After polling our Young Entrepreneur readers, here is our list of the top 8 ways that young entrepreneurs can raise capital for their businesses. I’ve also included a few of the comments that were left for some of the top points.

#1) Your Own Savings / Self Financing

I would say the best way to go about getting capital is to first start on your own. Whether you’re working or can get money from friends and family, you should try to get as much “in-house” as you possibly can. While being an entrepreneur is about the unknown and uncertainty, the more planning and prepared you are for future situations the less you put yourself at risk. That includes VCs/Angels who may want more equity or stake in your company than you. The more you are able to control throughout, the better.

I have found that most people however how sweet they are to you may not be willing to invest in you unless they can see some success. So my method is to try earning a little then go to my friends with hard numbers. As you grow then start including others and even a bank. But a track record is mandatory in my case.

In my opinion, the best way to get your own cash for your own business is to make it yourself. It’s always good to have definite cash flow coming in before you start something as risky as a new business.

In my opinion, I believe that for starters, you would have to raise your own capital before you can even ask some from friends and families. It’s not easy but hey, one has to start from somewhere.

No one bets on newbie. You need to prove yourself first before someone bet on you. So best way is use your savings and if you are really confident take the loan.

In my personal opinion, the best way to raise money is: From the start, don’t take money from your friends. Eventually, one week sooner, one week later, your friendship will be threatened by the burrowing money issue. That’s why internet is so useful in starting marketing plans as a source of collecting money. A strange is far more helpful, than a friend, when it comes to talk about money. There’s a Portuguese saying that says: “If you want to loose a friend… ask him for money”.

My preferred method is to start a self-financing business. If you can find a business with no major need for inventory or equipment, and withdraw no more than 10 to 25 per cent of the early profits, you’ll have 75 to 90% of cash flow available to pay current expenses and to finance growth. If you already have a job of business that meets your family’s needs, than let the business finance its own growth. I started on a shoestring nearly 24 years ago, working strictly after hours for the first 3 years. By then, I had established myself with a small base of clients, so that in shifting to full-time self-employed I had additional time to find new customers through networking and referrals from satisfied clients. Even while I was only working part-time, the business generated enough cash flow to pay the monthly expenses for my business vehicle, advertising, dues for membership in the local Chamber of Commerce, and a little extra here and there. Once I expanded to full-time, I had the experience and demonstrated cash flow, that borrowing from banks and getting credit cards issued to the business was no problem. One big stumbling block for some people is having the discipline to not start living off the profits until the business is self-sustaining. Many entrepreneurs have the mindset that they have to show off their success by spending money. Any little hiccup in the cash flow, a few slow months, or unexpected expense, and all the business can fail due to being under-capitalized. Quite similar to individuals who win a jackpot and start spending money and acquiring debt beyond what the prize can cover. Self-financing the business from the profits was a sure thing for me, and meant I wasn’t paying high interest rates to borrow, so the profits actually went further. And future lenders will appreciate the demonstrated financial discipline.

#2) Friends & Family

If you can convince family or friends to invest then that seems like the best way at least at the very beginning.

Unless you’re a proven winner and have had measurable success in the past than the seed capital is coming from FFF (family friends fools). Most investors want to see that you have a vested interest in any project seeking funding.

#3) Angels & Venture Capitalists

If you’re serious and looking to scale go the VC/Angel route.

If you meet the requirements of a VC or angel and are in the right sector, with the upside they’re looking for then consider yourself one of the fortunate ones. Be aware however, that VC is a very expensive proposition and you will be giving up a large percentage of your company. In most instances, you will be giving up control with your first round. If not, you will in follow up rounds. If you have a true winner on your hands it might be worth it. The advantage is that once you’ve been through a liquidity event you can become a serial entrepreneur and access to VC money for your next project is almost assured. Angels (organized ones) essentially have the same criteria as a VC although they invest at a slightly earlier stage.

#4) Licensing

Another important point that people often overlook is licensing your idea to someone else – if appropriate. This saves you having to raise significant startup capital yourself and is virtually risk free. It’s easier said then done though as often getting large corporates to even make time to hear about your idea isn’t easy. People are doing it though….

