This is a Guest Post by Colleen McCarty.

Entrepreneurs, business people, and product developers are in a unique position to capitalize on a trend that will to continue to rise: personality based businesses and personal branding. This trend embodies the American dream, taking extreme individualism to the next level – speakers, experts, trainers, bloggers - everyone has a schtick. Blossoming out of a formerly cubicled workforce, the personality-based business is a natural segue in an information-based economy, lending itself to massive product sales and huge numbers for individual ecommerce sites. Drop ship and on-demand companies make it even easier for individuals to sell any information-based products.

However, personality based businesses inherently lend themselves to one fatal flaw. They are built around humans – and humans are imperfect. Building your business around yourself indicatively means that your business will reflect your flaws. There is no way around it… or is there?

Many times the personality-based business finds us. For example, the professional speaker does not come out of the gates as a motivational speaker. Something extraordinary happens to them and gradually people begin to approach them about getting on stage and sharing their story. Before you know it, people are offering to pay for it. There is a business, but no business plan, no structure, no staff. Just the speaker and their talent. The other significant problem, other than being based on a flawed model, is that many times these personalities are just feeling their way through, not realizing fatal flaws they are making or even really seeing themselves as a business. “It’s just something I do well and get paid for. It’s not really a business. Businesses have offices and personal assistants and 1-800 numbers. This is just me.” Everyone from artists to jewelry makers to authors and speakers has been known to think that from time to time. But if we are to be successful businesses and personalities and businesses based on personalities (whew!) then we have to reconcile this chasm.

In order to do that I want to focus on a place in the world that has been conducive to producing thousands of entrepreneurial ventures per year and billions of dollars in revenue – Silicon Valley. The valley lies just south of San Francisco and is a hot bed of entrepreneurial spirit. Twitter, Google, Facebook, Hewlett Packard, eBay – these are just a few of the tech-based companies that have sprung up out of the startup culture created in Silicon Valley.

The valley is steeped in entrepreneurialism. It’s a characteristic that is rewarded as early as second grade when the children are asked to be a part of Invention Conventions. Kids are asked to create an invention that they feel would better the world in some way. They write a one-page report on what their product is and who it could help. When these children grow up, sometimes as early as their teen years, they come up with a company idea that revolutionizes an industry or creates a whole new industry. When that company grows to a multi-billion dollar IPO, that then-teen, now young millionaire decides to become an advisor and angel investor to others like him or her. This is called the Cycle of Innovation, and it is completely self-sustaining.

How can ecommerce store owners, authors, speakers and bloggers compete with this kind of entrepreneurial Petri dish? We are out here on our own, often times working from home offices. It is hard to foster a culture of innovation when the only one to bounce ideas off of is your dog. Since it’s doubtful that Fido will be the next Steve Jobs, I’m betting you could benefit from some ways to become more Startup minded. 

There are four ways a solopreneur can become more like a Silicon Valley startup: 

1. Don't Isolate Yourself

Community is extremely important. This makes the personality-based business model tough sometimes, because those that we want to consort with are the competition in many cases. Spending hours writing articles, blogs, and books is not exactly conducive to socializing. But do not let yourself fall into isolation. Connections – whether in person or online – are vital to your business. Not to mention that word of mouth is still the most powerful form of marketing, so you don’t want to become Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Attend conferences. Yes, they can be expensive, but they are one way to begin to build a network of like-minded individuals – people who will keep you on your toes and keep you accountable to yourself. 

If conferences aren’t in the budget, cruise Linkedin. Direct message or @ someone on Twitter. Make a list of people you look up to in your industry and really try to connect with them. When you’ve met three or four people that you feel you can trust and gain inspiration from, and vice versa, hopefully, then you can start a weekly mastermind call or a Facebook group where you can ask questions and see what everyone is up to. Associations are also a great way to connect, so check your local chapters of trade associations or blogger groups.

2. Pay Attention to your Working Environment

Companies in Silicon Valley have access to tons of gurus, research and culture doctors to help them enhance their daily work experience. Cafeterias serve free range and organic chicken at little or no cost, dry cleaning is available onsite, and many companies offer day care. How can solopreneurs compete with that kind of quality of life? Well, we can’t. But there are some things you can do to enhance your effectiveness and ability to be creative on demand.

