Our sixth Review Our Blog entry is from Kristof P. aka 1dollar of Aglomerate. His review was recently put up in his blog here: Review: YoungEntrepreneur.com.

Aglomerate is a blog that follows the daily activities of an online entrepreneur who is trying to make money from his website. From Google AdSense to Hits4Pay to AdBrite and other programs, Aglomerate looks at different ways to make money online and how you can learn from the author’s experience to do the same.

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

Evan Carmichael

Here’s a great story about somebody who turned a hobby into a small business. Kailyn Cage has always loved candy and earned the nickname the “Candy Girl.” One day Kailyn decided to bring candy to school and sell it. Both students and teachers alike bought from her and she made $1,000 before the administration shut her down.

Not one to shy away from early failure, Kailyn decided to make money the proper way and set up two candy machines in a beauty salon and Giant store. Before deciding on which products to carry she surveyed employees and customers to determine their preferences. According to Kailyn: “That’s the difference between my vending company and every other candy company. It caters to what the customer wants.”

She continued her growth by purchasing soda and snack machines for the local church where her father is the pastor and maintained a 3.94 school GPA.

At 19 years old, Kailyn netted $10,000 last year from her business and she is now taking entrepreneurship classes at university to expand her knowledge base. She is also taking engineering classes to learn about how to design her own vending machines.

“I’m not really interested in the social aspect of college life, or the partying and the drinking. My priorities are to expand my business, get knowledge so I can invent my own vending machines, and run track.”

Evan Carmichael

Our fifth Review Our Blog entry is from Cade Krueger of Write To Right. His review was recently put up in his blog here: Young Entrepreneur.

Write To Right is a site designed to write the words of the great ones in a simplified format to help right people’s lives. They will do what they can to assist you to achieve your goals by taking the lessons from the legends of their world to help you take a look at what you can improve on in your business, sales, relationships, and beliefs.

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

Evan Carmichael

• I hear rich people: Chad Hurley and Steve Chen speaking in SF May 23rd - INFORUM, the younger, hipper version of the Commonwealth Club is hosting an event with YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, moderated by Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson.
• Young entrepreneurs get cash, help with businesses - Tyler Pistor’s vision of converting paper documents into electronic files has earned him top prize among area youth entrepreneurs in the 2006 BIZMAP Business Plan Competition.
• Business success linked to innovation, hard work, integrity - Innovation, passion, belief, hard work, integrity and perseverance are the most important qualities that an aspiring entrepreneur should develop in order to succeed.
• Spare Some Change? Three Young Entrepreneurs Aim to Raise Capital for Business and Change the Country While Doing It - Three young entrepreneurs searching for capital for their startup business are taking a unique approach to fundraising; and they are calling on all Americans to help them out.
• Ground-breaking event to find farming’s young entrepreneurs - Farming needs young, innovative people to develop tomorrow’s agricultural businesses like never before.
• YouthActionNet Awards for social entrepreneur projects - The YouthActionNet Awards offer grants of $500 each to help fund the social change projects of young social entrepreneurs around the world.
• Chamber fosters young entrepreneurs - Mentoring, partnerships among the proposed approaches
• UP’s turks have nothing to conquer - UP is in fact a potential mecca for young businessmen. It has the highest purchasing power in the country and amongst the lowest labour costs.
• I’m Not Unemployed, I’m (SELF)-employed - We, young entrepreneurs, are employed by our desires to make it big and contribute to the world.

Evan Carmichael

Well Google is updating their algorithm again and it’s wreaking havoc for a number of entrepreneurs who rely on their web rankings to get business.

To “improve” their search engine, Google is taking the first set of results for a keyword and testing them against a number of different ranking measures. If your site is in the first set then you may see the yo-yo effect of the term being at the top of the page and then at the bottom only hours later. If your site is not in the first set then you probably are not seeing any difference… yet.

If after the re-ranking your site score better than before you will rise to the top and if it scores worse you will drop off. It will likely take a couple of weeks to settle down so expect the bouncing around to continue.

Google is also sending a lot more pages to their supplemental index. If your page gets put into supplemental you will lose all but all of your traffic to the page. I have 15,000 pages on my site to monitor so it’s hard to keep up on all of them but it also allows for tweaking and testing without damaging the whole site.