#5) Reverse Mergers

Reverse mergers in the last couple of years have become a viable means to raise capital. Especially if you have a good IR firm that can get you volume. Once you have volume, you have access to the hedge fund money. Some people will disagree, but when it comes to PIPES the hedge funds really don’t care about fundamentals, just liquidity. Of course doing a PIPE isn’t without its downside either. I’ve had investors tell me that discounting the stock is telling them I don’t believe its worth what it’s trading for; I disagree. The tradeoff for the money up front and the investor taking the short term liquidity risk is a discount. Structured properly (i.e. fixed conversion price) you receive the money you need for product development, sales, etc. and still maintain control.

#6) Private Placement

Another viable option is doing a “traditional” private placement. That is, meeting one of the SECs registration exemptions and selling stock to accredited investors. If the stock is trading, you simply discount the stock to make up for the holding period. The SEC changed the rules regarding 144 stock shortening the holding period for non affiliated parties for six months. If the company is private you can still sell the stock to accredited investors. However, it’s a tough sell being that unless there is a liquidity event they end up holding worthless stock. Much like the VC and Angel investors they look for 10x + their initial investment. Their sweet spot seems to be 18-24 months. The upside to private placements is that you dictate the terms, how much the stock sells for, what percentage of the company you give up, etc. Yes, it is a very, very difficult sell. However, investors that buy in the private placement arena are wealthy individuals who want to be part of the next big thing. They don’t care about percentages, control, etc. they just care about how much money they can make. In other words, they’re gamblers. You have to target your offering to the right group and each have daren’t reasons and amounts they invest. I hope there’s some decent information somewhere that will, at minimum, get people thinking. Most people not familiar with the various methods of raising capital seem to apply VC standards to all investments. If you are targeting a VC great, if not you need to structure your offering to meet the criteria of your investor.

#7) Credit Cards

#8) SBA

I hope you enjoyed our list and can refer to it as you try to raise capital and grow your business.

Stay tuned to the blog for our upcoming polls!

I recently had the opportunity to interview Ken Headrick, the Director of Products and Marketing for MSN Canada about how website owners can succeed with search. Ken is one of speakers at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference. (sidenote: I will be going to the conference from June 16-18 and will be reporting back on what I learn).

Here are the questions I asked Ken and his responses (my favourites are the last 3):

What has happened in Search in the last year and what can we expect over the next year?

A little more than 1 year ago Yahoo and Microsoft brought our PPC offerings to Canada and provided advertisers with new and different options. Generally, more Canada businesses are investing in Search but we are still quite a bit slower to adopt this technology as compared to businesses in the US or the UK. Market shares have grown for Google while the Microsoft market share has held steady and Yahoo’s has declined to the point that Microsoft is solidly in the #2 position in Canada in terms of search market share. The search experience is evolving in that there is more and more search pages displaying more than just the 10 links. Results show videos, images, maps and other relevant information on most of the major engines. More and more information is being put into the search engines to the point that I am not sure that people know that they can query stock prices or weather forecasts or sports scores or do local searches for businesses in their neighbourhood on Microsoft Live Search and some of the other engines. There is lots of innovation but a final one is that there are new mobile search offerings coming to market to allow you to search from your cell phone or Windows Mobile phone.

Local Search. How does it work and which businesses does it make sense for?

Local search is very popular as 46% of searches have some sort of location involved in the search. Local search is particularly popular on mobile phones for finding businesses in a local area like a restaurant, or a store etc. and this importance will only increase over time. Most of the major engines populate their local searches with databases from common popular local providers. It is important if your business involves a physical location you want to drive people to, that as consumer behaviour changes toward using the internet to search for things, that your business can be found in the local search of all of the major engines.

When I search for my business, I rank pretty low. What can I do to get ranked higher?

Most of the major search engines have a link on their pages for webmasters. Follow those links to the search engines tools, forums for discussion on tips and tracks and to participate in the SEO community (Search Engine Optimization) and pose your questions there and get help from others on how to improve your site. There are also a variety of free tools that webmasters can you to assess how they are ranking and for assessing the pages of their sites. Minimizing flash and other elements that are difficult to for a crawler to index, submitting your site maps to the engines directly, keeping your site content fresh and using your keywords in the titles and body of your pages, are a few of the basic guidelines.

