The Secret to Not Getting Sick on Business Travel to India

September 6, 2016 By Darin Thompson

Business Traveler at Taj Mahal Agra India

As my first international business trip to India in 2007 approached, I methodically prepared for both how to do business well in India, and importantly, how to avoid getting sick when traveling on business to the second most populated country in the world.

I’m excited to share that I have published my India Business Travel Guide – an insider’s guide, packed with business travel tips and tricks, that reveals the secrets of how to not get sick when traveling to India on business.

Plan Ahead & Don’t Get Sick on India Business Travel

While India was positioned as an epicenter for tech, and was such an intriguing place to me, nearly every person I came across that had traveled to India on business had gotten sick, many to the point they avoided ever returning.

The stakes seemed high to me.

The basis for much of my initial preparation for traveling to India safely and successfully was a set of guidelines shared with me by a friend and former colleague at IBM, Prathap Dendi. Prathap not only seeded me with an initial set of tips, namely related to food and hygiene, he joined me a day or two after I first arrived in Mumbai (BOM) for business meetings with business partners and systems integrators.

Having had the opportunity to return to India multiple times, both international in and out trips as well as extensive domestic travel across the business hubs of Bangalore / Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, New Delhi, and Mumbai, I’ve built up a more extensive personal understanding of doing business in India and staying safe and healthy while there.

In 2015, I shared a first cut at an India travel guide with colleagues who were traveling to India for the first time. That first edition was a simple Word document, and had some notion of headings and sections. I joined that trip in 2015, and everyone returned back to the US without getting sick.

I refined the travel guide quite extensively over the years, especially after I personally got sick, quite violently ill actually, in 2014 – in Delhi no less, the infamous Delhi Belly!

The essence of my refined approach was put to the true test in a 2015 return trip in which I did not get sick, and so I’m really happy to share the updated India Business Travel Guide here on Your Entrepreneur Inside.

Moving the travel guide online will make it more easily accessible, and that much easier to update with what I anticipate will be incremental revisions from colleagues and friends as the guide has truly been a collaboration in due diligence starting with Prathap’s initial input all the way back in 2007.

International Business Travel Is Fascinating to Me

I have a sincere appreciation for the blessing and honor it is to see the world through international business travel.

To gain insight and understanding of how business is done in foreign countries, to intentionally insert myself into situations where you have the chance to see first-hand the subtle nuances of culture, it’s eye opening, humbling, and makes me better.

I’m a much more effective businessman, both at home and abroad, and able to add more value and be more effective, because of the reps and experience I’ve had via international business travel.

Whether that’s knowing the subtle methods of how to get a deal done in a foreign market, to being an effective international public speaker, giving presentations in foreign countries, with and without interpreters, truly being understood by your audience because you’ve been given the opportunity to study the art of international public speaking, international business travel is a launchpad for all of it.

It would be an honor if you checked out the Guide, and, shared your feedback with me in an effort to continue to refine the content and make it better.

Leadpages’ Most Important Update Ever (and Why You Need It) and 17 Bonus Expert Landing Pages to Use in Your Business

July 29, 2016 By Darin Thompson

It’s great software, but I’d rather be able to create any landing page I want.”

I’ve heard that a lot from marketers when talking about Leadpages, or, in critical reviews of the landing page software maker.

Many marketers I follow in the industry loved the fact that Leadpages allowed you to create high-converting landing pages in less than 5 minutes, Leadpages even visually ranks the success of each landing page type in their system based on analytics from millions of conversions so you know immediately what pages to try.

But many marketers also wanted more flexibility. They wanted the chance to create any landing page they wanted from scratch.

Well they asked for it, and Leadpages listened. (See how here.)

Leadpages just launched an entirely new landing page builder that allows you to create absolutely any landing page you want—no tech skills needed.

This new landing page builder allows you to add, move, or rearrange any videos, copy, images, or anything else on your landing pages, so you can design the exact landing page you want.

Even better, Leadpages ensures that your landing pages stay mobile-responsive no matter what elements you add to your landing pages.

This week, Leadpages is giving you the ultimate incentive to get started. They’re giving you 17 expert landing pages free when you purchase an annual Leadpages membership.

I personally use Leadpages (I have the Advanced plan). It’s an investment, no doubt.

I stepped up several years ago to bring Leadpages into the fold of my online businesses as I came to the realization that in order to progress and evolve forward, I needed to invest actual money back into the business.

