slots-for-your-website/feed/ 3 http://definemag.com/technology/how-to-remove-blogger-bar/ http://definemag.com/technology/how-to-remove-blogger-bar/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:45:39 +0000 Michael Tao http://definemag.com/?p=1780 If you have a Blogger/Blogspot account, you know how annoying that top bar can be. It’s orange and ugly. You can easily hide it with some CSS magic.

Step 1 – Modify Your Layout

To modify your layout in Blogger/Blogspot, click on Layout and then click on Edit HTML.

Step 2 – Look for the CSS code

Scroll through your HTML code and look for body

body {
     background:$bgcolor;
     margin:0;
     color:$textcolor;
     font:x-small Georgia Serif;
     font-size/* */:/**/small;
     font-size: /**/small;
     text-align: center;
  }

Step 3 – Hide the Bar with CSS

Place this code above the body and save changes.

#navbar {
     display:none;
     height:0;
     visibility:hidden;
}

#navbar {
     display:none;
     height:0;
     visibility:hidden;
}

body {
     background:$bgcolor;
     margin:0;
     color:$textcolor;
     font:x-small Georgia Serif;
     font-size/* */:/**/small;
     font-size: /**/small;
     text-align: center;
  }

Bam! Blogger bar gone! Enjoy your beautiful looking blog.

Step 1 – Create an Icon

For best result, create a 57×57 px PNG image. Upload the image to your web server.

Step 2 – Link your New Icon

Insert the HTML Link tag between your head tags. They are located at the top of your page: <head></head>

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/images/dm-iphone-itouch.png" >

Step 3 – Browse to your Web site from your iPhone/iTouch

Click on the plus sign at the bottom of the screen

Step 4 – Add to Home Screen

Click on the Add to Home Screen button

Step 5 – Name it and Save it

By default it will take the page title. Once you are happy with the name, press Add

Finished Product!