Organic or PPC? How should a website owner determine where to spend her time and money?

It always make sense to make sure that your site is well search engine optimized so that that each of the engine’s crawlers can find you and the webmaster tools available from each search engine and a variety of partners can help with is activity. Depending on what you do and how broad your offerings are, it may be very difficult to come up on the first page on 100 different terms or on the specific terms you are interested in if they are common words or they are very competitive. In which case, PPC guarantees that you will be shown to your prospective customers in all of the cases that you want to. Thus, it is generally a good practice to be balanced in your approach recognizing that this will be different for each advertiser’s unique situation.

Microsoft or Google? Why should webmasters look at what Microsoft and not just focus on Google?

Generally it is best to advertise with all of the major engines to do Search as searchers for several reasons. Firstly, search advertising is likely the most measurable, trackable, controllable and provides the best ROI as compared to any other form of advertising you can do. Based on that, advertisers should be investing as much as they can, in as many engines as they can, to drive the most effective use of their marketing budgets. Second, Microsoft adCenter (the system you use to book PPC ads on Microsoft Live Search) provides the highest conversions in many categories as compared to Google and Yahoo and the cost per click will be cheaper with Microsoft adCenter and thus your returns will be better. Thirdly, Microsoft Live Search also reaches 46% of all online Canadians searching – over 10 Million people and we have the #2 market share in Canada – 2% share points ahead of Yahoo. This comes partly from the fact that MSN is the #1 portal in Canada and has the #1 position with over 90% share with Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger and so we have a very large audience to help you target. Finally, using Microsoft adCenter allows you to do demographic targeting of your ads to help boost your conversions and the ROI of your campaigns.

How valuable is a the #1 spot or page 1 spot worth?

This can get technical but there is a fairly well known piece of research by a Canadian company called Enquiro that uses eye-tracking technology to track searchers behaviour on search results pages where you have a typical 10 links being shown. The study shows where people look and refers to “the golden triangle” that lies on its side across the top of the page and points out to the right. While it is generally true that click through rates decline from the #1 position through the other positions at the top of the page and continues to decline down the right hand side, most advertisers will test and experiment with their campaigns and can move their positions up and down the listing of ads in the mainline (top of the page) and along the right side of the page to assess the changes in price per click vs. click through rate declines and reach the optimal return. The key point here is to test and that results will be different on different engines and for different advertisers.

What do you think of Ken’s comments?

TechCrunch recently put out their list of the top PR secrets for startup companies. I thought I would share my top 5 from their list:

Secret #1
Understand You’re Not the Only Story in Town

Bloggers and reporters are some of the busiest people you could possibly hope to meet. They’re actively looking for the most interesting, relevant, and linkable stories out there, preferably before anyone else can run with it. But truthfully, they spend most of their time hacking through the weeds of generic or over-the-top inbound emails, press releases, Facebook messages, Skypes, SMSes, Tweets, and IMs. It’s almost a small miracle that anyone can ever get their story told.

At the end of the day, you’re not the only company with a great story. Just because your story is new doesn’t make it newsworthy.

Bloggers and journalists are interested in good stories and the more time you spend developing that story up front, for each person you’re trying to reach, the more you can help them help you.

Secret #3
Participation is Marketing

You are equally important to the PR process. It doesn’t hurt to introduce yourself to bloggers or reporters offline and online to start building relationships with influencers who will help craft and guide your company across the market adoption bell curve.

Read and comment on their work. Send a brief intro email before you need anything. Attend one of the many tech networking events in your area to build your social capital, meet those who can help you, and those who you, in turn, can help as well.

Participation is marketing and by actively participating in both the online and real worlds, you forge relationships that will help your brand and social capital grow.

Keep in mind, how you participate, both online and in the real world, also contributes to your brand – especially in the realm of social media. Comments, social network profiles, blog posts, pictures you share, etc., are all discoverable in traditional search engines and new media search tools.

