Young entrepreneurs are always asking me where they can find the capital to launch their businesses or get to the next step. Your best bet, especially early on, is to connect through your network. Somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who can help you. That being said, I thought I would put together a list of other places you can try online to find the capital you are looking for:

Go BIG Network

The Go BIG Network is an on-line marketplace that connects the startup and small business community. The company allows startup companies, investors, advisors, job seekers and service providers to post requests for help on-line and have those requests routed to other members of the Network who can help them.

vFinance

vFinance  is a financial services company which specializes in emerging opportunities, providing investment banking, trading, trend forecasting, and consulting services to micro, small and mid-cap high-growth companies, and to institutional and high net-worth investors seeking above-market returns.

Funding Post

For over five years FundingPost has worked to bring entrepreneurs together with leading investors worldwide. We believe that it is important to reach investors in every medium possible - both online and offline.

Venture Capital Access Online
Venture Capital Access Online is a leading Internet-based marketplace for the venture capital and private equity industry. vcaonline.com provides online services and tools to entrepreneurs, investors and advisors/service providers worldwide. Our flagship product, VCPro Database, has become the most popular venture capital directory of its kind available today. We also offer valuable venture capital resources and timely industry news to entrepreneurs and professionals.

Angel Capital Association

The Angel Capital Association is North America’s professional alliance of angel groups. This fast-growing association brings together the 200 angel organizations in the United States and Canada to share best practices, network, and help develop data about the field of angel investing.

National Venture Capital Association

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) is a trade association that represents the U.S. venture capital industry. It is a member-based organization, which consists of venture capital firms that manage pools of risk equity capital designated to be invested in high growth companies.

Business Finance

Search the funding criteria of over 4,000 sources of business loans, venture capital, equipment leasing and commercial real estate financing.

Garage Technology Ventures

Garage Technology Ventures is a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund. We’re looking to invest in extraordinary entrepreneurs who have the ability to build great teams and great companies.

Evan Carmichael

Our 8th Review Our Blog comes thanks to Ray Johnson from LinkRambler. His review was recently put up in his blog here: YOUNGENTREPRENEUR.COM.

LinkRambler is a weblog whose focus is to inform and display all things related to linkbait. This includes promotions,meme, giveaways , contest, list just to name a few. This site will be dedicated to helping bloggers,marketers, and Internet users improve their online experience by informing them of what companies/sites are trying to do.

Thanks for the review Ray! If you are interested in doing a review, check out our Review Our Blog initiative for instructions.

Evan Carmichael

On Monday I discussed Google’s Domain Age Filter and the importance of having a domain that has been around for a while. Well how do you find out how old a domain is?

A cool tool that I like to use is the Wayback Machine. You can put in any website and it will give you an estimate of how long the site has been around for.

Another cool feature is that you can actually go back in time and see what the pages used to look like. For example, you can see what the Young Entrepreneur website looked like back in May of 2000 or what Microsoft’s website looked like over a decade ago in October of 1996. How website design has changed!

Not all of the pictures or elements on the page will load properly because they might have been deleted but you can get the general idea of what the site looks like. When I have a few moments I sometimes look back on my site or the sites of my friends to see what they used to look like and how bad they were.

To explore the site yourself simply go to the Wayback Machine, enter in the url you are curious about, then click on the Take Me Back button!

Evan Carmichael.

According to the Telegraph, the hit TV series, The Apprentice, is being blamed for lowering the desire for young people to start their own businesses. The UK version of the show is aired on BBC and has Alan Sugar as its star instead of Donald Trump here in North America.

Apparently only four percent of young people in the UK want to become entrepreneurs and some feel that “The Apprentice accentuates a blame culture which doesn’t inspire young people to see the workplace as a positive and constructive environment but rather a place which fosters dispute, aggression and unhealthy competition.”

I have never seen the UK version of the show but am a big fan of the American one. In the first season I used to have Apprentice parties and fill my living room with up to 20 young entrepreneurs to watch the episodes and guess who would get fired (note - watching the Apprentice is always more fun in groups!). Things are a little busier now so I cannot commit to every show but I try to open up my Sunday evenings to tune in.

I have always found the show interesting and exciting. I think about what I would do on the tasks, how I would enjoy the rewards, and how I would position myself in the board room. Sure it is entertainment but there is also a business component to it. If anything it gets me even more excited to get back to my business and continue growing.

How do you feel? Does the Apprentice discourage you from moving forward with your business?

Evan Carmichael.

• Y Combinator’s Unathorized European Clone - Y Combinator’s funding methodology of investing a small amount of money across a wide array of young entrepreneurs has already inspired other programs, such as TechStars out of Colorado.
• Time Management Skills - With so many demands on our time, there’s just simply not enough hours in day. The following are some areas that should be focused on to maintain a good schedule.
• Small business finance: Young entrepreneurs share their views - BusinessZone was at the recent British Chambers of Commerce annual conference to hear the thoughts of some of the UK’s leading young entrepreneurs on financing new ventures.

