For those of you not yet familiar with YE Founders Adam and Matthew Toren, they have truly been ’serial entrepreneurs’ since their early teens. They wanted to assist other fellow entrepreneurial enthusiasts with their businesses and try and guide them through starting, managing and growing successful business ventures so they started YoungEntrepreneur in 1999. They created a forum for like-minded individuals and it has grown to 20,000 members.

Well the serial entrepreneurs are at it again - this time in the music business. They have always had the desire to launch their own CD single - so they did. They recently went out and recorded their first song, “Totally Saturday”

It has generated some great feedback and recognition so far and I wanted to share it with the blog community as well. Adam and Matthew thought it would be a nice idea to show that it is “not all business” and that you need to balance your business life with a personal life and hobbies you are passionate about.

It is a “feel good” song that has hit potential! You can listen to it for free at http://amiestreet.com/weekenderslive.

Adam and Matthew appreciate your support and feedback! Let them know what you think by commenting on the blog!

Evan Carmichael

This is a great story I found in the Reader-Post about a Canadian entrepreneur named Mary Ready Weimer. When Mary Ready Weimer was  22 years old she started her own business by buying an art gallery. Regina’s Assiniboia Art Gallery has since been relocated, put online, and has won Mary a number of young entrepreneurship recognitions and awards.

When Mary graduated from university with a degree in political science her plan was teach swimming at a local YMCA before going out to get a “real job” in the fall. When Mary’s mother saw an ad in the paper that the gallery was looking for a new manager, Mary eagerly applied as she had long admired the work they were doing.

She was selected out of 70 candidates for the position and later on in the year as the owners joked about selling the business Mary joked about buying it. A year and a half later, she worked out a 6 year financing deal with the owners and she took over the gallery. Without even having a credit card to her name, Mary was the proud owner of her own business. “It was really good of them to offer the financing. I didn’t have a credit card, I didn’t want to go to the bank, and they were willing to take that chance.”

The first two years as a business owner were “overwhelming” for Mary as she worked 15 hour days. “In the beginning it was hard, really hard, just because it was only me. But eventually it started to slow down.” Mary convinced her husband to leave his job at Sears to help her out and she credits her website for helping her manage and market the gallery. “If we didn’t have the Web site, if we didn’t send pieces all over the world, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

“I never thought I’d own a gallery, my Web site was an accident. I guess you never know what’s coming next.”

Evan Carmichael

A friend of mine, Jesse, who is one of the most creative people I know and is always coming up with new, innovative ideas put me onto this story. It’s from New York Magazine and looks at how New Yorkers make money. They look at 21 different New York business jobs, how much money they make, and what you can expect in that particular industry. They look at everything from drug dealers and cabbies to museums and baseball teams.

Here are samples of 3 of the profiles I found interesting:

1) A Yellow Cab Driver

• Have no control over prices, they are set by the city
• Annual Revenue: $75,000 ($12,000 profit before tax)
• Most profitable fares: long distance trips with little traffic
• New Yorkonomics: Taxis become economically attractive when the cost of paying someone to drive for you is less than the costs of storing your car. New York’s high price of land makes parking so expensive that there’s enough demand for an army of Samuel Pekohs (featured cabbie in story).

2) A Drug Dealer

• Convicted crystal-meth dealer explains how he ran his business
• Annual Revenue: $1.02 million ($813,600 profit and paid no taxes), worked 15 hours per week
• Most profitable customers: Wealthy professionals who are hard-core addicts. They are discreet and always pay.
• Least-profitable customers: Friends. “Nightmare customers are your closest friends. They don’t have a problem calling at 6 a.m., and they expect low prices.”
• New Yorkonomics: With data on petty drug dealers, the economist Steven Levitt has taught us that there is an abundant supply of people willing to work in the drug industry at near the minimum wage, so why does this guy make so much? His high earnings flow from a type of social capital that is in short supply on the streets of Harlem: This dealer has the connections to cater to a well-heeled clientele that is willing to pay extra for a discreet and reliable dealer. Of course, since someone with his social skills could also earn a living without breaking the law, his high earnings from meth dealing also provide compensation for the risks of going to jail

3) A Copy Shop

• Just need an office and leased copiers at $500 / month to start
• Annual Revenue: $192,000 ($42,240 profit)
• Most Profitable Offerings: Restaurant flyers. Local restaurants order 1,000 new flyers every three days.
• New Yorkonomics: Business services like this copier have replaced light manufacturing as the backbone of New York City. Abundant copy shops thrive because smaller New York firms don’t want to lease their own copiers or pay for the space to house them. These business services help make the city an engine of entrepreneurship, because start-ups can buy services from freestanding suppliers, instead of buying their own equipment.