Secret #5
Don’t Launch on Mondays

Pick a news or launch date, say Thursday at 11:30 a.m. PST, and build in a cushion to start talking to the right people under embargo before you roll out. Mondays and early mornings are usually the most congested. Releasing it later will most likely earn greater attention.

A quick note on embargoes and exclusives. Embargoes are a form of sharing news with media where they agree to not publish the news before an agreed upon date/time. Whereas exclusives require that you give your story to one person, and one person only. Choose carefully, as once someone runs with the story; chances are that other newsmakers will pass.

Embargoes and exclusives are not to be manipulated or taken advantage of. You should respect them and the people you’re working with.

Allowing journalists and bloggers adequate time to prepare is critical. They’re busy and they need more than an hour to digest and write a story. Once a press release or the news is made public, they no longer pay attention anyway. Their job (in an ideal world) is to break news, not to rewrite press releases.

Determine which reporters and bloggers should be part of the initial news discussions (under embargo). I’m a huge proponent of the “less is more” embargo strategy to try to 1) demonstrate appreciation for those you want to work with—it should be different with each type of announcement you feel is truly “newsworthy,” according to which audiences the news is best suited; and 2) to reduce or eliminate the chance that someone might break the embargo by running the story early (usually by mistake—sometimes you learn the hard way though.)

Secret #8
Customize the News For Each Influencer to Make His Or Her Job Easier

I’ve been privy to an uncountable array of company pitches and it never ceases to amaze me just how few can actually summarize what they do and why it matters.

Focus on the elevator pitch and make it compelling, memorable, and relevant. Brevity is key.

Make sure to summarize each news announcement with a couple of statements and bullets to quickly showcase why anyone should care. Package the story differently for each person you’re hoping to reach, as each will have different needs. Take the time to pull relevant screen shots, create user accounts for each person if necessary, customize video demos and screencasts, and anything else someone may need to write a story instead of having to spend precious time doing your work for you.

Yes, it’s time consuming. But this is about building individual relationships and not about broadcasting spam.

Secret #12
Follow the Conversations and Join In

As much as media and blogger relations drive traffic and increase your user base, we can’t overlook the importance of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Diigo, FriendFeed, Ning, Mixx, Bebo, Get Satisfaction, Google and Yahoo Groups (among many, many others). When executed and managed correctly, and genuinely, the referring numbers can outperform the best articles and posts and the relationships that you create within these networks will prove incredibly valuable throughout the life of your company.

This isn’t about promotion or social network spam. This is about dialog driven by the insight you garner from listening to and reading the people who are talking about your company – with or without your direct participation.

Try searching for your company, product, or competitor’s name in any of the above networks or any other social network, to see how they’re being discussed. By researching individual conversations, threads, and/or groups, you’ll find strategic points of entry across the board. This does take time, and may prove too overwhelming for you to run individually. Hiring a community manager or empowering your PR team to do so is a great place to start, that way they can point you to the conversations that require your attention or handle them directly.

Listening is as important as publishing. The best listeners make the best conversationalists. Make sure to keep a Google Alert for your company, spokespersons, and products. Reading and responding is critical to managing perceptions, sharing expertise, and building loyalty.

There’s no question, you have to compete for attention and in order to do so effectively and genuinely, you need someone who can help tell your story, the right way, through the people who reach your customers. It’s not an overnight process and it’s not something to “be gamed.” It’s a process of investing in, building and leveraging relationships now and in the long term. And yes, if you do things right, bloggers, reporters, and analysts will want to talk to you about your company and vision along the way.

What have you done to get PR for your company?

He turned what was once a small bombed-out department store in Tokyo into the world’s most successful consumer electronics company. Not only that but Akio Morita, co-founder of the Sony Corporation, was also one of the few entrepreneurs that helped Japan’s economy recover in the aftermath of World War II. Today, more than half a century after the company’s initial inception, and with Morita at the helm until his only recent departure, Sony remains one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, with over 158,000 employees worldwide and revenues in excess of $63 billion.

Whether it was his innate abilities or the rules he had learned, Morita was able to translate that into not only his own success, but also Japan’s. He helped put his country back on the map, while building his own reputation across the world. Indeed, in 1998, a Harris survey revealed that Sony was ranked the number one brand name by American consumers, ahead of Coca-Cola and General Electric. How did he do it?

