Having been used to the Blogger platform, I moved over to WordPress for the YoungEntrepreneur.com blog and love it! One of my favorite functions is the incoming links feature. It is automatically part of the template as you log into your account and tells you which blogs are linking to you. It is a great way to keep track of who is talking about you in the blogosphere.

To thank the people who have linked to our blog without being asked to do so, I wanted to highlight some of their posts and give them a little link love.

-  8 random facts about me - Pro Money Blog | A young professional finance and entrepreneurship blog

- Branding My Face - Better for Business

- Four Easy Ways To Ignore Your Goals and Win! - Todd Earwood

- The Love of the Game - BootstrapBusiness.org : Blog

- Small Business Recommended Reading (6-26-07) - A Podcast with Small Business Advice from Small Business Owners - Startup BizCast

These are just a few of the recent bloggers who have linked to us and have helped us crack the top 100,000 in Technorati (currently at 96,238).

Thank you for your continued support!

Evan Carmichael

With over 27 million active members, 100,000 new members coming online every day, and over 40 billion monthly page views, Facebook has become the world’s largest social networking website and all signs point to its domination continuing.

The big question for entrepreneurs is: can Facebook help grow my business?

One of my readers put me on to this article from the Globe and Mail which discussed how a Toronto based entrepreneur was able to bring in an additional $3,200 in revenue for her fitness classes by using Facebook.

“I love it,” said Ms. Clapp, whose ad has been viewed about 127 times. “I’m completely fascinated with how I can create an online business without any overhead at all.”

The article and the suggestion from my reader was enough to push me over the edge - I decided to sign up for Facebook as a test to see how much it can actually help grow your business.

I posted a note on my profile asking how business owners could benefit from using Facebook. One response that I received from a friend, Jeremy, was:

I’m still a bit of a Facebook rookie (I’ve had a profile for two weeks). From what I can tell so far though, it is first and foremost a social networking site.

The best thing that I’ve taken away from Facebook so far is reconnecting with dozens of people I haven’t talked to in years (some as far back as grade 2). Seeing what friends from previous eras in my life are up to, makes the time I spend on the site totally worthwhile. From that I’ve had lots of people ask about my business and my clients who I’ve listed in my profile. I can’t say that it’s lead to any business for either of them yet–but we can all recognize the long term benefit of exposure to a warm audience.

I think that the Facebook culture looks down members who use their profile for purely commercial purposes–it’s like trolling a relationship website for a one night stand.

Is Jeremy correct? Over the coming weeks, I will update how my progress is coming along. In the meantime I would love to hear your success stories or tap into any resources you have come across on how to promote a business using Facebook.

Evan Carmichael

I run a series of Mastermind Groups for Toronto entrepreneurs. We meet monthly to discuss our businesses and solve the challenges we are currently facing - from financing to marketing to human resources. I am a big believer in pulling from those around you to make yourself better. I am equally a supporter of learning from those who are more experienced than you so you can learn from their successes. That’s why I took my groups to meet with Frank Cianciulli.

Frank has set up a number of businesses including two that have become the fastest growing companies in Canada. He is on Canada’s top 40 under 40 list, was named Ernst & Young’s emerging entrepreneur of the year, and has won numerous other awards.

When I took my members to see Frank, he shared some of his experiences with us as well as gave his advice on how to run a business. The thing that stuck with me most from what he said was that entrepreneurs too often focus on the wrong things. He gave examples of salespeople working on setting up their spreadsheets, writing sales scripts, getting lists of potential people to call, putting together a sales strategy… but not actually picking up the phone and drumming up some business!

He told us that revenue solves a lot of problems in a business and that there is no excuse for not making sales. His message was a simple one: Do not waste time on tasks thinking that you are adding value to your business. Being busy does not mean that you are being useful. It made me examine some of the things I do in my business and if there is a way to cut out some of the fat and be even more proactive about actually doing what needs to get done.

Are you so focused on the process and doing the things that you enjoy doing instead of focusing in on the things your business needs to succeed?

Evan Carmichael

A common question I get asked by entrepreneurs is about Pay-Per-Click (PPC) versus search engine optimization (SEO). Which is better? What are the pros and cons? Which is best for my website? To help you make up your mind, today I will cover PPC and complete the mini-series next week on SEO.

What Is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-Per-Click is a common advertising method entrepreneurs are using to promote their products. The typical model is when someone does a keyword search in a search engine (ie Google) your ad will appear on the right side of the page. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google for the lead. It is then up to you to convert that click into a revenue generating opportunity.