Thanks for the lead Jesse!

Evan Carmichael

How is that for a title to get your attention? CNNMoney recently put out a series of 8 profiles that look at successful entrepreneurs who have built up their companies despite not having access to major financial backing.

It goes to show you that you do not need a lot of money to get started - you just need to invest the capital you do have and your energy in the right places.

The profiles are a quick read and also include 8 lessons for success including:

Lesson: If you must borrow from your friends and family, keep it formal

Lesson: Prep as much as you can while you’re on someone else’s payroll

Lesson: Do what makes you happy - because at first, happiness is likely to be your main reward

Lesson: It’s not who you know - it’s how well you keep in touch with them

Lesson: You’ll amaze yourself at how cheaply you can run a business when it’s yours

Lesson: That great idea you had for your boss? Maybe it’s the business you’re looking for.

Lesson: Help investors see that taking a chance on you is not that big a risk after all

Lesson: Picking the right partner can be as important as picking a product

Evan Carmichael

In my continuing series on Google Filters, today I am going to discuss the Too Many Pages At Once Filter.

How It Works

Google likes to see that your webpage is growing consistently and over time. They like up to date content that is relevant to a specific topic and has incoming, relevant links. However, if you have too many pages of content that appear “overnight” on your website you can trigger the Too Many Pages At Once Filter.

The reason why this filter exists is again the fault of spamming, get-rich-quick SEO pirates. When webmasters realized that content was king they made the drive to acquire as much content as possible on their sites. They stole content from other websites en masse (called “scraping”) and claimed it as their own. By running their scraping software, website owners could overnight have thousands of targeted pages set up on their site.

Google used to fall for this scheme and these sites rose to the top of the index. Enter the Too Many Pages At Once Filter. This filter was set up to combat website owners who scrape other urls and add countless pages of content to their sites too quickly.

What You Can Do

Have a natural progression - The important thing to keep in mind is that Google wants to see a natural progression of pages added to your site. If you add 20 pages overnight you do not have to worry about being penalized but if you go from a one page site to hundreds of pages or more all of a sudden you risk being penalized.

Add new pages over time - Many sure your new pages are added over a period of time and that you continue to create new content. Do not add a hundred pages one day and nothing for another month. This kind of activity looks suspicious.

Get external links - Also try to get external links to the pages you create. The more links you have from external sites to your new pages, the more likely Google is going to identify them as quality articles instead of fake content that was stolen from other sites.

Evan Carmichael

Feeling stressed out? As entrepreneurs we never seem to have enough time in the day to get everything done. We typically take on many of the roles in the company from the janitor up to the CEO and work ourselves to the bone. Here are a few time saving tricks I have been experimenting with over the past little while that have been paying off.

Automate Your Business

Think about the areas where you spend the most amount of time on a regular basis and find a way to automate it. I spend the first hour and a half of every morning working on more ways to automate my business. Today, for example, I updated my system to give the people who write on my website easier access to their passwords. I have over 950 writers for the website and this new system will save us all time. It was a quick 30 minute fix for me and will pay off after a week of implementation. I also began working on automating the creation of my newsletter. It takes me about an hour per week to put together and send out. After an hour this morning and another hour or so tomorrow morning I’ll be close to finished and it will free up more of my time every week. The key is to look at repetitive tasks that have similar characteristics. Find out what is common and automate it. Your time should not be spent on something technology can do for you. Being busy does not mean you will be successful. You need to get busy on the high value tasks for your company.

Do the important work first

Every day I come to work with a list of things I want to get done and the I start working on them before doing anything else like checking email, returning phone calls, etc. Since automation is a critical factor for me it is always the first thing I do. I used to finish off my day and wonder where all the time went. The important tasks never got done because I was too wrapped up with distractions. Now I make sure that progress is made on the key tasks because they are the first things I focus on when I get into the office.