“From a management standpoint, it is very important to know how to unleash people’s inborn creativity. My concept is that anybody has creative ability, but very few people know how to use it.

The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a family-like feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate. We will try to create conditions where persons could come together in a spirit of teamwork, and exercise to their heart’s desire their technological capacity.

I believe people work for satisfaction. I believe it is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for his work. People need money, but they also want to be happy in their work and proud of it.

The American system of management, in my opinion, relies too much on outsiders to help make business decisions, and this is because of the insecurity that American decision makers feel in their jobs, as compared with most top Japanese corporate executives. 

If you go through life convinced that your way is always best, all the new ideas in the world will pass you by. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice. 

I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the U.S. market, and it had to be something different, something that nobody else was making. 

The key factor in industry is creativity. There are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business. 

What we in industry learned in dealing with people is that people do not work just for money and that if you are trying to motivate, money is not the most effective tool.

Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it. Don’t do market research. We all learn by imitating, as children, as students, as novices in the world of business. And then we grow up and learn to blend our innate abilities with the rules or principles we have learned.“

This week’s Entrepreneur University comes courtesy of Omaro Ailoch. Omaro is a senior software engineer, an internet marketing expert, an entrepreneur and the founder of OC IT Services a highly skilled California based web development, design, and search engine optimization firm. Omaro shares his thoughts on how you can use LinkedIn to grow your business:

“When you consider that LinkedIn has nearly 10 million users hailing from over 150 industries around the world, it is surprising that B2B websites aren’t paying more attention. There are, though, several methods your website could be employing in order to improve your exposure within the business oriented social network, while also potentially improving your search engine visibility.

Invite, Invite, Invite

Your LinkedIn network not only consists of those connections that you personally invite. The connections of your connections, and their connections are also added to your network. It sounds confusing but you essentially get three tiers of connections for every person you invite. This means that you can gain an introduction to somebody through one of your existing connections.

In order to build your profile and greatly increase your connections list, you should invite everybody that is relevant to your business and your industry that you deal with. If you are a service provider, then you should politely invite clients to become one of your connections. As they add their own connections, these same people will be added to your own list and so on.

Make Your Profile Available To Search Engines

Your profile page on LinkedIn can be made visible to search engines. LinkedIn is viewed quite highly by the major search engines, particularly Google. When creating your profile, ensure that you create a public profile and opt for Full View. As such, include links to your websites, but also include the keywords most important to you.

By doing this, your LinkedIn profile will receive better search results so that people searching for your service, or those searching for the service you offer, will be more likely to see your profile page. Don’t forget to modify the link details to your pages, so that they use your most targeted keywords. This will also help to improve the performance of your own pages.

Use Advanced Search Tools

LinkedIn enables you to perform advanced searches within your trusted network. You can look for those connections that are starting a new venture or a new project, or anybody that might be looking for the type of service you offer. This provides you with the perfect opportunity to introduce yourself and promote your particular service.

Answer Questions

LinkedIn Answers is a service similar, in essence, to Google Answers or Yahoo Answers. Registered users can ask a question and other users have the option to answer that question. Regularly check the Answers service to see if there are any questions within your field of expertise. Give a genuine answer that provides valuable information and the member that asked the question is likely to view your profile. Because you answer questions in your own field of expertise this may mean a new connection and a new business contact.

Using LinkedIn To Improve Your Business Networking

LinkedIn is quite different to many of the social networking sites online. It is positively geared towards businesses and business members. As such, it enables you to build a powerful business network and the community does not frown upon the action of promoting yourself, as long as you do it properly and at the most appropriate times.”

How have you used LinkedIn for your business?

Young entrepreneurs are always saying that they don’t have the resources around them to start a business. A new study out of England suggests, however, that young Americans might be better off than their British counterparts.

According to The Prince’s Trust, a UK based youth charity which focuses on entrepreneurship, more than a third of England’s young people want to start a business but a lack of support at school means few achieve their dreams.

