Voguepreneurs

Women Entrepreneurs Who Have Built Million Dollar Brands Through Digital Platforms

Andrea Siracuse

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781636760247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

Can everyone build a brand through digital platforms? Andrea Siracuse sets out to find out why some women rise to the top and others flop at building brands through digital platforms. Filled with stories, lessons, and takeaways from successful female entrepreneurs, Voguepreneurs takes a look at how these successful women sparked an idea, refined that idea, and then used digital to grow their community and brand.

In this book, you'll learn:

• How the uber-successful female influencers on social media built a massive following.
• What lessons you can use from their trials and triumphs to grow your own brand.
• What the 4 S's to Success are and how to use them to achieve unlimited potential.

Voguepreneurs is the perfect tool to help you grow your own brand, learn how digital marketing has evolved, and inspire you to grow your own million dollar business.

PART 1

The Beginning

Chapter 1

History of Digital

It is the early 2000s and my teenage self is dancing and twirling to whatever music is playing on MTV.

I was fourteen years old and without a license, so in my free time I turned to music and, of course, Total Request Live (TRL). If you don’t know what TRL is, I’m sorry. It was seriously the best show on MTV, and I’m devastated it doesn’t exist anymore. Carson Daly, the host of TRL, was my dream man: tall, dark and handsome. TRL was a place to learn new music, listen, and watch music videos. I was obsessed with it.

I could be caught any time of day with my Walkman (for my gen-z readers, this is how we listened to music) on my hip, singing in the mirror while watching TRL. I would put on my sassiest outfit (think feathers, lots of pink, and sequins on every seam in every outfit) and makeup covering every inch of my face, including hot pink glitter eyeshadow that made me look like a backup dancer for Christina Aguilera. It was a look.

I loved dancing and dressing the part back then. My parents even have home videos of me with dance routines to various music with friends. It was a normal Saturday afternoon activity for me.

Whenever new releases came out, I would beg my mom to take me to RadioShack as soon as it opened. I would wait in line (no matter how long it took) to get whatever new album was the hottest hit at the time. After all, I could only get updates about an album release via the radio or television (mainly TRL). My mom said I was too young to watch TRL, but I sneak-watched MTV whenever I could. There was no “network” of people to connect with that had the same interests as me. All I knew is whatever the television or radio host wanted me to know. That’s all the information I had.

It’s hard to imagine a time before social media. Back in the nineties, we would get information through televisions, magazines, radio stations, billboards, friends, and family. We now simply pick up our phone and can Google anything we want. The evolution of digital content has skyrocketed over the years, especially in the last thirty years. If someone were to land on earth today and ask me to help them get acquainted to this world, I would literally hand them an iPhone and say, “Here you go! This is where you should start.”

For the 4.57 billion internet users worldwide consuming digital content, we all know and use it as part of our everyday routine.5 Through our phones and computers, we’re able to get news, purchase goods, listen to music, and connect with friends and family living across the world. We’re able to learn and do things that we’ve never been able to do before. It’s crazy to think smartphones have only been around for a little over a decade now. No more waiting in long lines to purchase that new lipstick you heard about from a friend or waiting by the TV to see your favorite brand release a new product you can’t wait to try. Our world has been completely transformed by our new ability to market, sell, and purchase online—a transformation propelled by social media.

Before we really get into how digital has played such an important role through the stories of women in this book, let’s take a look at some of the major digital milestones that have completely transformed our world into a digital one.

We’ll focus on the main digital channels that have helped the women we are spotlighting become influencers and successful businesswomen.

1997

Sixdegrees.com Launched

I honestly completely forgot about Six Degrees. This platform was known (probably to very few of you) as the first social media platform. In reality, it was basically a glorified address book. Think of it as a webpage of contacts for your family and friends. It was named after the six degrees of separation concept and allowed users to list friends, family members, and acquaintances both on the site and externally; external contacts were invited to join the site.6 People who confirmed a relationship with an existing user, but did not go on to register with the site, continued to receive occasional email updates and solicitations. Users could send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees, and see their connection to any other user on the site.

Six Degrees, at one point, had around one hundred employees and around three-and-a-half million fully registered members. The site was purchased by YouthStream Media Networks in December 1999 for one-hundred-and-twenty-five million dollars.7

AOL Instant Messenger

I didn’t have a Six Degrees account, but I spent most of my teenage years chatting with friends and boyfriends on AIM. For all my eighties and nineties babies, do you remember changing your away status to something like “maybe…ur gonna b the 1 that saves me…brb shower” when you broke up with your boyfriend? Or changing your profile to music lyrics depending on your current mood? I think my screen name was something to do with princess and glitter?

AIM was popular from the late 1990s to the late 2000s in North America and was the leading instant messaging application in that region. AIM’s popularity declined steeply in the early 2010s as internet social networks like Twitter gained popularity, and its fall has often been compared with the once-popular internet service Myspace. 8

2000

Sixdegrees.com Shut Down

Google.com launched in 1998, four years after Yahoo.com. Could you imagine being a student at Stanford University and announcing you wanted to build a website where you could literally search ANYTHING in the whole world? Well, Sergey Brin, an American software engineer, teamed up with Larry Page, another PhD student at Stanford, to start Google in September 1998. 9

When I think of Google, I think of Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google Home—pretty much anything I need to help me keep everything organized and on track. Google products aren’t just designed for personal use but have helped millions of small businesses as well. Google has Google Analytics to see how your website traffic is doing, Google AdWords to reach more people, and even can create personal template invoices (it’s so cool if you have a small business, and you should check it out if you don’t know what I’m talking about). I guess that’s how you become the most visited website in the world.

2002

LinkedIn Launched

This company was founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman and former employees of PayPal and Socialnet.com.10 Initially, LinkedIn was used as a business—an employment-oriented social networking service that operated via websites and mobile apps. It’s now mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and jobseekers posting their CVs. As of 2015, the company’s revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals.

LinkedIn currently has 706+ million users in more than two hundred countries around the world since May, 2020.11 It’s definitely not a channel I went to first in the past, but as LinkedIn grows (Microsoft reported that LinkedIn’s revenue grew 24 percent in Q2 2020) it’s becoming a place to show your thought leadership.12 T...

Table of contents

• A New Wave of Digital Women Entrepreneurs
• The Beginning
• The 4S Process
• The Digital Dilemma
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgement
• APPENDIX