Many of them have to do with your immediate surroundings. Whether you’re working off the kitchen table, in your home office, or in an office collective there are some things you can do to maximize the utility of your space. Little choices in how you set up your office/work space may seem unimportant, but if you constantly feel drained or stifled, maybe you should rethink some of what’s surrounding you.

Feng Shui can lend us a few tips about how we can surround ourselves with the best energy possible. Yellow is a color that stimulates creativity and discipline, both of which are important when working alone. If you write a lot, blue-green is soothing and also stimulates creativity. Put a healthy plant in a glass bowl in the top left quadrant of your desk or work-table – this will bring wealth and success to your business.

Feng Shui aside, your environment is important. If music helps you work, then get some speakers and blare away, but if music doesn’t help, just keep things silent. The same goes for pets; if your dog constantly wants to play fetch, maybe he or she would be better relegated to another area of the house while you work. Take advantage of some of the research that these companies have done and try to implement some of those “mood-enhancers” in your daily life. If you are bogged down by errands, but need to be working, then have a task or delivery service do your errands for you. Focus on the most important part of your business – discovering new opportunities for revenue.

3. Build a Values System 

Writing out elaborate 5 and 10 year plans, financial projections and big ideas for the future are all important parts of owning a business, but they can easily go off the rails when we don’t have a clear set of values for our organizations. It’s easy to let ourselves off the hook and say “I’ll just go with the flow. It’s just me after all.” Do not fall into this trap. Building a values system for your company is just as important – actually, more important – than if you had several employees. You need to lay the ground work for success now. I know it’s hard and I know you don’t have much support, but it has to be done if you expect to see major growth in your business. Sillicon Valley culture doctor Justin Moore (CEO of Axcient) spends 20% of his time on building and sustaining his company’s culture. He says that CEOs (yes, that’s you, you’re the CEO of the startup that is you!) need to ask themselves these questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What’s important to you?
3. What behaviors do you want to see in people in your company?
4. How do you want them to act and make decisions?
   
   

You might not have employees yet, but the goal is that someday you will. Writing out the answers to these questions should give you about 15-20 statements about your company. Moore suggests weeding this down to 5 and making these 5 your company’s core values. Type them out and print them if you desire – frame them, place them somewhere that you can see them and be reminded. Being a solopreneur does not mean you have to be ill prepared, poorly organized and not at all ready for the future. 

4. Create and Feed Your Own Cycle

The most important part of the Silicon Valley culture is the theme of giving back to those who are now where you once were. Having your mastermind groups and building your inspirational community is one step towards this, but looking to the younger generation and asking yourself “How can I help?” is also important. I am not suggesting you become an angel investor today, but there are certainly things you can do to create and feed your own cycle of innovation. We’ve all made mistakes and to reach out to another solopreneur and let them know that making mistakes is ok, and helping them avoid others creates a connection and trust that is essential for a community to grow.

It’s hard doing it all yourself, that is why scalable growth is always the goal in any enterprise. No one wants to do it all forever. Planning and changing your mindset are important keys to getting off the kitchen table some day and leaving the word ‘bootstrapping’ behind. You are not just you – you are a startup with infinite potential. 

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Today we’re thrilled to announce the five winners of our Build-A-Business competition.

During the 8 months of the competition period, over 10,000 entrepreneurs created new online businesses that sold more than $55 million in products. The five new businesses that sold the most over any two months of the competition each win a $50,000 US investment.

We’re also sending each of the winners on a VIP trip to New York City to meet with the industry experts who served as mentors to the participants throughout the competition (Timothy Ferriss, Daymond John, Tina Roth Eisenberg and Eric Ries).

In addition to the grand prize investment and NYC trip, each winner gets a special one-hour media strategy training session with editors at Fast Company Magazine, and $20,000 toward digital advertising for their business.

Here’s a visual overview of the competition, including our five amazing winners. You can click on the image to view in full-screen.

We’re excited to see so many great ideas grow into successful businesses through this competition. Our winners really took it to the next level, combining brilliant products with savvy marketing to sell an amazing amount of products.