A report marking 25 years of The Prince’s Trust Business Programme reveals that 38% of young people in the region would like to start their own business, but less than 6% have actually done it.

More than a third (36%) cited high start-up costs as the biggest barrier to starting a business, while almost three-quarters (71%) believe that schools and colleges encourage safe, conventional careers rather than supporting aspiring entrepreneurs.

More than three-quarters (76%) of England’s young people also claim careers advisors do not mention starting a business as a career option.

The survey of more than 1,000 young people nationwide also revealed their concerns about the current economic climate. However, almost one in five of England’s young people (18%) stated that they would start their own business if they lost their job during a recession.

Almost half (45%) of young people interviewed believe that the United States does the most to encourage and support young entrepreneurs, compared with only 8% claiming the UK as the leader for enterprise.

Almost three-quarters (71%) of young people want the Government to provide tax relief and low-interest loans to young entrepreneurs. At present, 74% believe that only well-off people can afford to start a business in the UK and that today’s entrepreneurs are most likely to be white, middle-class, middle-aged men.

What do you think of the survey results? Is The US the best place to be a young entrepreneur? What do you think are the biggest challenges facing young entrepreneurs today?

PubMatic recently released its second monthly PubMatic AdPrice Index (view the website). The index indicates that the economic slowdown in the U.S. is beginning to impact the online advertising industry, with overall monetization dropping by 23 percent. The PubMatic AdPrice Index is based on data from over 3,000 publishers and billions of ad impressions.

The PubMatic AdPrice Index revealed surprising weakness in monetization for the vast majority of Web sites. Large Web sites fared the worst while small Web sites managed to maintain their monetization rates. eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped dramatically by 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents April. Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Small Web sites managed to improve their monetization, increasing from $1.18 in March to $1.29 in April.

Here are some of the findings:

• On average, Web site monetization dropped by 23 percent from 49 cents in March to 38 cents in April. *Pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.
• Among the verticals, Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Entertainment monetization dropped 17 percent from 40 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Gaming and Sports were down marginally (4 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Technology remained relatively flat at 83 cents in April vs. 82 cents in March, but is still off January highs of 92 cents.
• In April 2008, 77 percent of small Web sites garnered net publisher eCPMs from ad networks of under $1.00, compared with 95 percent of medium Web sites and 100 percent of large web sites.

To combat the drop in monetization, many publishers are adopting best practices to maintain or grow their Web site revenues. These best practices include:

• Network diversification: Working with multiple ad networks (as opposed to one or two) to find the right mix of optimum advertising campaigns.
• Monetizing international traffic: Working with foreign-based ad networks to better monetize international site visitors. While international traffic is often a minority of a publisher’s traffic volume, this traffic can be highly lucrative because of the weak U.S. dollar and the growth environment outside of the US.
• Segmentation strategy: Segmenting a Web site into various categories (finance, travel, lifestyle) and using different ad tags for each category. Most ad networks are better able to target relevant campaigns to a Web site’s inventory as a result.

Outsourcing is becoming an increasingly popular trend for entrepreneurs trying to save money and maximize their time spent on high value projects. One of the most popular places to find people to work projects for you is Elance. I’ve personally hired a number of people through Elance’s service.

Elance recently put out a list of the types of projects you can outsource to a virtual assistant. Some of the top suggestions are:

Sales Leads
Without sales, you don’t have business. But if you’re spending time meeting prospective clients and servicing existing customers, it’s hard to find new leads. A VA can find and research individuals, companies, and technologies, via blogs, websites and forums.  They can prepare reports and briefs to help you determine who to contact next. With the right information in hand you can focus on developing new business relationships instead of having to spend time researching.

Turn Business Cards into Outlook Entries
Networking is critical in most businesses. Putting information from business cards into your Outlook address book helps you stay organized and automatically organizes your phone or PDA. Who really has the time to do this? You can fax/scan the business cards you receive, or send Excel or Word contact listings to a VA who can transfer the information for you. You’ll always have the information you need at your fingertips.