Pros of Pay-Per-Click

• Immediate Traffic - The best thing about Pay-Per-Click is that the results are immediate. If you need traffic right away you can sign up for a Google Adwords account and start buying traffic for your website today.
• Targeted Traffic - You have the option to select keywords that your target clients would likely be searching for. This ensures that the traffic coming to your site has pre-qualified themselves as a potential buyer.
• Promotional Traffic - If you have a special promotion that has a limited timeline, Pay-Per-Click can be a great tool to help get the word out. While it may take months of preparation to rank organically for a certain keyword, you can drive traffic right away to show off your promotion. You can also cut off the traffic when the promotion has ended.
• Easy to Measure - Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, it is now easy to measure how well you are converting your traffic and if it is a money making or money losing venture for you.
• Test your Message - You can run different ads with different headlines and different value propositions to test their effectiveness. I know entrepreneurs who use Pay-Per-Click just to test out potential positioning statements before they launch a product so they know they have the best ones when they start selling.
• Keep your Web Design - SEO often requires that you change around the look and feel of your website in order to rank for certain keywords. Using Pay-Per-Click allows you to drive qualified traffic while keeping the interface you like and focusing the website on conversation rather than lead generation.

Cons of Pay-Per-Click

• Ongoing Cost - This is the most obvious con. You have to pay for each click that comes to your website. Every month you need to continue paying if you want the traffic to keep coming.
• Expensive - As keywords become more competitive is it increasingly difficult to rank at the top of the paid ads without paying top dollar. There are fewer and fewer bargains available as entrepreneurs become more Pay-Per-Click savvy and are investing time, energy, and money into making their Pay-Per-Click strategies work for them.
• Not as Popular as Organic Search - If you rank at the top of the Pay-Per-Click you will not get nearly as many hits as you will on the organic search. People still prefer the natural results versus the paid ones.
• Click Fraud - What happens if someone clicks on your ad by accident or, worse, your competition intentionally clicks on your ads. The end result is that you are paying money for those clicks and you are not getting visitors who have any intention of buying from you.

Next week I will continue the series of by looking at the Pros and Cons of SEO.

Evan Carmichael

One of the biggest thrills and challenges of running and growing a business is bringing on employees. Whenever I find myself too bogged down with a particular, repetitive task, I first try to automate it and then give it to someone else to handle so I can focus on bigger issues.

One of my employees in particular is a life saver for me. She handles (almost) all the admin work that I hate to do, writes articles for my site, and edits articles that are submitted. Without her my business would grind to a halt as I would get buried under a mountain of work.

Whenever I bring someone new on I try to find out about their passions and see if there is a way to incorporate those passions into my business. Obviously they have to have the skillsets necessary for the tasks I have or I would not hire them but what people are good at and what they are passionate about are different things entirely.

For my employee, her passion is Africa. She has been there twice and helped the local entrepreneurs build their communities. Since my site is all about entrepreneurship I have put her in charge of a new project that we are calling Africa Accounts which will focus on bring awareness to sustainable development through entrepreneurship in Africa.

While she is still responsible for everything else she is working on, she has taken to this new project with so much energy that it not only makes her other work more productive, she raises the spirits of everyone else in the office so they are working harder. In addition to her regular pay she is getting a revenue share from the money that her project produces. I do not know how much it will make yet in comparison to the rest of my site but it gives her the incentive to work harder as she has a stake in it.

If you are bringing new people on to work for you, find what excites them, incorporate it into your business, give them a piece of the action and watch your business flourish. It is a recipe for success that is working for me and can be replicated over and over again.

I would love to hear your stories of how you have motivated and empowered your employees!

Evan Carmichael

One of our Young Entrepreneur forum members, usakos, asked what motivates entrepreneurs in a recent forum post. It is an interesting question to ask because being an entrepreneur is one of the most challenging and demanding careers out there.

Especially at the start of your business you never have enough resources, you have to face ongoing rejection from potential clients, investors, and partners, and you are constantly wondering if your idea will work out in the end or not.

If you ask a successful entrepreneur or read the stories of famous business owners, they will often say that they started their business because they were passionate about it, not because they were in it for the money. Do it for the right reasons and the money will follow, they say.

According to Rediff, the main motivations for Indian entrepreneurs are:

Rewards of entrepreneurship
Autonomy 57%
Making money/financial independence 43%
Saw business opportunity/impact on industry 27%
Recognition of self and/or organisation 23%
Desire to create something new/innovate 20%
Build something important/make a difference 17%
Grow a business from scratch 17%
Desire to be entrepreneur/excitement of entrepreneurship 3%

Personal qualities
Intellectual challenge/achieve potential 27%
Instinct 10%
Others 10%
Career
Career growth/diversification/satisfaction 13%
Others 3%
Experience
Utilise previous experience 6%
Had technology/industry vision 3%

Non-monetary factors
Help India in various ways 23%
Non-monetary success/personal satisfaction 7%
Create value/jobs/wealth in society 3%

If you are not motivated by something that you truly feel passionate about it will be hard to face the grueling days and work through the startup phase to build your company into a success.

What motivated you to start your business?

