Theme: Marketing | Startup Media|

When I started working on this project, I had a few Ideas in mind, I rejected many of them because I didn't myself believed in them and hence, don't want to recommend something that I am not sure of.  I got this idea( The one we will talk about here) when I was working on this blog itself and side by side learning the art of digital marketing.

This concept that we will be talking about is not a full-fledged business idea but a means to create a network, a community around it and get credibility for a lifetime. There are many different organizations who are doing something on these lines.

Background 
We talked about growing internet penetration in our last blog post and increasing smartphone penetration that is complementing it in a perfect manner. Talking about a few other things here:
1) Digital marketing 

Well, due to increasing internet penetration and saturating traditional ways of marketing, digital marketing is a very lucrative thing from India point of view, we have dedicated courses not only short term but colleges like Mudra Institute of Communications(MICA) offers a full MBA program with a specialization in digital marketing, that's how big it is and still has a tremendous growth potential because
1) An increasing need for marketing
2) Rising internet penetration
3) Digital marketing is cheaper than offline marketing
4) You can reach millions of people just by this medium really fast.

Over 8 lakh job opportunities were there in Q1 of 2017 alone for digital marketing, as India progresses more towards digitalization this number will keep on increasing, also schemes like digital India are acting as catalysts for this purpose.

2) Ease of doing business
India improved greatly and jumped 23 places in the ease of doing business index, India was ranked 142 bk in 2014 and now at 77 currently, becoming a top-ranked country in South Asia, India has improved for two consecutive years. Initiatives like "Make in India" and schemes like "
MUDRA" are paving the way to rising startup culture in India. Overall the process is getting really streamlined.

These rising startups work on really thin margins initially and need to market themselves differently to be recognized.  In India, companies spend 20-22% of their total marketing budget on digital marketing, compared to developed countries like the USA  where companies spend 40% of their marketing spend on digital platforms. This shows we have a huge potential to tap in this segment.


The Basic Plan
The basic plan is starting a blog, where we aim to cover upcoming startups and feature them on our blog, as an online magazine for upcoming startups which are in very initial stages, or just upcoming. We can feature their story behind the business, why, how, where, the road ahead? Even a personal interview can be published to help the audience understand the founder in a holistic way.                                                           
How will we find such startups?

Well, there are a lot of ways but the easiest I found is going to sites like Internshala.com or any other internships portal, you will find a lot of internships listed there by startups, contact them, interview them, draft a blog, post it and DONE. This is the single most efficient way to go about it, obviously, we can explore numerous other ways to do it. You can even explore sites like angel.co which are about startup jobs and funding them.

Why will the startups do this?

Everyone wants free of cost marketing initially, startup founders are very open to trying new things that might aid them to grow or help them create initial buzz for the service/product, they will be really happy if someone is already talking about them. What else? you might even create some really good contacts while carrying out this process which might help you in the future in some way.

You can even ask the startup founders to feature your blog on their own platform or social media as you are writing about them, this will also fetch you some backlinks which will make the credibility of the blog go really up and also improve your google page rank.

How will we earn?
Initially, you won't. This blog will take its own sweet time to grow and become popular but once you start getting traction there are a number of ways which can bring in good returns.

1) Running ads on your blog
   You can sign up for Google Adsense, fill out the form and run ads on the blog, ad networks bring in companies that want to run paid ads online across various websites.
 2) Charge startups to get published on the blog, once you have created a buzz for yourself.
3) Affiliate Marketing

Do check out Theme Food If you want to pursue a food-based startup, it is a really affordable plan. It might also serve as a perfect  side business.