Meetings
A well-planned and executed lunch meeting with one important client could be as important to your business as a meeting with 20 or more participants. Every meeting has the potential to make or break your company – make sure they are planned flawlessly! A VA can research venues, make reservations, schedule the appointment with participants, and even follow up a few days ahead of time to make sure your plans are all set. Let a VA take care of the details so you can focus on accomplishing your goals at your meetings.

Blog Posting
First a caveat: If you have a distinctive writing “voice,” only talented writers will be able to mimic it and create blog posts that “sound” like you. But don’t let that stop you from hiring a VA to help with your blog posts. Virtual Assistants can collect news, keep up with trends, do research… even write rough drafts of posts that you can then shape into your “own” distinctive style. And to keep the conversation among your readers going, a VA can respond to comments left on your blog, alerting you when a comment requires your expertise to answer. Many bloggers generate a mixture of posts. Some are simple news recaps and updates while others are more like opinion pieces. Let a VA help you make your blog more robust… while also making it easier to maintain and keep fresh.

Voicemail Management
Do you receive a lot of voicemails? Do you spend a lot of time in meetings and dread having to check your messages? A VA can check your voicemail on the schedule you set, prioritize your messages, and even email summaries to you in case you’re not in a position to receive calls. A VA can also return routine and emergency calls, saving the important or sensitive calls for you to make when you have the chance.

Have you used Elance to outsource some of your processes? What has your experience been?

Due to the popularity of our April post on Robert Kiyosaki (Play To Be First – Robert Kiyosaki), I’ve decided to dedicate another blog post to him. This time the post will cover one of Robert’s most fundamental beliefs – Make Your Money Work For You, not the other way around.

“We go to school to learn to work hard for money,” says Kiyosaki. “I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them.”

When Kiyosaki was nine years old, he approached the father of his best friend, Mike, to teach him how to make money. The dad gave the young Kiyosaki a menial job in one of the convenience stores he owned. It was not exactly what Kiyosaki had had in mind. After three weeks of dusting cans and making just ten cents a week, Kiyosaki told his friend’s dad he wanted to quit. Kiyosaki had not learned how to make a fortune, but what he had learned was a lesson far more valuable, said the father. At the age of nine, Kiyosaki was beginning to understand the futility of working a job he hated for a meager salary that would not get him anywhere in life.

That lesson formed the basis of Kiyosaki’s later career, and is one of the major components in his teachings. Kiyosaki did not get to where he is today by going to work every day, being frugal, and saving his money. Instead, Kiyosaki learned to take risks – managed risks – and make his money do the working. “The poor and middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them,” says Kiyosaki. “The rich buy or create assets that work for them so they don’t have to.”

In the Industrial Age, the formula for success was to go to school, get good grades and find a secure job for life. Either the company or the government would look after your financial wellbeing once you decided to retire. Today, says Kiyosaki, times have changed: “We are in the Information Age and more than job security we all need financial security…You can no longer rely on your employer or your government to take care of you.”

According to Kiyosaki, key to achieving financial security is in understanding the difference between an asset and a liability, and learning to leverage that difference. “An asset puts money in your pocket and a liability takes money from your pocket,” he says. “The rich understand the difference and buy assets, not liabilities.”

In his very blunt words, “Savers are losers.” Kiyosaki sees money just sitting in a bank account as money wasted. Your financial goals should not be to save money, get out of debt, or invest for the long term, unless you are content being one of the middle class, he says. But, if you want to be a part of the rich kids’ club, that kind of thinking is obsolete.

“Today, ‘save money’ is bad advice,” says Kiyosaki, who has made most of his fortune in shrewd real estate investments, and teaching the rest of the world how to do the same. “I have a problem with too much money. I can’t reinvest it fast enough, and because I reinvest it, more money comes in. Yes, the rich do get richer.”

Having trouble selling your product or service? This week’s Entrepreneur University comes courtesy of Russ Lombardo, a nationally recognized Sales and CRM consultant, speaker, trainer, author and radio show host. Russ works with business owners, sales executives and professionals who want to increase their sales results by acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Russ shares his view on how anger can impact your sales:

“As an avid and competitive racquetball player, I get into some very heated matches with opponents from time to time. Racquetball is a very fast-paced and intense game and if you aren’t careful, your emotions can get carried away and override your ability to play smartly. How your opponent plays can have a direct affect on your emotional state. For instance, if he consistently gets in the way of your shot, you either have to take an alternate and less effective shot or call a hinder which results in a do over. If this continues throughout the game, it can get very frustrating.