What I have found is that some of the pages that went to supplemental were very keyword rich. I used to rank on the first page for these pages and suddenly dropped off the index. By lowering the keyword density of the test pages they were back to page one within a couple of weeks. We are now applying this keyword density lowering strategy to the rest of my pages.

If you have noticed a drop in your rankings and traffic recently, try changing the keyword density around and submit a new sitemap to Google to let them know about the changes. If your rankings are jumping around from day to day, hang in there - the update will settle down in short order.

Evan Carmichael

Thanks to Jenluv, one of our YE members, this blog has been nominated for the Blogger’s Choice Awards under the categories of Best Business Blog, Best Marketing Blog, and Best Blog of All Time.

The Blogger’s Choice Awards allows blog readers to vote for their favorite blogs in a number of different categories. The votes will be shown on the site in real-time, so you can see who’s leading within each category and winners in each respective category will be recognized at a one-of-a-kind awards ceremony on June 2nd, at Postiecon in Orlando, FL.

You can nominate as many blogs as you like but can only support one blog per category.

So far our blog has 3 nominations and is tied with Seth Godin and one ahead of Guy Kawasaki. Help get us to the top by nominating us! Thank you Jenluv and Thestealthyone for your support so far!

Evan Carmichael

• Time Isn’t Money - One of the unfortunate things about being an entrepreneur is time does not equal money.
• ‘Young Entrepreneurs’ Present Plans for Record Label in Haas Program - Nearly 50 students from surrounding high schools presented business plans to a music label executive at the Haas School of Business.
• Would You CLICK Through Your Entrepreneurial Journey? - If you had the chance – if you had a universal remote that allowed you to fast-forward through your life – would you use it to get you to the point where you “have made it?”
• Incubator at Kongu Engineering College - The idea is like this, any entrepreneur having a requirement for an industrially demanded product can make use of this facility. He can bring in his own workforce or make use of the student resources in the college.
• No one wants your advice - Advice. Nobody wants advice. Not from me. Not from you.
• Area young entrepreneurs go for the gold…and get it - Distributive Education Clubs of America is an organization that started in the early 1940s for students interested in marketing, management and entrepreneurship.
• The Pure Adapt double shift - how I max my productivity - Every young entrepreneur has the odds stacked against them: we all have less money, less experience, and less resources than a seasoned business veteran. We tend to make up for all of those things by working VERY hard.

Evan Carmichael

I’m a big believer in modeling masters - find someone who has already achieved what you want to do and copy their strategies for your own business. With my first company we thought we needed help to take our company to the next level. Sure we had clients around the world and were investing in our product, but we wanted to play a bigger game.

We thought it would be best to bring in some outside advisers to help take our company forward. We began tapping our network to look for someone to fill the role. We did our research on people, asked a lot of questions, and checked references. The first guy we brought in ended up being a big waste of time and money. We flew him to see us and go to a tradeshow with us. He was all talk and no action. Many weeks and thousands of dollars later we parted ways.

Through our local connections we found another adviser who ended up being instrumental to our success. He helped us negotiate several large deals and was a trusted person we turned to with the experience we were looking for.

Here are a few tips to help you create win-win relationships with advisors:

1. Pay out on success. Don’t pay them up front for future work. Make it success based and pay them once they deliver.
2. Don’t give up equity too soon. There’s nothing like having a bad equity partner and advisers often will ask for a piece of the action. If they are performing then there’s every reason to give them that extra incentive but don’t give up equity before they have shown you what they can do.
3. Use your connections. A reference from someone in your network is always better than bringing somebody you don’t know at all into your business. Even if you check their references, it’s much better to trust a candidate who has been referred by somebody you know and respect.
4. Make sure they’ve been there. If you want to take your company to a $1 million or $10 million or $100 million company, make sure the person you’re bringing on has done it before. If they are advising you they should already have the experience you need.
5. Do they know your industry? Every industry has it’s own way of doing things. Make sure your candidate has the industry experience you’re looking for. They should already know the main customers, partners, suppliers, and investors and the dynamics of the business. Whoever steps in to help you should be ready to go and not have to do a lot of on the job learning.

It’s important for every entrepreneur at some point to go outside and ask for help and advice to get to that next step. Make sure in doing so to ask the right questions and select the person who is the best fit for the job.