Here’s a look at our five winning stores, their cool products, and the entrepreneurs behind it all:

GameKlip (Electronics & Gadgets)

GameKlip is the brainchild of gamer-turned-inventor Ryan French, an Applied Computational Math Science student at the University of Washington. Frustrated by the inefficient game controllers on his phone, Ryan crafted a precision-moulded clip to connect a PlayStation controller to his smart phone, allowing for mobile game play with a full-sized controller.

Ryan's product was originally created from simple resources. He bought a few sheets of plastic and used an industrial-strength hairdryer to shape the clip that attached the game controller to his phone. He was amazed at how well his creation turned out. “The simple piece of plastic transformed my phone into a real gaming machine,” said Ryan. “It worked so well, I had to share my creation with the world.”

Ryan decided to share his invention the way any true gamer would - he created a short video with his phone camera. When other gamers saw the video, they wanted clips of their own. Ryan started taking pre-orders and was blown away by the response.

“The first wave of orders was very exciting, but overwhelming. In the beginning, GameKlip was all handmade and built to order, which meant I had to spend most of my time bending plastic into the correct shape and processing orders. I had no ecommerce or order processing software at that time, so everything was done with a spreadsheet. I was working 18-20 hours a day, seven days a week, to build, process, pack, and ship my orders. Something had to change!"

"Discovering Shopify was one of the big turning points for my business. It was easy to set up and drastically cut down my workload. To further my productivity I setup ShipStation to automate the process of taking an order, generating a shipping label, and keeping records. The massive increase in workflow productivity allowed me to focus more on my product, and less on the busy-work.”

Ryan used his newfound “free” time to take his business to the next level. He purchased an injection mold so he could contract out the manufacturing of his product, and ensure the quality of each GameKlip was exactly the same.

Ryan French is still developing new iterations of GameKlip, and continues to grow his business online. He has shipped his product to over 80 countries, and has big plans for the future.

GoldieBlox (Design, Art & Home)

Debbie Sterling raised $285,881 on Kickstarter to fund her groundbreaking product: a construction toy that encourages young girls to get into engineering, develop spatial skills and hone problem-solving abilities.

From Bob the Builder to Star Wars Lego sets, engineering toys have traditionally been marketed to little boys. Debbie, a University of Stanford Engineering graduate, came up with the idea for GoldieBlox while discussing her career choice with a fellow female engineer.

“We were discussing why we became engineers. My colleague grew up with three older brothers and played with their hand-me-down Lego and Lincoln Logs. When it came time to pick a major, engineering seemed like a great choice, and it never occured to her that it was a weird career for girls. I started to think that I had missed out. My parents didn’t buy me construction toys because they didn’t think I would like them. They thought of them as boy’s toys. If I had played with construction toys as a kid, I probably would have developed my passion for engineering much earlier.”

Debbie set out to find examples of construction toys in the “girls” sections of toy stores, and was disappointed to discover very few options. “I started thinking about all the little girls out there who could be great engineers but would never even consider it. When I walked down the pink isle in the toy store, I felt like I was back in the 1950s," said Debbie. "This was an amazing opportunity to open little girls’ eyes to the possibilities of engineering. I became obsessed and it was all I could think about, all I wanted to do.”

Debbie created the character of Goldie, a spirited female engineer, to be her toy line’s mascot. The line’s debut toy, “GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine,” turns construction into a game, where little girls must build a belt drive to help Goldie’s dog chase his tail.

Fresh-Tops (Fashion & Apparel)

Fresh-Tops is a “bubble-gum, hipster-chic” fashion brand spawned by an orgy of glitter, ice cream and electro-pop. Creator Nella Chunky produces limited edition women’s clothing and accessories.

Nella’s success wasn’t an accident – she experimented with several different brands and clothing lines before she decided on the Fresh-Tops line. “We started up with a couple of designs and just went from there. We really listened to what our fans wanted. We listened to their suggestions and just kept experimenting,” said Nella.

Nella chooses new pieces for the Fresh-Tops clothing line based on suggestions and requests made by her fans on Facebook and Twitter. This novel and progressive use of social media meant that Nella was able to produce the exact product her fans wanted. She attributes her success to the relationship between her fans and her business: “You really have to listen to what people want, and then give it to them. You have to be flexible and keep adapting to their needs.”

SkinnyMe Tea ("Everything Else") 

Gretta van Riel created this successful brand of tea in order to help people detoxify and lose weight. The teas, made from natural ingredients, are said to increase metabolism and even improve digestion, complexion, and sleep.

