How much time off do you take off during the week? Most entrepreneurs run their business 24/7. In the early days of building a company you need to put in the long hours to get the business off the ground.

It takes a lot of hard work and effort to get to the point where you can sustain your standard of living and pay the rent / mortgage from the money you take out of the business.

After the company is past the survival stage many entrepreneurs continue to work the long hours. Managing bigger contracts and employees creates even more work and the inability to delegate puts the full burden on the entrepreneur.

Pretty soon the work becomes too much, the entrepreneurs can no longer see the big picture because they are caught up in the day to day operations, and they burn out.

It’s important to take time off in your business. Spending time outside of your company helps you relax and be gives you the ability to take a step back to understand where you really want to take the business.

Personally, every week I take Saturdays completely off and on Sundays I usually work only a few hours getting ahead on some of the tasks that are due up during the week. On Fridays I also help my fiance with her business which really only gives me four full days in the office. I find that the time away has helped me become a better delegator and the leisure time helps me be more creative.

Are you taking enough time off or heading down the path towards burn out?

Evan Carmichael

She never wanted to run her own business; she just wanted to be the best mom she knew how to be. But today, what began as a single children’s educational video that she filmed in her basement with a friend’s camera and her cat as a prop, has morphed into a billion dollar company that continues to be an industry leader.

Julie Aigner-Clark might not have predicted her own success with her Baby Einstein series of videos, but she was certainly happy to roll with it. Today, mothers the world over know this entrepreneur’s name, and love her for the intelligent videos she has brought to the market.

“There was nothing on the market that I felt was any good, so I decided to make something myself.” That was Aigner-Clark’s reasoning for starting her now wildly successful series of children’s educational videos, Baby Einstein. While it might be a simple logic, her formula for success was far from it. How did this stay at home mom become a household name with families across America?

According to Aigner-Clark:

“About a year into my daughter’s life, I started thinking about the whole idea of making a video for babies. Something stimulating and positive. I wondered, ‘Why isn’t there a way to expose her to the arts and sciences?’ I found the marketplace completely lacked what I was looking for.

I started this company because my children are at the age when you start to worry that they know about stranger safety, especially when they are on the Internet. I wanted a video that would be fun for them to watch as well as teach them. I am passionate about this and I am optimistic in its success.

I knew my baby. I knew what she liked to look at. I assumed that what my baby liked to look at, most other babies would, too.

The first Baby Einstein video took off because it was a completely new concept. It was an entirely new idea. No one else had videos for babies.

There was nothing on the market that I felt was any good, so I decided to make something myself.”

To be successful as an entrepreneur you need to sell a unique product or service. If you are selling the same product as everyone else you are unlikely to break through and create a successful company.

Is your product or service really something that is unique and valuable?

Evan Carmichael

Over 80% of new businesses fail within 5 years of starting up. For this edition of Entrepreneur University we enlisted the help of business coach Leanne Hoagland-Smith. Leanne Hoagland-Smith works with individuals just like you who want improved results personally or organizationally. She works to improve human capital for sustainable transformational change by developing results driven leadership in people, teams and organizations.

Leanne shares her advice for how to overcome the 7 most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make:

Small business owners numbered over 5.5 million in 2001 and generated over one billion in annual payroll. Sam Walton said there is a “lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of” and looks like Sam was right.

During the last five years as THE small business coach in the Chicago area, I have discovered 7 mistakes that small business owners consistently make. These small business help tips should guide you as the small business owner, entrepreneur or executive around these pitfalls as you work to improve your business results.

1. Work on your business not in your business Mistake: Most new business owners and many experienced business owners are so busy working in their business, they fail to work on their business and demonstrate the leadership that the business demands. In the book, It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small, But It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow, the authors revealed that executives spent less than 15 minutes each day thinking about the future of their business because they were so busy dealing with yesterday and today’s events.

2. Assess your business both externally and internally Mistake: Don’t presume that you know what is going on in your business. Take the time to assess your business both externally and internally. Using an organizational assessment based upon proven criteria such as Baldrige may help you to focus on the directionally correct actions.

