have you heard of the online puzzle game that's taken the world by storm?

Wordle, is an online 5-letter word game. Each day a new word is released and players have six attempts to guess what the word of the day is. It recently went viral and was so successful that it was bought over by the New York Times, who paid a seven figure price tag. 

So what keeps people coming back for more from this simple game?

• You can only play one round a day.

This builds anticipation and reduces overexposure from the consumer point of view. 

• It counts your win streak.

This incentivises the consumer through gamification. Once you start building your score you don't want to stop!

In this week's issue: 

• Announcing a new strategic partnership: Who are the Metapreneurs?
• Robots are taking over… your pizza?
• SEO: How to structure your content for top, middle and bottom of the funnel. 
• Entrepreneurship struggles: You're not as alone as you think.
• Lights, Camera, Action…
• Last Week's Best Bits.

💎 Join Furlough on Discord 💎

Announcing a new strategic partnership: Who are the Metapreneurs?

A bomb dropped on the Furlough community last weekend and it was amazing!

We have partnered up with another amazing community: Metapreneurs.

Who are the Metapreneurs? 

Metapreneurs is a collection of 11,111 unique, high utility NFTs (Stored on the Ethereum blockchain) that secures the entrepreneurs spot within the Metaverse. Holders will have access to utilities which accelerate their entrepreneurial journey. 

Like us, they have a big vision and and a really interesting roadmap to go with it which you can read about here.

We met so many new people over the course of the week and we have to say, this is a great community focused on growth. We're looking forward to interacting with more members and providing them additional resources. 

This is also a fantastic networking opportunity for Furlough members to expand their horizons. Sometimes it just takes speaking to that one person to change your life.

So with that, we are wishing everyone from the Metapreneurs Discord a warm welcome! 

Robots are taking over… your pizza?

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to automate hours of your time at work? 

Would you still be a valuable asset to the company that employs you?

This is one of the scariest realities most employees earning minimum wage must face. 

But this happens to be one of the opportunities that Abraham & his family have capitalized on with their startup SmartPi. 

SmartPi is looking to revolutionize the pizza franchise industry by automating the mundane tasks in most establishments. 

Their machine will be able to automate the entire process of preparing, cooking, and serving pizzas so that employers can save costs on hiring, firing, and all the other expenses in between. 

If we’re honest with one another, you’ve probably been in a restaurant that seems a little overstaffed but the employees seem to be super unproductive & uninterested in their work. 

Who wouldn’t be? 

Since SmartPi is joining the market fairly late, they introduced themselves with new features that they’re competitors haven’t seem to use yet. 

Using their industry knowledge, their machine is going to be the most complex automation for pizza franchises on the market. 

Sounds great right? 

But from a business perspective:

• They haven’t produced a fully functional prototype yet 
• They’re currently raising $1.25m from Venture Capital investors 
• They need a strong CTO with a background in tech & robotics to really scale their operations to the next level and achieve their current valuations

And from a marketing perspective: 

• They need to focus on who they’re ideal customer is (i.e. franchise locations, enterprise, ghost kitchens, individual restaurants etc.)
• They need to develop more channels for monetization (currently have 2 in place; the machine itself + maintenance packages) 
• They need to clearly identify the pain points of their customers (i.e. labor savings, productivity improvements, operational training etc.) 

There were so many valuable takeaways from last week's session. 

For aspiring entrepreneurs & current founders, the most important message to take away from this session is the habit of persistence. 

It’s definitely not easy to penetrate a market where there is extremely little competition. 

It’s even more difficult to enter a market where so many competitors have failed before. 

But it’s important to reflect on these failures, and use that to light a fire under you. 

This is the precise moment when you experience a breakthrough. 

So are you going to give up when it gets tough? 

Or are you going to keep pushing until your idols become your rivals? 

Tune in this week as we're going to be diving into Platypus.

Join us in the #Furlounge this Tuesday @ 2pm for some high-level marketing insights!

If you're a founder looking to get your startup boosted, then send a message to one of the community managers in the Furlough discord to join the waitlist (Spots are LIMITED).

SEO: How to structure your content for top, middle and bottom of the funnel

Session Highlights: 

What is semantic SEO?

• Semantic SEO is the keywords around your primary key words for your site and the relationship between key words so that Google is more accurately able to determine the purpose of each search word. 
• You want to really dig in and focus on the intention behind your customers search words and what the customers journey will be.
• EXAMPLE: if you are searching “cheap burritos” in Google, you will return results for different type of restaurants, pubs, or food trucks that serve burritos. 

How do you optimize your content for it to be semantically good?

• Let’s use the same example as above, Mexican restaurants, both the words “Mexican” and “restaurants” are nouns, every noun has an entity card which contains the relationships of said nouns.
• Doing your keyword research, you would take the parent keyword and ensure that it is repeated within your content/blog/etc. Adding another word like “burritos” within your content would be something you could add to yield more search queries. 
• You can also include any relationships for the words you are trying to rank for, if they are all together on the same page then Google can make sense of it and direct the customer to your page.

What tools are available to find keywords?

• Ahrefs is a powerful tool that can be used to suggest keywords and provide keyword difficulty scores
• You can use this tool to go after the keyword that has the most volume, and within your blog text you can include related keywords so you can rank for them as well.
• All of these different entities give your page more authority and more relevance because you will be ranking for the overall topic as well, not just the individual keywords.

When do you know if you have gone too broad with the keywords on your topic?

• The short answer here is when it stops making sense for the customer and their journey.
• For example, if the customer was searching for online casinos in the US, it would make sense to write a blog post or other content giving a list of American online casinos and providing more information about them, advantages and disadvantages, etc. It wouldn’t make sense to use keywords like “casino near me” or any casino names that are outside of the US, because that is not what the customer is looking for. 
• You want to keep focused on what is the intent of the user, and what makes sense for the user.