Go check out what Leadpages can do for you (and claim your 17 pages).

17 Expert Landing Pages for Your Business Used by Some of the Most Successful Online Entrepreneurs

This week, Leadpages is giving you a little extra incentive to try out the #1 landing page and audience growth software for yourself.

When you purchase an annual plan this week, Leadpages is giving you 17 extra landing pages from some of the world’s top marketing leaders. (That’s in addition to the 150+ templates that already come with Leadpages.)

These 17 expert landing pages include. . .

Pat Flynn’s Dual-Purpose Leads and Sales Page: This favorite page from Pat Flynn is designed to both grow your email list and sell your products at the same time.
Amanda Holmes’ Virtual Summit Page: You can use this event page from Chet Holmes International to sell out your next conference, mastermind or online event.
David Siteman Garland’s Webinar Page: This “ultimate webinar page” from David Siteman Garland is engineered specifically to fill up your next webinar or online event.
Mariah Coz’s Blog Home Page: Whether you’re blogging or not, you can use this stunning home page to grow your list the second new visitors come to your site.
James Wedmore’s Product Launch Page: This proven launch page is perfect for releasing your new course, book, product, service, or even a whole new business.

Even better, you can use Leadpages’ new drag-and-drop landing page builder to customize these 17 gorgeous pages any way you like for your own business.

Leadpages Launched Their #1 Most Requested Feature This Year

It’s not even a feature per se. It’s an entirely new experience for customizing your landing pages: Leadpages’ new drag-and-drop landing page builder.

This all-new drag-and-drop builder gives you the ultimate flexibility so you can add, move or rearrange any elements on your landing pages while still ensuring 100% mobile responsiveness for your pages.

Leadpages is giving you extra incentive to try out their new drag-and-drop builder.

Leadpages is giving you 17 landing page templates designed by top marketing professionals—at no extra cost—when you join Leadpages.

Interested? Want to research LeadPages a little more? Don’t worry, I did too. Watch a quick 10 minute LeadPages demo that will put you in the driver’s seat.

P.S. Like any reputable software company, all Leadpages memberships come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So I’d suggest you try it. Find out if it’s for you. If not, just let them know within 30 days and they’ll issue a full refund.

P.P.S. Check out Leadpages in action immediately below with the Leadpages’ Leadbox created to give you, for free, the 3 entrepreneur tools you should be using, and probably aren’t!

Have You Read REWORK? Listen to My Review of the Business Book, in High Quality Audio

July 5, 2016 By Darin Thompson Leave a Comment

Here’s an interesting spin on a book report…

I read the business book REWORK, wrote a 1,700+ word review of it, but then decided to change things up a bit by recording me reading the review to you in an audio book review of REWORK.

Many who read REWORK boast the collection of short essays will change the way you work, forever.

It was the subtle insight taken from reading REWORK that was so inspiring for me. Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the guys behind 37signals (now Basecamp) business fame, have a tremendous amount of practical experience, insight that I like to call “right around the corner knowledge“.

There is some really thoughtful knowledge out there that, for some, can be taken for granted, it’s just out of the reach of those who have not had the experience themselves, and thus, just right around the corner. Fried and Hansson do a great job in taking you by the hand and giving you a guided tour of the windy roads of the entrepreneurial business realm.

In my book review, I talk about the concept of receiving the gift of entrepreneurial permission from Fried and Hansson – as an entrepreneur, it’s easy to shoulder the burden of trying to live up to big corporate norms and processes, while Fried and Hansson, business leaders who have been there done that, just cut through it all and assure you the reasonable approach can indeed work, and not just work, but become wildly successful.

As an example, one of my favorite subtle insights from REWORK is on corporate growth, and exactly how much growth is enough. In my audio review of REWORK, I share that I’ve mentally wrestled with the concept of corporate growth for most of my adult life, which more than likely stems from attempting to balance the entrepreneur inside me and my appreciation for organic growth and scale in business, and separately, my appreciation for the intricacies of successfully navigating and driving results at Fortune 100 companies (most notably for me, IBM, where I spent approximately 15 years of my full-time corporate career).

Fried and Hansson practically hit you upside the head on page 22 of REWORK with an essay called “Why grow?” that has one of the most articulately composed analogies that will undoubtedly make you look at growth, and the extent to which it is pursued unnaturally, like you never have before.

Have you ever felt awkward leaving work at 5pm?

