Steve Spalding is the managing partner of Crossing Gaps, a Florida based firm that helps businesses launch successful web campaigns. He blogs at How To Split An Atom and recently authored the book All The Little Things

Your only job as an entrepreneur is to tell a great story.

Building a great product is a given, without one, you’re dead in the water.

Having a great team is a given, without one, you might as well stop now.

Having enough money to keep yourself in Ramen and rent, well, you see where I’m going with this.

Ask yourself what separates the hundreds of people with great ideas, great teams and a nest-egg from those who become breakout successes? Other than luck, timing and a pile of hard work you can tie their success directly to how good their story is.

#1 - Become a well-known face

The most successful entrepreneurs on the web travel, a lot.

Why?

It’s not just for education and networking, it’s because travel helps to keep them in public view. If you are at every event with the same people who are at every event, you start to become a recognizable character. You get asked about your startup. If you are a decent human being, people start to like and respect what you’re doing. Later, assuming you meet the three “given” criteria above, they start to tell other people about it.

If you’re looking for a way to get into someone’s mind and heart, the first thing you should do is get in front of their face.

#2 - Have an interesting story

The most successful entrepreneurs on the web have a “story.”

If you spend your time talking to people and you’re all over the map, chatting about this great idea or this new product or this other thing you’re thinking about doing that will change the wor…

If you don’t have a coherant plan or at least coherant “principles” no one will ever be able to lock onto what you do. If you can’t explain it to them, they can’t explain it to anyone else and all that work you did traveling the country is scattered to the four-corners.

Discover what you do. It doesn’t matter if you “do” tons of different projects, make sure you can wrap them in some overaraching principle or at least explain them it a way that makes it seem like they are.

#3 - Tell your story

The most successful entrepreneurs are open to telling their stories to anyone who will listen. I’ll leave this one to our more statistically adroit readers. Make a plot between several companies traffic and the number of interviews that companies founder does. Now try again with traffic versus gross revenue. Without looking at the numbers, I can tell you the first one will have a strong correlation and the second, well, I’d be surprised.

On the Social Web perception is a large contributing factor to success. If people see you, they will use your stuff. The more they see you, the more likely this is to happen.

Of course, none of this is likely to help you attract a mainstream audience but in many cases, that’s OK too. Think of it as the trickle down economics of PR (for better and for worse). You are targeting the people with the largest platforms, who then turn around and tell everyone they know and so on and so on and so on. Since a large portion of business success is surviving for long enough for “the miracle” to occur (which I’ll talk about in another post), sometimes starting the landslide is all you need to do to speed that along.