Switching gears to SaaS SEO, one of our attendees asked how to approach structuring content for the top, middle, and bottom of funnel:

• You always want to start at the bottom and work your way up. Starting at the bottom takes care of your existing client base and as you move up the funnel then you can begin to reach those who don’t know anything about your topic. 
• At the bottom of the funnel content examples would include: knowledge based content about the product, guides, reviews, comparisons, how to use your product. 
• Middle of the funnel content would build on existing knowledge, highlight the features and benefits, explain who you are as a company, and introduce yourself and your product to a slightly wider audience. 
• The top of the funnel would be content that is a lot more general to your industry and knowledge base. 

How do you know which content to prioritize?

• You can do a content audit --- Scrape the titles of existing content posts, are your sections covering everything they need to cover? Does the client have enough information to buy your product?
• This can show if there are any sections that are lacking, and therefore, where to prioritize your time and energy. 

Just starting out? Our SEO sessions are open to all experience levels. We emphasize learning and growing week-to-week. Join us weekly on Wednesdays to build your SEO knowledge!

Entrepreneurship struggles: You're not as alone as you think

How important is a mentor?

Usually success requires the advice and support from the right people. Bob Proctor said “A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you, than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you.”

Furlough sees the importance of a mentor. Many community members have already achieved success themselves and are looking to help others to prosper as well. 

This week’s highlights:

During the Mastermind, community members Roslyn, Gensen, Jordan, and Eric shared various insights about business ownership. They explored the importance of meaningful relationships, the hardships of business ownership, and how to discover operational deficiencies. Creating meaningful relationships helps you prosper.

• There are many hardships to business ownership and having a support system and mentor is important on your path. 
• Find a mentor who has succeeded themselves. Make sure the mentor has accomplished the goals you want to achieve. This is someone who has overcome hardships and can help with your business struggles.
• Use LinkedIn to create meaningful relationships. People will reply 40% of the time so don't take it personally if you don't get a reply. It's a numbers game.
• Keep expanding your network as much as possible. You only need one person to help you change your life.

Succeeding involves sacrifice and rejection.

• Focus on what needs to get done today and use grit to achieve success. 
• When creating a startup there is a lot of fear surrounding how your employees will be paid and rejection from others. You must push forward even when you feel like giving up.
• Friends and family might not understand what you're trying to do with your business. This can lead to conflict and even alienation when you're starting out. 

Constantly look for areas of improvement.

• Gensen talked about a good way to find operational deficiencies is by taking a step back. You can observe areas that need improvement by taking a vacation or letting your employees take the lead.
• Identify areas that need improvement and fix them quickly.
• As a business owner try not to do everything yourself and make sure to delegate tasks appropriately. If you take a vacation or aren’t available the company needs to run smoothly without you.
• Learning troubleshooting skills is very important. 
• The Four Seasons taught troubleshooting skills to employees by asking them to fulfil all customer complaints. No matter how outlandish the request, the complaint must be resolved. This empowers employees to take initiative in the decision making process.

Lights, Camera, Action…

Keeping with today’s theme of persistence… 

How quick do you think you can go from $0 to running a 6-figure a year business? 

Got it? 

Great.

Now what if we told you it was possible to do within 3 months? 

You’d probably think we’re crazy. 

But then you’ve probably never met Mason Kuhr.

This phenomenon is Furlough’s very own TikTok-preneur (yes this a totally real title). 

As entrepreneurs, we tend to always place some figurative monetary value in the back of our minds and grind until we get there. 

For some people, it takes them years to even see that first sale. 

For others, they give up too soon to see anything happen. 

But what’s interesting with Mr. Mason, is that he started his journey by working backwards. 

Just a few short months ago, he was nearly dead broke. 

But he decided to share his knowledge & passion for fitness as well as a holistic lifestyle on TikTok. 

Because why not? 

Over the following months, he amassed nearly 140k+ followers on the platform, and over $60k in revenue through his online store. 

Talk about a come up!! 

But since he found Furlough it was time to really take his business to the next level. 

Last Thursday, we walked through The Stampede Network (Mason’s personal eCom brand). 

It became obvious to our experts that The Stampede Network was absolutely crushing the basics but there was a TON of room for improvement: 

• From expanding his email marketing efforts: 
  • (i.e. adding a returning customer flow, a/b testing subject lines, fine tuning the customer journey, as well as collecting reviews)
     
• From building upon his current Tik Tok ad strategy: 
  • (i.e. creating additional video assets, exploring video view campaigns & remarketing efforts, and testing more audiences based on user intent) 
     
• From optimizing his current Google ad strategy: 
  • (i.e. setting up shopping campaigns, investing in remarketing to grow reach & LTV, start optimizing for conversions etc.)

Since the foundation is so solid at this point, we’re super excited to see where Mason takes The Stampede Network.

If you’ve got any suggestions in terms of different strategies to grow organically on Tik Tok, let us know in the #ecommerce channel! 

Join us in the #Furlounge this Thursday @2 pm to listen in on our next Brand Audit.

If you're a brand looking to get your 2022 action plan, then send a message to one of the community managers in the Furlough discord to join the waitlist (Spots are LIMITED).

Last Weeks Best Bits

Get ready to experience this weeks best bits from our community:

ECOMMERCE: 23 most successful Shopify dropshipping store examples.
STRATEGY: Power of contrast in marketing.
EMAIL-MARKETING: Over 2000 free email marketing resources. 
SEO: Local keyword generator.
SEO: Blog outline generator.
TOOLS: More amazing tools for your next startup.

Have a great week and we hope to see you in our Kick Off today at 2PM EST!