Do You Have A Unique Selling Proposition | Getentrepreneurial.com

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If I were your prospective customer, why should I do business with you above any and all other options? Why would I be an absolute fool to buy what you sell from anyone else but you? That answer should be clearly articulated in the form of your USP.

What you need to know…

A USP is the single, most distinct and important benefit a business owner provides to their clients that’s different from their competition. It’s absolutely critical to not only create an effective and highly compelling USP, but to use it in every piece of marketing you develop, and in every form of communication you use with your clients and prospects.

Why you need to know this…

Your USP, working in tandem with your elevator pitch, creates a huge competitive edge for your business. Developed properly, it will separate your business from your competition, eliminate them in the minds of your prospects and have them saying to themselves that they would be fools to do business with anyone else but you.

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Twitter’s advertising business is stalling | TechCrunch

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Twitter may have re-oriented itself and laid off part of its workforce to streamline its business, but it still doesn’t look like it is bringing in enough money to keep Wall Street happy.

Here is the biggest data point from the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report: according to the company, advertising revenue totaled $638 million, which was down slightly year-over-year. A reversal in its advertising growth is certainly not going to help Twitter’s case, which needs to be able to pitch itself to advertisers as a legitimate alternative to Facebook — and now Snap, which is expected to go public in March and already generated $400 million in 2016.

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Flipboard’s Quest To Save Online Publishing—And Itself | Fast Company

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The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010, but the apps it presented offered a rather nostalgic revival of traditional media. Photos, graphics, magazines, and books optimized for its high-res screen featured a print-era visual polish that had been sorely missing from ad-crammed web pages and monochrome ebook readers.

One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page; and flicking up on the screen triggered a visual effect that looked like flipping pages. Flipboard was among the top 10 iPad apps in its early days, according to rankings by AppAnnie. “It seemed to be a perfectly timed creature of the iPad age, of the tablet age,” says digital advertising consultant Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.

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Will a Test for Brain Trauma Protect NFL Players—or End the NFL? | Bloomberg

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In November, Kevin Hrusovsky paid a visit to the NFL’s headquarters on Park Avenue in New York. Hrusovsky (pronounced ruh-sov-skee) is chairman and chief executive officer of Quanterix, a life sciences startup that makes machines for measuring proteins and other biomarkers in the blood. He had the NFL’s attention because researchers have been using his company’s machines to hunt for markers of concussions and neurodegenerative disease. In an open letter NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell published in September about the league’s commitment to player safety, he wrote that Quanterix was developing “a blood test to reveal a concussion diagnosis.” It would be, Goodell said, “a major breakthrough.” The league, through a partnership with General Electric, has awarded Quanterix $800,000 in grants in the past three years. Hrusovsky was hoping to persuade the NFL to invest directly.

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Hemelswater Makes Beer From Rain On Urban Rooftops | Pop-Up City

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Climate change makes it rain more often and more heavily in Western Europe’s low countries. At the same time the streets of our cities are completely paved, leaving no room for water to drain. This causes increasing urban flooding issues. But there is a solution, and it’s called beer.

The Amsterdam-based brewery Hemelswater has started to collect water from rooftops in the city to make beer from. Their first beer is called Code Blond and is collected from the roof of the Volkshotel building in Amsterdam. The name Code Blond refers to the weather forecasting codes that indicate dangerous weather expectations such as storm, snowfall and heavy rainfall in the Netherlands. As a consequence of the changing weather conditions these weather alarms are being used more often than in the past.

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I Don’t Care How Good You Are At What You Do | marketingforhippies.com

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I recently went to see a holistic health practitioner in town about whom I’d heard good things.

I arrived at his office and was welcomed to sit down.

He opened his laptop and asked me for my email and then for my wrist. “We start with taking your pulse,” he explained.

So he took my pulse for about a minute and then, for the next 45 minutes told me what was going on and what I needed to do about it based on my particular constitution and body type. As he made these suggestions, he typed them into the email he was going to send me.

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Take Complete Charge of Your Content | Duct Tape Marketing

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In 2016, content was in supreme power expected to be delivered in the form of compelling, personalized and interactive stuff that can be rated well and ranked high in all search engines. Overall, the strategy of content marketing saw a significant shift in 2016 compared to a year ago. The year 2017 is predictable. Brands, big or small are slowly preparing themselves to deliver value added real-time contextual content with videos, images, GIFs and infographics.

Content creators and marketers get a chance to enrich their customers with a more personalized content, those that can add value to the brands and those that can stand out. The key point here is to keep appearing with different sets of quality content. But, the majority of the marketers are still lacking the confidence to take complete control of their contents. Campaigning such content is no doubt going to be complex.  Efficiency in creating contextual content, formatting them as per the need of their target audience, and distributing them through proper channel needs little homework.

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Porsche 911 Carrera: REVIEW, PHOTOS | Business Insider

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We don’t lack for sports cars in this world. If you want some affordable thrills behind the wheel, you can buy a Mazda Miata for less than $30,000 (and you can buy a well-loved one for less than $5,000).

From there, the sky’s the limit: the Ferrari 488 GTB, for example, will set you back $360,000. And it will be worth every precious penny.

What I’m saying is you don’t lack for choice. But what if you don’t feel like shopping? What if you just want perhaps the greatest sports car ever produced by human hands on planet Earth?

Well, then you should just spend $111,070 — the price of our test car — and get yourself a 2017 Porsche 911 Carrera (base price is only $89,400).

Here’s why:

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Tenth in a Series) | Peter Mehit

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images

10. Plan for Daylight | Peter Mehit

I was flying from Philadelphia to Dallas.  It was an early Thursday morning flight and almost empty.  I got a complimentary bump to first class and sat at the front bulkhead, half awake with a pile of papers in the empty seat next to me.  The cabin PA crackled to life.

“We got a problem,” the captain said in that droll voice that we all make fun of.  Then the plane went into the steepest dive I’ve ever experienced. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he added, I think as an afterthought.

But things were pretty far from okay.  Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and then floated in the air, weightless.  My papers were floating off the seat cushion and in that moment, I noticed that I was weightless too.  It only lasted for about five, maybe ten seconds and it would have been the coolest thing ever, if it weren’t totally terrifying.

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