Gretta was working as the digital marketing manager at a large media agency in Melbourne, Australia, when she came up with her great idea. “I actually had a dream about the teatox,” said Gretta. “I woke up with a name, an idea and a vision, and made the website using Shopify the very next day. It was so great to be able to have an idea and go from conception to inception so quickly with the help of Shopify.”

Gretta developed her line of teas using all natural ingredients that help people shed unwanted weight by increasing metabolism and removing harmful toxins from the body.

It wasn’t long before the sales started flooding in, and Gretta had a difficult decision to make. “I had to choose between a steady job that I liked, or following SkinnyMe, which was really my passion. Luckily the sales started coming in quickly, and that helped me make up my mind.”

“There aren't many other detox products on the market that utilise only tea and that are completely natural. So the concept has caught on quite nicely. It helps that the product works really well, with many of our customers experiencing some truly incredible results. This has meant that our vision was able to spread very quickly via social media and word of mouth.”

Now SkinnyMe Teas are popular all over the world, with their most popular product being the Teatox pack, an all-natural detox program.

Canadian Icons (Canadian Winner)

 

When Aron Slipacoff decided to create a store that sold Canadiana, he didn’t want it to be just another consumer website. Instead, he created a unique shopping experience where visitors can buy iconic Canadian items, and also get a taste of Canadian history and culture. The shop sells everything from mukluks to unique paintings by Group of Seven artist, Emily Carr. Even the service, which is prompt, friendly and trustworthy, is a truly Canadian experience.

The idea for the shop came out of Aron's deep love of Canadiana and his desire to share iconic Canadian products with the world. “I wanted to present Canada’s past in a new, contemporary way,” said Aron. “As someone who lived in the Canadian Arctic, I am really passionate about what Canada’s north offers the world geographically and culturally. I wanted people to experience the stories and products that are inspired by the north.”

Aron wanted his customers to understand why the Canadian products he sells are so special. “To fully appreciate a Canada Goose parka for example, you need to see its connection to Canada’s Arctic peoples, how Canada Goose works with Inuit elders on design, how the company gives back to these communities. You need a more complete picture of the uniquely Canadian connection to the product to really get the feel for what makes it iconic.”

So instead of launching a store that simply sold products, Aron built his shop to be a bit like a Canadian museum, with the history and stories of the product built into the shopping experience. 

“Items like Canada Goose coats and Manitobah Mukluks are being sold and admired all over the world, but the Canadian stories behind the brands were left untold. There is a trend now where people want to become more knowledgeable about what they consume and spend money on. The marriage of these ideas was how CanadianIcons.ca was born.”

Aron also wanted his customers to experience what Canadian culture is so well-known for: its friendliness and warmth. So he decided to ship orders for free. “We thought about it and decided to offer 90-minute delivery in the nation’s capital, and we offered next-day delivery everywhere else in the country. Living up to that promise was a challenge. Through all of the Canadian weather and the holiday rush, we realized pretty fast that fulfillment required daily attention and diligence." Aron's focus on service is what sets Canadian Icons apart, and has helped contribute to the business’ quick success.

Twitter has over 200 million active users creating over 400 million Tweets per day. That’s a lot of people and a lot of tweets.

For business owners, Twitter has become an important tool for distributing content, providing support to existing customers and proactively reaching out to potential customers.

To make its platform more attractive to businesses and brands, In 2012 Twitter began slowly rolling out its paid ads platform, however it was only made available to certain partners on an invite-only basis. This past April that all changed when Twitter announced that they would be making Twitter Ads available to all users in the U.S.

That means no matter how big or small your business is, and no matter how many followers you have, you can now start leveraging Twitter's paid service to amplify your Twitter presence, gain new followers, create more awareness about your business and drive more traffic to your website.

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Get $50 in Free Twitter Ads from Shopify

We are pleased to announce that we have teamed up with Twitter to offer all U.S. based Shopify stores a free $50 Twitter Ads credit.

This is a great opportunity for merchants to get started testing some paid tweets and get familiar with the Twitter Ads platform. 

Claim Twitter Ads Credit Now

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Getting Started With Twitter Ads

Even if you don't use Shopify, you can still get started using Twitter ads by heading over to the regular sign up page and completing the on-boarding process.