If you’ve got any sort of hustle in you, no doubt, you have indeed felt awkward at some point cutting out “early”.

Shocker, REWORK addresses the topic, and probably in a much different way than you would think, especially considering we’re talking about authors who are entrepreneurs easily generating 8 figures in recurring annual revenue (Fried doesn’t seem to care about valuations, yet, doesn’t that perfectly align with the general sentiment you take away from REWORK – but, what if it’s a $100 billion valuation?!?).

I highlighted a number of really solid insights in REWORK that I look forward to returning to in the coming years, be that for inspiration, the entrepreneurial permission I was talking about, or, simply a level set on what’s reasonable in trying to grow and scale a business.

Check out and listen to the REWORK book review, and, share your feedback using the social share buttons, it would mean a lot to me, and, I’m sure it will help others too!

Inline Icons on StudioPress Genesis Navigation Menus

March 20, 2015 By Darin Thompson Leave a Comment

Curious how to add inline icons to WordPress navigation menus?

It’s easier than you might think.

I’ll share exactly how to add icons next to navigation menu items in WordPress using Font Awesome, an icon font set consisting of scalable vector icons that can be used to place icons inline (i.e. right next to and in the same row) to your navigation menu titles.

Font Awesome 4 Menus Plugin is the easiest way to add icons to your WordPress navigation menus – now available in the WordPress Plugin Directory boasting more than 10,000 active WordPress installs.

Adding icons to WordPress navigation menus with a plugin is clearly the easiest way to get to end of job, and is the route I use to place icons inline to WordPress navigation menus in premium WordPress themes by StudioPress.

Why Use Font Awesome for WordPress Navigation Menus?

In essence, Font Awesome is a instantly CSS customizable font set of scalable vector icons.

While you’ve got other options, including dashicons, which is already included in WordPress, I like Font Awesome because it gives you a simple way to make icons appear inline to navigation menu titles rather than above – for dashicons, which appear on top of your navigation menu title instead of inline, check out Brad Potter’s dashicons tutorial for StudioPress Genesis Framework navigation menus.

In addition to giving you inline navigation menu icons, Font Awesome is packed with feature / function.

500+ icons in a single collection, giving you an icon-based language to write in
No requirement for JavaScript means fewer cross-browser compatibility issues
Infinite scalability makes each vector-based icon graphic look good at any size on all displays, including high-resolution retina displays.
Free (even for commercial use), that’s always nice
Style, icon color, size, shadow, and anything possible with CSS you can do with Font Awesome
Originally designed for Bootstrap, solid compatibility with all frameworks
Screen reader compatible
Desktop edition available (use it in Microsoft Word if you want)

It wasn’t all that long ago when Font Awesome was banned from the WordPress Plugin Directory, but in May 2013, WordPress lifted the ban following open source and GPL related licensing changes by Font Awesome.

3 Steps to Add Font Awesome Icons to Genesis Menus

It’s relatively simple to incorporate Font Awesome into your theme’s navigation menus, here are the 3 easy steps to make it happen.

1. Install Font Awesome 4 Menus Plugin
2. Enable CSS Classes screen option in Appearance > Menus
3. Enter a CSS Class for the icon you want

Step 1: Install Font Awesome 4 Menus Plugin

Because the plugin is in the WordPress Plugin Directory, simply navigate over to Plugins > Add New within your WordPress Dashboard navigation, search for “Font Awesome 4 Menus”, install and activate the plugin – there are no settings or the like to adjust, cruise right over to step 2.

Step 2: Enable CSS Classes screen option in Appearance > Menus

By default, WordPress ships with a number of menu visibility options disabled, in this step, you’ll enable one of those options so that you can actually see and create a placeholder if you will, for an icon CSS Class name that will eventually render your icons on your navigation menu.

Go to Appearance > Menus within the WordPress Dashboard, click Screen Options near the top right, and check the CSS Classes option. Now you’re cooking with gas and ready to add an icon to your navigation menu in step 3.

Step 3: Enter a CSS Class for the icon you want

In this final sep, you’ll actually tell WordPress what icon you want it to display inline to, and in front of, your navigation menu title.

First, use the Font Awesome Cheatsheet to copy the CSS Class name associated with the icon you want to use (CSS Class names begin with “fa-“).

