• Bob Young from Red Hat on Entrepreneurship - Bob Young, co-founder and former Chairman of Red Hat. He had nothing prepared, no notes, no tie, and even admitted to forgetting he was supposed to give a speech that day until shortly before the event.
• Wanted: Young American farmers for documentary - With this film we hope build the case for those considering a career in agriculture, to embolden them, to entice them, and to recruit them into farming.
• The teens that mean business - Two years ago, nearly all Jasmine Lawrence’s hair fell out after a chemical perm went horribly wrong. Today, partly because of that accident, she is at the helm of a haircare products group whose sales could top $1m this year.
• Entrepreneurs are the future! - Andy is desperately striving for a State that supports Entrepreneurs and will provide the necessary resources for individuals to start businesses.

Evan Carmichael

Our seventh Review Our Blog entry comes courtesy of Josh Houghton. His review was recently put up in his blog here: Review of the Young Entrepreneur Blog.

Josh Houghton’s Real Life Real Estate and Reviews is a blog that contains honest, real world reviews of real estate books and courses from a real estate investor and entrepreneur. It also follows Josh’s successes, failures and insight as a growing real estate investor, entrepreneur and property manager in the Columbus, Ga area.

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

Evan Carmichael

I run a series of Mastermind Groups for entrepreneurs in the Toronto area and one of the exercises we’ve done with all three of the groups is to set a goal for where the members want to be at the end of the year.

Why goal setting is important
When you have a goal that you are working towards, your business has focus. Too many young entrepreneurs jump from one idea to the next and do not follow through on anything. It is easy to get distracted and end up not accomplishing what you want because you lost your focus. Also, when you set a goal you give yourself something to shoot for. It should be something that motivates you to get up every day and take action because you are reaching for a target.

How do you set a goal?
When you are doing goal setting it is important to find something that is very important to you. If you are not passionate about the goal you are setting then there is no way you are going to put the hard work in to achieve the goal. I would also encourage you to set a numeric goal because it is easier to track. Instead of saying you want to get more customers by the end of the year put down a number. For example, you could want to land 10 new customers or 100, or 1000… or more depending on your business. Having a due date is also important which is why we said December 31, 2007.

Commit to someone else
If you commit to someone else you are more likely to follow through on your goal so once you set them tell others it them and give them updates. Nobody wants to look bad in front of their friends and peers so it will drive you to accomplish what you said you were going to do. You will also build yourself a great support network and people will want to get involved to help you achieve your goal. If you do not commit to others then it is too easy to get lazy and not follow through. A quick example is a personal goal of going to the gym to lose weight. People who go to the gym together are more likely to continue doing it but if you are going alone you will find many reasons not to go and you end up not following through. Having your own Mastermind Group can also be a great way to hold you accountable.

What is your goal?
The goal that I have set for myself is to reach the 35,000 spot in Alexa for my website. I have been hovering at around the 50,000 mark for a while so it will be a stretch but I am excited to strive for it.

What are your goals for December 31, 2007? Where do you see yourself and your company?

Evan Carmichael

Most search engines like Google send crawlers out to your site to see what pages you have created and then proceed to add them to their index. But what if they miss some pages or you make changes and they do not come back for another few months? How can you let the search engines know? The answer is through sitemaps.

What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that contains the details of all the pages on your website. If you add a new page or modify an existing one all you have to do is edit your sitemap file to let the search engines know. In November 2006, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all agreed to support the sitemap protocol. Ask.com has now also agreed which means the four leading search engines are all on board.

How do I create a sitemap?
There are a number of ways to create a sitemap. My personal favorite is the GSiteCrawler. It is a free download that you can download to your computer. Once you run the program it will crawl your website and automatically create a sitemap for you according to the sitemap protocal (saving you tons of time and energy!). Because of all the new content we are regularly adding to my site, I run a sitemap every week. As of the writing of this post my sitemap currently contains 16,639 pages.

How do I tell the search engines about my sitemap?

You should create a link in your robots.txt file to your sitemap. All the major search engines will look through your robots.txt file so it is a quick way to let them know. Google and Yahoo have also created tools to allow you to let them know as soon as you make a sitemap change. This is not yet possible with Microsoft and Ask.com.

If you are not yet using sitemaps chances are the search engines are missing some of your pages and have an out of date record of what you have on your website. Make sure the hard work you put into creating quality website content is not wasted and tell the search engines that you have updated your pages by creating and submitting your sitemaps.