Once you've created your account and entered your billing information, you're ready to create your first campaign. When you click the 'Create Campaign' button, you will asked whether you want to promote your account or promote your tweets.

Note: At the moment, there are actually two Twitter advertising dashboards available on the self-service platform, Basic and Advanced. There is seemingly no difference in cost or how ads perform, but the basic dashboard limits you to a single target audience that will be applied to every promoted tweet or your promoted account. The advanced dashboard lets you target several audiences. All screenshots below are from the Advanced dashboard.

Promoted Tweets vs Promoted Account

Promoted Tweets: These will probably work best to extend your reach on Twitter and drive immediate traffic to your products, blog, or campaign landing page. That's because they (should) put a relevant message in front of users that don't currently follow you but are interested in the subject matter of your tweet.

When promoting a tweet you can choose to promote any of your existing tweets or create a new tweet to promote.

If you choose to create a new tweet, you also have the option to set it up as a Standard Tweet which is delivered immediately to all of your followers, or as a Promoted-only Tweet which is not delivered to your followers, suppressed from your profile and only delivered as part of a Promoted Tweet campaign.

To enable this option, make sure you select the Promoted-only 'eye' icon when composing a new tweet.

Once created, a tweet can be selected, bid on, and deployed at any point in the future.

The promoted tweet will appear at the top of related search results pages and on home timelines for users that might be interested in the promoted tweet's content.

The important thing to remember is that a promoted tweet should provide a relevant message that links to a landing page intended to get your prospect to take some form of action. That action could be buying a product or getting your prospect to enter their email so you can start a relationship and send future offers to them.

Promoted Accounts: These on the other hand are meant to start a relationship on Twitter itself rather than attempting to direct traffic elsewhere. This is more of a long term play that will help you build trust and a following over time that gets people seeing more of your tweets on a regular basis.

A promoted account will show up in the 'Who to Follow' widget positioned at the left side of the Twitter interface on the 'Home' and 'Connect' tabs. The promoted account will also show up in some search results and on a user's profile page in the 'Similar to You' widget.

It may be helpful to think of promoted tweets as being most similar to Google AdWords. Both are pay-per-click advertising intended to drive traffic. Promoted accounts might be thought of as the search engine optimization (SEO) done to improve results on Google or Bing. While you're still going to pay for each follow with a promoted account, the point is to increase the size of the audience that sees your posts naturally.

Targeting Strategies

The Twitter advertising self-service platform will allow you to target users by keywords, interest or through your profile.

In addition to these parameters, you can also target further by location, device and operating system, gender, interests or username.

When entering exact match key phrases that you want to target, it's important to keep in mind that in Google searches people tend to leave out small "connector words" like "a" and "the" but on Twitter people use conversational language so you may need to include these words in order to get an exact match.

In addition, Twitter will only deliver promoted accounts or tweets to users that it believes will be interested in your content. So selecting "fishing" as an interest does not necessarily mean that your promoted tweets or account will be shown to every Twitter user interested in fishing, but rather those interested in fishing that Twitter believes will also be interested in you.

An Auction Model

Twitter ads, like many other popular forms of online advertising, are based on an auction model, meaning that advertisers bid on their ads and the most profitable — not necessarily the highest bid — ads are likely to receive the greatest number of impressions.

Twitter has said that it will not increase ad frequency, which might make the platform pretty competitive. For many small online retailers, this competition may mean that it makes sense to get an early start on Twitter.

Almost all pay-for-performance advertising requires a bit of experimentation. And it is best to experiment when there is less competition driving up bids.

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Have you experimented with Twitter Ads yet? Do you ever click on promoted tweets?

By Andreea Ayers, Author of Pinterest Advantage

As a small business owner, you can sometime feel like you're being pulled in every direction while trying to drive traffic to your ecommerce shop. When it comes to social media, you’ve got to post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, your blog, and somewhere in there, maintain your online store. While it may seem daunting to take on yet another social network, Pinterest is well worth the effort, especially if you sell a product – which most of you do!

Here are 10 ways you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your ecommerce online store:

10 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Sales Using Pinterest

1. Pull Back the Curtain

People want to see how things are made, from Kickstarter backers watching a product evolve from prototype to product, to behind the scenes clips from your favorite TV show.