Back in Appearance > Menus within the WordPress Dashboard, open the Menu Structure for the menu you want to edit, open the navigation menu item you’d like to add an icon to and you’ll now see a “CSS Classes” field. As you might have guessed, you’ll paste the CSS Class name from the Cheatsheet in that field, save your changes, and you should now have an icon inline to your navigation menu title!

Further Reading: Font Awesome

Once you have the basics of Font Awesome nailed, you can start to get creative with things like stacked icons, animated icons, fixed with (stacked) icons, and making icons larger – the Font Awesome team created a list of examples to help.

If you make the investment (of implementation time) into using the Font Awesome 4 Menus Plugin, an incremental step forward you might want to consider is adding the Font Awesome CDN to WordPress without a plugin. This involves editing several files in your WordPress install (Jan Hoek shares how to do this in Add Font Awesome Icons to the Genesis Menus). Is it worth doing? Perhaps if you’re making heavy use of the font, leveraging a content delivery network (CDN), which is global, would be worthwhile from a page load time perspective. Further, if you’re averse to adding yet another plugin to your install for fear of bloat, taking a CDN approach is ideal.

Growing a Business? How to Create Your Own Evergreen Sales Funnel

March 16, 2015 By Darin Thompson Leave a Comment

Ever heard “the money is in the list“?

Yeah, me too.

One of the biggest mistakes I made as an entrepreneur was not starting email lists for my entrepreneurial ventures from the beginning.

I did a ton of research on email list building software, focusing my attention on products that made it easy to generate landing pages and lead boxes for WordPress sites, easily integrated with AWeber or MailChimp, had slick A/B split testing capabilities, and looked professional (it’s somewhat surprising that not all list building software is equal in this regard).

I honed in on a product, bought and tested it out, and after realizing it didn’t do what I wanted it to do…continued to do more research.

I now realize the research was simply, procrastination.

Despite taking a few steps forward towards email list growth early on, it wasn’t until I discovered LeadPages (software that allows you to easily create, split test, and optimize mobile responsive landing pages that can drive sales and email list growth) in 2013 that I got serious about, and started to actually implement, list building techniques.

I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said it’s never too late to do the right thing.

LeadPages, at least for me, just seemed to “get it”. Their webinars, which I attended several of before ever becoming a customer, were always on point – I took copious notes at all of them. Webinars are currently run by Tim Paige, and he usually has a high profile online business expert alongside him.

Always packed with entrepreneurial value, LeadPages webinars are for all online entrepreneurs, regardless of where you’re at in your email list building journey (even if you haven’t captured a single email address yet).

This Wednesday, March 18, 2015 3 pm EST, LeadPages will host a webinar entitled: How to create your own evergreen sales funnel to boost your leads and sales this year. Register now.

LeadPages Used Its Own Conversion Optimized & Mobile Responsive Landing Pages to Grow from Zero to 35,000 Customers in Two Years

That’s how fast LeadPages has grown since they first launched their business in January 2013. As one of their customers, I can attest this company is impressive to say the least.

In Wednesday’s (March 18, 2015 3 pm EST) live training, LeadPages is showing you how they did it (go check this out).

Inside this live training, the lead-generation experts at LeadPages will show you the same sales funnel they have used to grow their start-up from day one.

They will also walk you step-by-step through how you can create this exact funnel for your business — so you can continuously grow your business this year and beyond.

If you have an interest in growing a business or just creating a more strategic marketing plan, I encourage you to make time to attend this live training.

Go here to claim your spot right now.

“Must Have” Knowledge for Developing Online Evergreen Sales Funnels

Here’s a glimpse at what you can expect in this 1 hour + live training session on how to build an evergreen sales funnel for your website.

Your Own Simple Sales Funnel That Sells 24/7: You’ll discover how to build a simple sales funnel that can grow your email list and boost your sales every day of the week — without launching a new product or running a special promotion.
4 Kinds of Content to Boost Your Sales Further: You’ll see the types of content that are designed to drive more sales, so you can use every blog post and other content to continuously grow your business.
The Proven Funnel = 35,000 Customers: Once again, you’ll get an insider’s look at the sales funnel that has built LeadPages into an industry leader in just over two years.

This training goes live at 3 pm EST on Wednesday, March 18, 2015.

Go here to claim your spot.

P.S. The last time LeadPages hosted this live training, over 2,000 people registered in just 24 hours. It’s highly likely that Wednesday’s live training will fill up just as fast. I recommend you claim your spot right now (and show up a few minutes early to the webinar so as not to get locked out when capacity is reached).