Evan Carmichael

In my last two posts on Google penalties I discussed how to know if you have been banned and how to tell if you have suffered a major penalty. Today, in my last post in this series, I want to cover the more subtle components to being penalized by Google.

Check your positioning for the important keywords

If you have noticed a significant drop in Google traffic and have already ruled out your site being banned or your site suffering a major penalty, the next thing to do is to check where you rank for the keywords you used to be at the top of the index for. If many of the keywords that used to put you on the first page are past the top results and buried in supplemental than you have probably been hit with a major penalty. However, if you still rank on the second or third page and for a keyword that you used to be #1 for then chances are a less severe penalty has been applied to your site.

Assuming you have done all the onsite SEO work needed, the primary factor Google looks at when ranking a webpage is the number and quality of links it has pointing to it. Generally, the more high quality website you have linking to your page, the higher you will rank in Google. This is the core of Google’s algorithm and many webmasters have tried to fix the game by creating link farms, buying links, doing link exchanges, and having hidden links to their site.

If you suddenly drop from the #1 position to page two or three it is likely because Google has canceled the value of the links coming to your site. They detected suspicious linking activity and wiped out all the credibility of the links to your site thereby dropping you into the lower pages.

What to do

In this case, the penalty is related to your linking strategy and you will want to check who is linking to you. Cancel any relationships with suspicious websites and focus on building high quality links. Take your name out of spam directories and off of lists that promise to get you ranked #1 but end up penalizing you. If you are working with someone who is in charge of your link building campaign, question what they have been doing and reverse the links from the low Page Rank pages. Once this is done, the process is the same as I mentioned before: go to Google’s Webmaster Tools, submit a reconsideration request, tell them what happened, and promise not to do it again.

What if none of these apply to me?

If the three scenarios I went over do not apply to your website and you have still dropped in rankings then it is because your competition is heating up and doing better than you are. Continue to focus on building quality links and look at your onsite SEO to make sure you give yourself the best chance of ranking at the top.

I hope you have found this series useful and I look forward to your comments!

Evan Carmichael

I came across a press release by a young British entrepreneur who is trying to build a million dollar business while being confined to his bed.

Richard Stratton worked odd jobs to save money to start his own business. His dislocated hip has kept him hospital and bed bound so, in true entrepreneurial fashion, he taught himself web design and started a new company, The One Big Ad.

Richard’s million dollar idea is to build a popular site, find 100,000 advertisers to spend $10 for a banner that will appear on his webpage. Richard is also having a random draw for $250,000 that one of his 100,000 advertisers will win. According to Richard, “as the site progresses and begins to attract further media attention, the increase in visitors will lead to an increase in clicks making the $10 investment seem very small, particularly with the potential $250,000 prize fund.”

According to his blog, out of the 100,000 advertisers needed, Richard currently has 60.

I do not want to judge whether this idea will work or not but I do want to applaud Richard for his gusto and desire to build something big. Too many times entrepreneurs get stuck in the grind of running a business and focusing on the wrong things. They end up driving themselves into the ground instead of building a real company.

I have always found that when you have a big goal to shoot towards then your decision making becomes a lot easier. Will doing this activity help me achieve my goal or take me further off track? Focus on the initiatives that will support you and do not lose your focus!

Do you have a million dollar idea? I would love to hear it!

Evan Carmichael

On Friday I discussed how you can tell if Google has banned your site and what you have to do to get back into the index. It is a fairly cut and try penalty - either you are in the index or you are not. But what happens when you rank for some search terms but not others? Do you have a Google penalty or are you just suffering from a drop in rankings because your competition is getting stronger? Parts 2 and 3 of this series will focus on the grayer areas of Google penalties.

Check if you rank for your domain name and other important keywords

Assuming more than your homepage comes up in the site:www.yourdomain.com search the next thing to look for is if you rank for the keywords in your domain. For example, the Young Entrepreneur website ranks at the top of Google for the keyword “young entrepreneur”. The only title tags on the YE homepage are also “Young Entrepreneur”.

The domain name and homepage title tags represent the most important keywords for your site. They should the ones that you have the highest chance of ranking for unless you have picked an extremely competitive industry. Part two of testing the degree of a Google penalty is to look at keywords that you used to rank #1 for and keywords that you should be ranking #1 for.

If your homepage title tag is “Make Money Online” then you are in for quite a battle to get ranked but if it is “Mark Smith Nature Tours” and you own www.MarkSmithNatureTours.com then there is a serious problem if your site is not coming up in the number one position.

What to do

If the important keywords that only you should be ranking for are not bringing up your site then you have been penalized and must follow similar steps as if you have been banned. You have engaged in some kind of activity that Google frowns upon and you have to rectify it, go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and submit a reconsideration request. Tell them what you did wrong and promise not to do it again. If you cannot find the problem, bring on a professional who can help you before you try to contact Google.

I will finish off this series later this week to give you a complete plan for how to check if you have been penalized by Google.

Evan Carmichael