Whether it’s just you working away at your home based business or your employees working together to get your latest shipments out, show your Pinterest followers what’s happening inside your business and the people who make it tick.

2. Reuse Content

Save time by pinning photos and videos you already have. The images you've used on your blog, or that you took at your latest craft fair, are sitting on your hard drive waiting to be shared.

Create a brand history board that showcases your business as it grew from hobby to shop and share photos of your past products to illustrate just how much you’ve grown.

3. Get Your Fans Involved 

Use your mailing list, customer lists, and social networks to drum up activity on your Pinterest board. If you’re new to social media, remember that you have a personal network of friends and family who would love to support you.

Ask your fans to share photos of your product in action to provide a wider variety of engaging images for your pinboards. Let non-Pinterest using fans know you’d love to highlight their support and if they’ll send you their pictures, you’ll pin them.

4. Create Thematic Boards 

If you did #3 already, your fans know where to find you on Pinterest. Now you’ve got to engage. Build thematic boards to help spark new interest.

If your product is jewelry or apparel, ask fans to share photos of them wearing your design in front of notable landmarks. For home décor and design shops, ask fans to share their design savvy and show off the room they used your product in.

5. It’s Not All About You 

Even if you have a thousand products, you and your fans will eventually run out of pictures. Let your fans express their personal style by building boards that are all about them. These could be photos highlighting their techy sides, the fashionista inside or anything else that links back to the idea of your brand. The goal is to keep content fresh and keep your followers coming back to see what’s new.

6. Get Personal 

Pinterest is the most personal of the social networks, so introduce the person behind the pins. Share some details like the poster’s name, job title, and what they like best about working at your company. If it's just you - tell them a bit about yourself. 

If you’re brand gives back to a charity or you only chose eco-friendly products and materials, highlight it to remind your followers that there’s more to your shop than just selling a product.  

7. Watch your Metrics 

Tracking follower engagement on Pinterest isn’t as easy as on Facebook or Twitter, but with a careful eye you can see what kinds of pins and boards your followers get excited about. When you know what works (and just as importantly, what doesn’t) it’s easier to get the most out of your time on Pinterest. 

8. Link, Link, Link, Link 

Yes, that’s a lot of links, but it’s the number one thing businesses on Pinterest forget. If someone is browsing your boards and sees a must-have product, make it one-click easy for them to find it on your Shopify shop, and buy by adding a link to that product in the pin description.

9. The Long Sell 

People want to chose a product, not have it sold to them.

You want to engage your followers and show them what you have to offer. Once they’re hooked, send them to your ecommerce store. And don’t forget to post your products’ prices with your pins. This will make the more likely to be discovered by new customers who are searching the Gifts section on Pinterest.

10. Collaborate 

Double your results, but not your efforts, by teaming up with other Shopify shops to highlight each other’s products on Pinterest. Find like-minded businesses that share your target market, but not your product and offer them the opportunity to be showcased on your Pinterest boards in return for a space on theirs. You can use Shopify's Marketplace to search categories and products.

Build boards around a theme like home décor, or keep it broad as a board of independent business you support.

Conclusion

If traditional social media sources are like advertising, then Pinterest is like the helpful sales clerk who helps clients find what they really want.

Small and medium sized businesses can get lost in the noise of millions of voices on Twitter and pushed to the bottom of the Facebook newsfeed. On Pinterest you can build something special that the big companies can’t do as easily: shape your social media strategy to express your brand’s personal style. 

Pinterest was built for businesses like yours, because of it's heavy focus on the visual. When you let your creativity (and that of your Pinterest followers) run free, you’ll earn new interest, buzz and the sales that go along with it.

I’d love to hear how these tips worked for you or any ideas that aren’t on the list that have worked for you. Share your thoughts in the comments.     

For more info on Pinterest check out:

• The Ultimate Pinterest Guide for Ecommerce
• Shopify's Pinterest & Ecommerce Infographic

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This is a guest post by Andreea Ayers. Andreea started her own t-shirt business a few years ago and sold over 20,000 t-shirts and got in over 200 magazines and media outlets before selling her company. She is also the author of Pinterest Advantage, an ebook and an online course about growing using Pinterest. You can find her at Launch Grow Joy.