Evan Carmichael

• Funding a Startup with Angel Investors or Venture Capital - They told me about some companies that are offering young entrepreneurs early capital ($5,000 - $20,000) to get things up and running in exchange for small equity stakes.
• Upcoming: Women 2.0 Napkin Business Challenge Pitch Event - Women 2.0, a cool network of young female entrepreneurs (and those aspiring to escape their cubicle shackles), is hosting an event to conclude their Biz Plan Napkin Challenge.
• Young Entrepreneurs Seek Access To Govt Policies - A Dialogue session’ between the Brunei Industrial Development Authority ‘(Bina) and the Young Entrepreneurs Association of Brunei (YEAR) was held at Bina’s headquarters yesterday as a further’ step towards boosting private and public sector cooperation in Brunei Darussalam.
• Don’t be Afraid to Distort Reality – Think BIG - Young entrepreneurs, it’s crucial that you think big straight from the beginning.
• FT: New generation enters the business of doing good - As guests at the 2007 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, they have found themselves drawn into a movement that mixes a younger generation’s take on ideas of social justice with a new business-style approach, challenging the grant-giving approach of traditional philanthropy.
• Young entrepreneurs conference to be held - The third annual Young Entrepreneurs’ Conference will be held at UW-River Falls, Tuesday and Wednesday, April 13-14, and presented by the College of Business and Economics and sponsored by Xcel Energy.
• Workshop all about takin’ care of business - A group of prospective entrepreneurs gathers in Roanoke to learn how to be their own bosses.
• Revenue streams for liberal entrepreneurs - Today I will focus on revenue streams available to liberal entrepreneurs.  In a sense, this is the second half of the liberal entrepreneur’s (very rough) business plan.
• Young entrepreneurs across Ontario to benefit from major investment - The Ontario government is supporting young Ontario entrepreneurs by providing $2.2 million to the Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), Small Business and Entrepreneurship Minister Harinder Takhar announced today.
• Berkeley students help hip-hop label - A New York-based hip-hop music label, Ruff Ryders, will receive advice on how to break into the European market from a group of East Bay teenagers in the company’s target demographic.
• Melding Silver and Gold - Jason Ryan Dorsey, author of My Reality Check Bounced!: The Twentysomethings’ Guide to Cashing in on Your Real-World Dreams, said young entrepreneurs could dramatically shorten their learning curve by bringing in someone who already has experience in the business world.

Evan Carmichael

A big challenge a lot of young entrepreneurs face is being taken seriously – you’re young and don’t have the 25 years experience in the industry so why should I trust you?

Depending on the product or service you’re selling it can be much harder to gain the trust of your customers if they are a lot older than you.

With my first company I was selling software into multi billion dollar NASDAQ companies and started off when I was 19 years old.

Here’s how I did it.

1. Don’t start face to face. My initial contact was almost always made through email or phone. It’s almost impossible for someone to tell how old you are this way and if you know your stuff you gain their confidence before meeting them face to face.

2. Don’t put your picture online. We only profiled our CEO online who was the oldest from the three of us and while our names might have been there, nobody ever saw my face on the website. I was 5 years younger than my partner at the time who was the CEO.

3. Grow a beard. To look older I grew some facial hair that added a few years to my appearance. I met another young entrepreneur who wore glasses even though he didn’t need to – all in an effort to look older and more distinguished.

4. Wear a suit. It can be hard for people to take you seriously so the first step is to take yourself seriously. When you’re meeting with a prospect, client, partner, media, investor, etc. wear a suit. Make sure that it fits you and isn’t too big for you. Even if I knew the people I was meeting were going to be dressed casually I would always make sure to be in my suit to give the professional appearance.

5. Know your stuff. It may be harder to get the door opened but if you can help them solve a problem and you know your stuff people will listen to you. Make sure to have practiced your pitch and have the answers to the important questions.

It worked out for me. We landed deals in over 30 countries and ended up moving the company to California. Now that I’m older and have a track record I don’t have as many issues with my age but it was a bigger obstacle when I was first getting started.

Make sure you dress and act the part and follow these five rules to get people to take you seriously.

Do you have any other suggestions for our fellow young entrepreneurs?

Evan Carmichael