Check Stats Once Per Day

Since I have an online business, there are countless programs that I am using that each have their own statistics packages. It is far too easy to get distracted by constantly checking your stats. I used to check my Google AdSense account, Alexa rating, live web statistics, Google sitemap figures, and countless other statistics multiple times per day. Now I do it once - first thing in the morning. I wake up, grab a bowl of cereal and check my stats. That’s it. The stats will not change if I watch them all day long or only once per day and it has saved me a lot of distraction time that can be better focused.

Answer Emails Once Per Day

This was a particularly hard one to start doing. Every day I get hundreds of emails from authors, media, partners, advertisers, and visitors who are interested in my site and want a response. I had my Outlook going all day long and answered emails almost as soon as they came in. I would leave projects I was working on to answer emails and then forget what I was doing and where I left off. There are actually very few emails that NEED to be answered right away. You would be surprised at how many people think their emails need an urgent response when in fact, they can wait. Now I answer emails once per day and usually check in close to the end of the day for any emails from my key partners. Otherwise the auto send/receive every minute has been turned off and I do not check my Outlook except for finding a contact or looking at my calender. It has surprisingly not had a negative impact on my business and has given me way more time to focus on important projects.

Chunk Your Time

When you chunk your time and set aside designated times / days for certain tasks you get a heck of a lot more done. When I am answering my emails once per day it is a pretty intensive 2 (or so) hours. I am typing at a mile a minute, do not let anything else distract me and everything gets done. It is amazing how productive you can be when you focus on a specific task. I have applied this philosophy to many tasks in my business. We do website updates at the beginning of the week. If a request comes up at the end of the week, we tell people that we will gladly take care of it at the beginning of the next week when we do our next update. I do my meetings with people on Wednesdays. We also do our newsletter on Wednesdays as well as most of our marketing. For most of our tasks we let them pile up for a reasonable period of time and then handle them all at once to get the most out of our time. Obviously you do not want to go overboard and have angry customers who ordered from you and you take six months to ship because you want to maximize your time but by chunking your tasks in a reasonable way you can dramatically increase your efficiency and free up even more time to focus on building your business.

These are some of the things I have found to be useful - what do you do to get more done in your day?

Evan Carmichael

Hot of the heels of this weekend’s post on the Top European Young Entrepreneurs of 2007 comes a report from the Independent that there are over 900 Britons between the ages of 17 and 34 who have a net worth of a million dollars or more. This number is also predicted to grow at 100% per year!

They are called the “baby millionaires” to reflect their youthful age. According to Coutts, a market leader in private wealth management in Britain, “Our client base is getting a lot younger. The average age of a millionaire used to be mid-fifties, but now it is mid-forties, which obviously shows that people are making their money earlier: they are tending to take the plunge and start their own businesses at a younger age.”

In addition, the research shows that 40% of the baby millionaires are women, dispelling the theory that it is a man’s only world, and 36% of baby millionaires are yet to be married.
Three of the baby millionaires profiled were:

Louisa Fletcher, Age: 32
- From: Guildford
- Worth: £7m
- Companies: Online property companies propertyprice advice.co.uk and fish4homes.co.uk
- She says: “You get to a point where you’re a bit fed up with providing the picks and shovels for everybody else in the gold rush. I launched my first site last year. On a normal day, I’ll switch my laptop on at 6.30am and turn it off at 9.30pm, including weekends. A lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this, but you have to be on the ball when you start your own company, because the buck stops with you.”

William Berry, Age: 29
- From: West London
- Worth: £5m
- Companies: Online companies accommodationforstudents.com, thomascharles.com and conferences-uk.org.uk
- He says: “I think it’s easier to become a millionaire now, but it does depend on the sector. The great thing about the internet is that it creates a fantastic level playing field. If you’re a small and dynamic business, it allows you to be more nimble than your bigger, lumbering competitors. The secret is having an ability to integrate business strategy and opportunity with technology.”

Jamie Murray, Age: Wells 23
- From: Gloucester
- Worth: £5m
- Company: Online company glassesdirect.co.uk
- He says: “While I was a student, I bought a simple pair of glasses for £150, a ridiculous amount to pay. When I looked at the whole industry, it seemed very dubious.”