3. Develop a strategic plan Mistake: If you don’t have a plan, you are on someone else’s plan. A strategic plan indicates who does what by when. Remember, hope is not a strategy.

4. Work your plan Mistake: Pay for a plan and leave it on a shelf or in a desk drawer. A plan’s purpose is action. Without action, the plan is useless and the dollars invested in creating the plan are wasted.

5. Invest in your people Mistake: Spending dollars on things such as technology and not people. People make the business. They create the loyal customers or disloyal ones. Employees don’t come to work thinking how they can mess up the company. Invest in people development and watch your investment quickly multiply.

6. Pay yourself first Mistake: Wearing all the hats and not paying yourself what you are worth. Entrepreneurs wear many hats when they establish their business. As time progresses, they continue to wear these hats because money is tight and they believe that they can do things better. The end of the year approaches and the company made a profit. By paying yourself first, you will focus on what you do really well and delegate those other activities to others at a far lower rate.

7. Keep balance between your personal and professional lives. Mistake: You are too busy to take the time with your family or friends. By attending your work life balance as well as your personal and professional development, you will see incredible results happen within your business.

These 7 leadership tips will help you catapult your business in warp time. Of course, if you like where you are now, then ignore these tips. However, can you be sure your competition will also ignore these tips? And what would happen, if they just implemented one tip less alone all 7?

Evan Carmichael

Ashley Qualls is a 17 year old entrepreneur behind Whateverlife.com. She runs the website from her basement in her Southgate, Michigan home and is closing in on 2.5 million visitors per month.

Last year, her business generated $1 million in revenues.

Earlier this month she had to petition to be declared an adult so she could legally sign the contracts she has with her advertisers and be able to manager her own money.

“I’m stubborn and I’m independent. I like the feeling that it’s my company, and I want to have the say-so in everything.”

She has hired her mother to be her business manager and has also employed three of her high school friends to work for her after school.

“I love it. You can create so many things. The possibilities are endless.”

The website was started in December 2004 when Ashley borrowed $8 from her mother to buy the Whateverlife.com domain listing. The initial intent was to showcase her graphics design skills and share her MySpace designs with her friends.

Without spending any money on advertising the site quickly took off as many MySpacers enjoyed her designs and used them to improve their own MySpace profiles.

The website, which gets more hits that Oprah.com, had an offer to buy for $5 million but Ashley turned it down.

Evan Carmichael

In my continuing series on the filters Google uses to evaluate a website I wanted to discuss the Duplicate Content Filter.

How It Works

In an attempt to make the search results more valuable to its users, Google implemented the duplicate content filter to prevent the same content from appearing multiple times in the search results. In the early days of search engine optimization webmasters used to create content and then distribute it to as many different websites as they could. That way when users typed in a keyword, the webmaster’s same article would come up dozens of times and they would dominate the search results.

Another problem was that devious webmasters trying to build content for their own websites would steal the articles from other sites and put it up as their own. They were trying to leverage the hard work and effort that other webmasters had put into creating unique content instead of trying to do it all themselves. The other webmasters got upset that their content was being stolen and the hijackers were happy because it was bringing in extra traffic.

The net result was not a valuable user experience because the search engine users would get pages and pages of the same results coming back from the exact same article – just published on different websites. The duplicate content filter removes this problem by selecting one source to use for the article and removing the rest from the search results. Now, instead of hijacking the top pages of the search results, webmasters will only rank once.

The question now becomes: if the same article has been listed on many different websites, which one will rank at the top for the same article? Google has tried to put into place measures so that the first website to have the content is the one that ranks (the original source) but this is not always the case. Sometimes the website with the highest Page Rank or most relevance also comes up on top.

What To Do

If you create valuable, unique content make sure to get it noticed quickly on your site. Have it linked from a high profile page, preferably the home page, and submit it to Google so they can rapidly add it to their index. Ensure that the content is relevant to the rest of your site and that the pages you have linking to it use the title as anchor text and also contain relevant text on the page.

If you are planning on allowing other people to use the content, make sure that Google has recognized it as being on your page first. You can do this by doing a quick Google search to see if the article has been added to the index or not. If it’s not there, don’t let anyone else use it yet.