Evan Carmichael

With Google’s most recent update, one of the results has been a great number of pages being dropped to the supplemental index. What this means is that your page will show up after the main results for important keywords. In my case I was ranking on page 30 for keywords that I used to rank for on the first page.

In my post from April 11th (Is Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacting Your Site?) I discussed the importance of changing your keyword density to make your pages seem less spammy and improve your results. This greatly improved my site results and I have since expanded it to most of the articles on my site.

On the weekend I did something else that helped drive even more traffic - I created deep internal backlinks.

Google will also put your pages into the supplemental index if the pages do not have any links or Page Rank. The best way to get Page Rank is to have outside pages link to you but this takes time and is part of a long term SEO campaign. A quick fix is to make sure that your own pages deep link properly. This is especially important if you have a large site. On my site we made sure that each page had a link somewhere on the site but many of them were not being picked up by Google.

On Sunday I decided to try something new. I increased the number of backlinks internally and made sure that each internal page was linked at least three times from another page on my site. This made sure that the pages would be picked up. I then created a Google Sitemap and submitted it to Google.

The result? Traffic was up 35% on Monday compared to the Monday from last week and it continued yesterday and today as well. As more of the pages get picked up I am looking forward to an even greater traffic surge.

Even if you do not have a very large site, if you are finding that your main page is getting picked up but your deeper pages are put in supplemental, make sure to have those deeper pages linked multiple times from other pages on your site so they can get properly indexed.

Evan Carmichael

• Students: Social innovation pays - 10 Social Innovators will be selected to lead Conscious Lifestyle ventures and receive up to $1,000 in funding, a web page, t-shirts, business cards, personalized support, and everything else you need to make your venture a success.
• Institute For Entrepreneurship College - Today, just a few hours ago, I learned of a new program called the Institute for Entrepreneurs at Grand Canyon University.
• 10 things every young entrepreneur should know - No matter how established your business you may find the following ten tips can help you to improve your business practices, stretch your financing reach and increase your net worth!

Evan Carmichael

One of the things that really helped me get my business going was to bring on foreign language student interns. There are a number of schools in my city where they bring in students from overseas who want to learn English. They are usually university educated and highly skilled. After they finish their semester at school they look for an internship opportunity with a local company.

The students are looking to improve their English skills as well as gain some additional experience. Having worked in a North American company looks really good on their resumes when they go back to their home country and because they are on student visas, the students can only volunteer at companies - legally they are not allowed to receive compensation which is a great plus for the entrepreneur!

I have had interns help out with programming, marketing, event management, research, and a number of other tasks. They are usually also excited to work and bring dynamic energy to your company.

The language schools are constantly on the lookout for companies to host their students and will provide you with replacements after the student’s term is up (usually 1-3 months).

As entrepreneurs we typically have to think outside of the box and make our resources stretch as much as possible. Having free, skilled help by bringing on foreign language student interns can be a great way to help give your company the boost it needs to get to the next step.

Evan Carmichael

• Are you Europe’s Young Entrepreneur? - Business Week Online has a competition to find the best European young entrepreneur under 25.

Evan Carmichael

Last week I talked about Google’s Sandbox filter as the introduction to a series on the filters that Google users to rank webpages. Today I’m going to discuss the domain age filter.

One of Google’s problems is that so many people are launching websites that is has to determine which to rank at the top because everybody wants to be #1. The domain age filter was set up to give older domains more credibility than the newer ones. If your website has been around and active for years then you are more likely to not be a spammy website. Using this logic Google gives your domain a better rating and you have a higher chance of ranking at the top.

By the same token, brand new websites have to wait a period of months before they are even allowed into Google’s main index. It will then take them even more time to rank once they are accepted in.

How can you use this information?

- Use old domain names. If you have the option between starting a brand new domain or taking an existing one and changing the content, it is far better to use the existing domain name. It has the credibility built up and will have a much easier time ranking.

- Get your domains now. If you are thinking of setting up new websites, buy the domains right now and put up a simple landing page. Then tell Google about it so you get into their system. You may not be ready to launch officially until months or even years but when you are ready to go, you will have an older domain name that can give a nice boost to your rankings.

- Purchase older domain names. This is a little bit underhanded but some people have taken to buying old domain names and then modifying them to suit new purposes. If you buy a site that has been around for years, it will become a lot easier to rise in Google’s index for important keywords. You should note that Google is watching out for this kind of activity and frowns upon it. If you are going to buy the domain name make sure you do not change the WHOIS registration so Google does not find out that the domain has a new owner or you could lose all the SEO benefits of owning the old domain name.

Evan Carmichael