Evan Carmichael

BusinessWeek put out a list this week of their top European Young Entrepreneurs for 2007. They looked at business owners who were under 25 years old, were making an impact, and were inspiring others to do so as well. Most of the featured entrepreneurs are in technology related businesses and are breaking from the traditional past of their deeply routed cultures.

Some of the winners are:

Russia: Artemi Krymski, 23 - building the best real estate directory for buyers looking to purchase properties

Sweden: Jonas Hombert, 20 - selling easy to use video-editing software taking advantage of the YouTube craze

Ireland: Aodhan Cullen, 25 - founder of popular web analytics software provider StatCounter (I use it for my website and am a big fan)

Estonia: Karoli Hindriks, 23 - runs MTV Estonia and sells knitted hats and gloves made from reflective material

BusinessWeek has put all the profiles together in an easy to read slide show. You can check it out here. Taking the 5 minutes to read through the stories will definitely give you an additional motivational boost this weekend to drive your company forward.

Evan Carmichael

I came across an interesting article recently that discussed the findings of a new report on entrepreneurship. Researchers from the United States, Germany and the Netherlands looked at entrepreneurs who were starting a business and asked them how confident they were about having the necessary skills to succeed.

Both American and Canadian entrepreneurs were found to be the most confident but were also found to have some of the lowest success rates in the world. Confidence was determined to be a key ingredient for new entrepreneurs in the decision to start a business despite not having any proof that their skills would be adequate enough to succeed.

One of the researchers commented “We think it’s just part of this overconfidence story that drives the decision to become an entrepreneur. As long as you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, you can be confident. Overall, our evidence suggests that potential entrepreneurs may be overconfident in their own skills and abilities.”

Only entrepreneurs from New Zealand, Hungary and Argentina were found to be more confident than Americans and Canadians where over 50% of us believe we have the skills necessary to succeed. On the other end is Japan where only 11% believe they have the necessary set of skills and 24% for Sweden.

The study, ‘I Think I Can, I Think I Can’: Overconfidence and Entrepreneurial Behaviour, is set to be published in the Journal of Economic Psychology.

Are we too cocky when we are starting our businesses? Is this why we have the highest failure rates in the world? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Evan Carmichael

For those of you who do not know who Matt Cutts is, he is the head of Google’s Webspam team. He helps determine what gets into Google’s search results and what gets left out. He runs the popular Matt Cutts blog where he discuses gadgets, Google and SEO. The blog has become a must read for most people who are into SEO and are trying to learn how to get their website ranked higher in Google.

Matt was interviewed at the search engine conference SMX Seattle recently and I thought I would share some of his quotes that shed some light on to how Google ranks webpages:

On links that go out from your site:
“I think it’s good for your users, and therefore it’s good for search engines but I’m not going to say we have a signal that measures that.”

On how to improve your PageRank:
“PageRank is based on hyperlinks.”

On how to outrank your competition:
“A lot of these companies are savvy - look at what they’re doing. You can learn a lot from competitor analysis.”

On the Googlebomb algorithm:
“The Googlebomb algorithm is completely algorithmic. My understanding is that the algorithm was not changed. It doesn’t run every day. It runs every 2/3/4 months.”

On how to get your pages out of the Supplemental Index:
“Pages in supplemental can come into main index if they get more links. Supplemental index is not a penalty. We parse and index pages differently in supplemental. We may not index every word and every phrase if the page is in supplemental. We have to compress pages to store them in supplemental. If I had my way, we’d take the label off.”

On whether click through rates impact rankings:
“It can affect personal search and we won’t confirm or deny if it affects general search. If we were to use it, it would be very noisy. Historically, I’ve been leery of using it because of the attempts to spam/game it.”

On whether owning one bad website will impact your rankings on other sites you own:
“If you have spammy sites, it’s fair game to consider that when reviewing all your other sites. If you have 200 spammy sites, shouldn’t that be a signal when we look at your 201st site?”

Matt closed by asking what the audience wanted to see from the Webmaster Console. The responses were: Penalty reports, real time information, accurate reports, errors without having to go into each domain, spider traps, shared logins, RSS, 404 referrers, more data on a query.

Evan Carmichael