Here are the other blog posts so far in my continuing series on Google Filters:

• An Intro To Google Filters – #8 The Overoptimization Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #7 The Too Many Pages At Once Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #6 The Co-Citation Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #5 The Too Many Links Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #4 The Broken Link Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #3 Google’s Link Farm Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #2 Google Domain Age Filter

• An Intro To Google Filters – #1 Google Sandbox

Evan Carmichael

Last month my website passed 200,000 monthly visitors and, as a result, we have started receiving an increasing amount of interest from advertisers wanting to reach the target audience on my site.

We’ve landed a deal with Bell Canada, one of Canada’s largest companies, and are in discussions with two major online companies. Bell Canada came to us as a referral and the other two companies both came to us, presumably after doing a search and finding my site.
To date a lot of the revenue from our site has been from programs such as Google AdSense but we’ve increasingly looked at private sponsorship. Bell Canada was our first corporate sale and we’ve also sold smaller ad spots to some of the experts we profile on our website.

We have also recently been approached by a website representation company. They basically do the work of finding advertisers for you and are your outsourced sales team. The company I’m in touch with is a reputable firm as a few of the other websites in my industry are also using them.

Should I work with them? The upside is I could attract more brand name advertisers to my site and it could free up my time to be able to focus on building even more website traffic which, in turn, would drive more revenue. There is also no up front cost to working with this company.

The downside is they take 40% of everything they bring in and want to work towards an exclusive relationship. They are also charging the same rates that I am already charging and quoting for the different sections of my site. As my site continues to grow I’m sure we’ll get even more attention from advertisers as well.

My current problem is should I:

1. Continue as is and wait for more advertisers to come to me as I grow.
2. Bring someone on to be responsible for selling my ad spots.
3. Go with the website representation company and let them sell my site.

What would you do in my situation?

Evan Carmichael

Every entrepreneur will face challenges getting a business off the ground. One of the biggest barriers to break through is getting past all the people who don’t believe in you and who try to get in your way.

Today I wanted to highlight the story of Lillian Vernon who kept pushing until she hit her stride and made her company a success.

Lillian Vernon became a household name at a time when women were not even supposed to work outside the home.

From the humble beginnings of an immigrant family, Vernon started a business in the kitchen of her small home and grew it to be one of the most well-known multi-million dollar companies in the U.S as well as the first female-owned company to be listed on the American Stock Exchange.

Today, the Lillian Vernon Corporation earns almost $300 million in revenues, has over 4,500 employees and continues to be one of the country’s leading catalog retailers. in Vernon’s own words:

“I first got started in business because I needed to supplement the family income. This was a good way to do it because I was going to have a child. Frankly, I was 20-odd years old and didn’t know anything.

It was a risk. I had a husband and I was pregnant with my oldest son. But I don’t look at risk the way other people do. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to go in feeling like you’re going to be successful.

I became successful due to several reasons. I never gave up and I never let anyone or anything get in my way. I use the power of positive thinking to tackle obstacles and challenges so they don’t defeat me.

Passion for my work and my business is another important reason. I really love my work and I get great satisfaction from it.”

Evan Carmichael

A common question that many entrepreneurs have when they are starting or growing a business is how to get funding for the business. Most people only think about if they can qualify for a bank loan but there are many other alternatives.

For this edition of Entrepreneur University I’ve turned to SCORE Business Counselor Alvah Parker who gives us the top 10 ways to fund a business:

1. Self-funding – You provide the capital necessary to start your business with your own savings and assets.

2. Friends or relatives often have money to invest. The loan can be structured so that there is a benefit for everyone involved.

3. Line of credit – If you have an asset that is valuable a bank will establish a line of credit for you. People use their homes as the asset or if you are already in business your business could be that asset. With a line of credit you might have access to $100,000 but you pay interest only on the amount you actually use.

4. Personal loan – A bank gives this type of loan based on your borrowing history and credit you have established with them or based on an asset you own. With a line of credit you only use what you need and pay interest on that. With a personal loan you get the full amount and pay back both the interest and principal over time. Whenever the loan is secured by your home, proceed cautiously. It is possible to lose both your home and your business if you fail to make your payments.