Evan Carmichael

• 20 Things You Should and Should Not Do Before Starting Your Small Business - Dane Carlson lists 20 Things Not to Do Before Starting A Business. While I agree with some of his points, I disagree with many others and think that if you follow them, they will either hinder the growth of your business, or get you into trouble.
• Mind Petals Magazine - Young Entrepreneurs - In March, I started writing for Mind Petals Magazine. In case any of you are not familiar with Mind Petals, it is a young entrepreneur network offering informative, inspiring and motivational content designed for any entrepreneur.
• Young Entrepreneur: The Future Looks Very Bright - Today young entrepreneurs have come a long way from delivering newspapers, walking dogs, babysitting or running lemonade stands. In fact children as small as 12 have started to run full fledged manufacturing businesses and services.
• Helpful Hints for Young Entrepreneurs - Entrepreneurship isn’t just for people with specific business training; it’s for anyone who wants to take advantage of an opportunity. Here are some tips to help you get started.
• Did You Get Back Your Taxes? If So, Reinvest those Bucks! - For the first time since running my business I got back a tax return. YAY! It was definitely a good feeling, albeit it was only a few hundred dollars.
• Newest College Major: Entrepreneur - Here are some interesting thoughts from a recent study about young entrepreneurs.

Evan Carmichael

Apprentice UK winner Tim Campbell has come up with a new way to help fund young entrepreneurs. He is creating the Bright Ideas Trust in London with the goal of helping young entrepreneurs launch 365 businesses a year.

The startups will get financial backing and expert advice in return for an equity stake in their businesses. The money earned from the ventures will go back into the Trust to finance future young entrepreneurs.

If executed successfully it could be a great model for North America to follow as well as developing countries to help develop new ideas and foster entrepreneurship. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of businesses come out of this experiment and if it can be built to become a self-sustaining initiative!

Who do you think would be the best person to set something like this up in North America?

Evan Carmichael

Our blog has pulled ahead of Guy Kawasaki and now has 5 votes for the best business blog according to the Blogger’s Choice Awards. Special thanks to Cdhuckabay for the most recent vote. To nominate this blog, please click here. Thank you for your support!

Evan Carmichael

Ted Turner, founder of CNN and owner of the Atalanta Braves, among many other companies, was worth $9 billion at his peak in the mid 1990s.

When he was young he went to the military-oriented McCallie School where he did not do well as a student. He was always breaking the rules and earned the nickname “Terrible Ted” from his fellow classmates and teachers. The school had a demerit system where when you did something wrong you earned a demerit point and had to walk a quarter mile as punishment. Turner ended up gaining over 1,000 demerit points.

Turner was always a ‘C’ student and never excelled at school - but he went on to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in recent history.

It got me to thinking is Turner the exception to the rule where he was able to overcome the poor academic grades and build a successful company?

There are many stories of entrepreneurs who drop out of school and launch tremendous companies - but there are even more who drop out and never accomplish their dreams of building a successful business.

Is there a correlation between doing well in school and being a great entrepreneur or do schools simply prepare you to get a job?

Evan Carmichael

• Marry Your Passion and Divorce The Rest - Adam, who runs the successful and newly launched My Body Tutor, said something that left an impression on me: “I married my passion with entrepreneurship.”
• Look-Look at the New Entrepreneurs - Today’s youth are moving away from the old definitions of success held by previous generations. This shift has kicked-off a surge of young entrepreneurs who are striking out on their own, developing new business models, launching independent ventures.
• Interview with Brad Feld, Managing Director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital - What lessons learned can you impart on young entrepreneurs that you gained from your first venture, Feld Technologies? “Just go for it.” When my partner and I started Feld Technologies, we funded it with $10. Not $10,000. $10. We didn’t know any better and just got going.

Evan Carmichael

There has been a lot of viewings, links and feedback on the Is Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacting Your Site? post that I put up during the week. As far as I can see Google’s updates are still happening as the daily stat indexes are also jumping around for my site from 8,000 to 13,000 recognized pages. I thought it would be beneficial to explain some of the common Google filters which will help you understand how to get your website ranked well in Google’s search engine. We’ll start with the Google Sandbox.

The Google Sandbox is a mechanism Google uses to ensure that new pages being set up are not spam. Brand new domains are not immediately allowed into Google’s index. They first go into the sandbox which is a trial period that Google places on all new domain names until you can prove that your website is legitimate and not spam. Google has to combat the surge of fake pages being set up to sell Viagra and other such products so they made the decision that you don’t get into the main index until you prove that you are a good website.

When your domain is in the sandbox it will be very difficult to rank for any keyword search terms. You may rank for your domain name if the keywords are not very competitive and you might also rank for very obscure keywords but don’t expect any significant traffic while your page is in the sandbox.

How long is a domain in the sandbox for? It’s tough to say and there is no clear cut answer. I’ve taken a brand new domain name to a PageRank of 5 after 3 months of setting up the domain. Typically though it can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months to get out of the sandbox so you have to be patient. I’ve heard of some domain owners who had to wait even 9-12 months before getting indexed.

How can you get out of the sandbox? The best thing you can do is get high quality links from other reputable websites. Links from high quality websites that Google ranks highly indicates that you are not a spammy website. Also make sure that you don’t violate any of the other Google filters that I’ll be discussing over the coming weeks. With a little hard work and some patience you can get yourself out of the sandbox and into the main index.

Evan Carmichael.