BUILDING A STARTUP IS PAINFUL AND DIFFICULT. Aurelia, RJ & Natasha are ready to help. Every week they share key insights to aid your journey to building the next Unicorn company.

Taking the stage as a start-up is a huge, exciting adventure: the performance of a lifetime. Learn to connect with your audience and keep your instrument tuned!

Connecting, writing, engaging and running a successful business are ALL full-time jobs. Keeping yourself in tune is just as important, though. Natasha shares her own methods to maintain a healthy work-life balance so she can be at her best.

When I was younger I didn’t place any particular emphasis on having a work life balance — I think early on in your career there is some pressure to put more emphasis and time into your job rather than focusing on your personal life.

Through the years, I’ve realized I delivered better work and enjoyed my job more when there was more of a balance between the two. I think realistically the years I pulled the longer hours and established myself professionally helped me to negotiate and better navigate the awesome work-life balance I have now at Rokk3r Labs!

Natasha Petrukhin engages with local, national and international communities to identify promising ideas and entrepreneurs. Tweet Natasha to discuss a shared love for dumplings and your startup quandaries that keep you awake at night: @tashnosh

Getting the word out to investors, clients, customers and the public (filled with potential investors, clients and customers!) is a tricky business. The possibilities for creating, curating and presenting content can be overwhelming. But the rewards can also be enormous! Interested in how one hour of effort today can lead to thousands of leads in the future? RJ will tell you how.

Content Creation with Content Curation is a winning formula if done right. For sake of this question, we will focus on content creation and its benefits. Some of the key benefits are:

1. You become engaged with your target audience

2. You develop a fan following / helps drive traffic to your site.

3. Your original content becomes a valuable share for other leading content curators / helps establish you as an authority.

4. It allows you to sell your product or service in a non-aggressive manner / helps drive traffic in to leads.

5. It gives you staying power/credibility as your quality content moves up the rankings in search engines over time.

6. And above all, it allows you to build your Brand.

Now, having said that there are many different ways to deliver this content. In my humble opinion I see Blog as being the most effective.

With every blog post, you’re either educating or entertaining readers. If you write a seriously good blog post, then people will share that. People don’t share product pages. That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come you can continue to get traffic and leads from that post.

One hour of effort today can lead to hundreds or thousands of views and leads in future. The best blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you are consistently creating quality content that helps your target demographic, it will establish you as the go to authority in that vertical. These are some of the core benefits that a quality blog and content creation can lead to.

Happy Blogging!

RJ develops strategic partnerships between entrepreneurs and investors at all levels. As a proven been-there-done-that entrepreneur, tweet RJ about nanotech and your investment related questions at @RJ_CLU

Say you had a sour note somewhere along the line. No one’s THAT perfect! You can, however, re-engage with former clients and work to turn their frowns upside down! Aurelia has a creative idea to share.

One of the ways that has been successful is to reestablish you/your company as a thought leader in their industry. Create some type of event that shares valuable information about their industry and use current clients as case studies. These knowledge transfers are not sales meetings — they are ways for them to learn from your recent experiences and network with others in their industry.

Aurelia Crews is on the front lines of unearthing and connecting today’s most brilliant entrepreneurs. As someone who comes from a corporate background, Aurelia also specializes in helping corporations innovate “at the edge”. Tweet her your startup qualms at @crewsin22