5. Credit Card – In today’s market many credit card companies are offering 0% financing. If you know you can pay back the money relatively quickly, this is free way to borrow. This method should be used cautiously. Interest rates can go up.

6. SBA loan (US only)/Commercial loan – The SBA doesn’t actually loan money but they will guarantee your commercial loan for the bank. To apply for this type of loan the bank will want to see a business plan along with some financial information about you.

7. Grants – NIH (in US) gives grants for Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and there are also grants called Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR). To learn more about this go to: grants1.nih.gov There may be other grants in your specific industry. One place to do research on grants is through the appropriate industry association connected to your business.

8. Micro loans – These are loans from nonprofits or government agencies that focus on economically deprived communities and minority groups. These are usually loans for small amounts of capital for example under $25K. Organizations like Working Capital and Small Business Development Corporations in various communities offer these kinds of loans.

9. Angel investors – These are investors who provide money to start up business. They take a greater risk than a bank and will want to make more money because of that.

10. Venture Capitalist – These are groups that have funds available who are willing to take a big risk (often on new technology) and expect a high return. This is usually a source for an existing business rather than a new one. VCs invest large amounts of money in the business and therefore own a large part of the business. Their goal is to sell the business in a relatively short time. One way they sell the business is by taking the company public through an IPO (Initial Public Offering).

Evan Carmichael

A look over to our Feedburner counter today reveals that we’ve hit the 200 subscriber mark! Thank you to everyone who has been a part of the blog and for contributing your comments.

I started writing the Young Entrepreneur blog on March 3rd with my post: Can colleges and universities “teach” entrepreneurship? We hit the 100 reader mark on July 26th. Getting to our first 100 readers took 145 days.

I’m pleased to say that going from 100 to 200 took only 71 days, less than half the time to reach the first 100. Hopefully with the exciting posts that we have planned for the coming months we’ll hit 300 in even less time!

I thought it would be fun to highlight some of the most popular posts by comments over the past 71 days for those of you who are new readers and for our loyal members who might have missed a post or two over the last couple of months.

4 Comments

• Entrepreneur Profile – Fraser Doherty
• Lessons From Richard Branson – Part 2 – Don’t Do It For The Money
• Lessons From Richard Branson – Part 4 – Build A Solid Team
• 20 Tips To Manage Your Time – Entrepreneur University
• Delegate, Delegate, Delegate!
• Entrepreneur University Logo Needed

3 Comments

• A Smart Way To Start A Business
• Lessons From Richard Branson – Part 1 – How to Identify an Opportunity
• Young Entrepreneurs Face Bigger Challenges
• How Much Do You Want It?

Thank you for your continued support and I’m looking forward to providing even more tips, advice, resources, and information to help you grow your businesses as young entrepreneurs!

Evan Carmichael

Google has traditionally updated its famous PageRank system once per quarter. The search engine claims that it is constantly updating PageRank but that the toolbar which gets displayed to the public only gets updated once per quarter.

There is a lot of discussion as to when the next PageRank update will be as the third quarter update has not happened yet and we’re already in October! Some are speculating that the PageRank update has already begun although I have personally not seen a difference with any of the pages that I monitor:

• My own site remains at a PageRank of 5
• YoungEntrepreneur.com remains at 6
• The YE Blog remains at 5

Even some of the companies we profiled like Toronto Dance Salsa (profile) have not seen a change in their PageRank despite a dramatic rise in the number of incoming links.

The fate doesn’t look better for new websites trying to achieve PageRank status either. For example, Thicken My Wallet is a financial blog that I read  on a regular basis. The blog was started in April of 2007, it has over 120 links to it from different websites and the content of the blog is unique and of high quality. Yet the blog remains unranked with a PageRank of 0.

PageRank plays an obvious role in helping to establish the credibility of a website. It makes readers treat you more seriously, helps you sell more advertising, and can be a benchmark for various affiliate and other online money making programs.

I will keep the blog updated if I see any PageRank changes with the sites I monitor.

Are you seeing an update with any of your websites?

Evan Carmichael