When your opponent hinders you (i.e., blocks your shot and/or the ball), repeatedly calls debatable short serves, unnecessarily keeps bumping into you, yells loudly, or just behaves in a not-so-friendly and unmannerly way, it can easily result in your getting angry. Also, when your game is simply off and you keep making lousy shots, your frustration can lead to anger as well. When these things happen, your game can go right down the tubes. You begin thinking about your emotional state rather than focusing on your next shot, position or strategy. This very thing happened to me just recently when I was playing someone I would consider a discourteous player. I started getting angry and yelled at him and made equally impolite comments. Suddenly I realized something – I have very good selling skills but I’m not applying any of them to this game or my opponent. I wasn’t treating my opponent the way I would treat a customer, especially an unreasonable and a discourteous one.

I thought, “Hey, if my opponent was my customer, how would he feel about me?” The answer was simple; he would probably throw me out of his building. This was stupid. So I used this analogy to re-think how I was going to react to my opponent. Not only did I go on to win the game, but I felt better about myself. Most people have heard the expression about winning the battle but losing the war. It’s the same thing with this example. After cursing out my opponent or ridiculing his behavior in an unprofessional yet emotional way, I may have felt better at that moment (won the battle), but at the end of the day I would have lowered myself to his level and felt just as discourteous and unmannerly as my opponent (lost the war). In sales, the same scenario exists.

When you’re working with a prospect who is being unreasonable or who’s just being a plain jerk, how you react can make the difference between winning and losing the sale. Why people act this way is varied. Sometimes it’s just their personality and they don’t believe they are doing anything wrong. They’re just angry, grumpy and bad-tempered people by their very nature. Other times they may be testing you. They may want to see how far they can push you to gain control over their negotiating position. And other times it’s a matter of respect. Purchasers don’t always respect sales people, so they treat them accordingly. Unfortunately, some sales people don’t earn any respect and therefore deserve to be treated poorly.

When confronted with a situation that makes your blood boil, it’s important to act, not react. Sometimes you may have to walk away from a sale because the prospect is being too rude or even unreasonable. However, in cases where they are a serious prospect but just acting like a jerk, you need to handle your behavior properly. Here are some tips on what to do to prevent a battle from ensuing.

1. Remember your role. Don’t forget that you are a sales professional and not some hot-headed kid. Your role must include listener, solution-provider and partner. You’re there to understand the prospect’s problems and requirements so you can propose the right solution as a valued business partner. Focusing on this will help you keep a more even keel when confronted with emotional situations.

2. Pause before speaking. Count to ten, go to your happy place, or do whatever you have to do to give yourself a few seconds to think before speaking. When someone does or says something that angers you, you cannot afford to react without thinking. You’ll end up encouraging an argument or debate and behaving in an unprofessional manner. Take your time responding by first thinking about what was said, what he might have actually meant, your role (see previous point), and how to remove the emotion from what was said or done. This will help keep your temper from rising and allow you to respond more maturely and professionally.

3. The customer’s always right, sort of. I don’t believe that the customer is always right. I do believe that the customer is always right in his mind. This simple truth can help you keep things in perspective by realizing that, although the customer is being unreasonable or discourteous, he may believe that he is right in his mind. We all need to respect other people’s opinions, even if we don’t agree with them. If someone is behaving in a way that you don’t like or agree with, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong in their mind. Likewise, your customer may feel the same way about you and your opinion. Keep things in perspective by remembering to respect other people’s opinions and feelings, however wrong they may seem.

4. Earn respect. We all want to be respected, but we also have to remember that we need to earn respect in order to be respected. You earn respect by acting as a professional, building trust with your customer and being a good listener. If you behave like the same kind of jerk as your customer, then you’ll be treated the same way. Take the high-road and earn respect, regardless of how you are treated. You may still not win the sale, but you’ll feel much better about yourself at the end of the day.

5. Be Patient. Selling takes patience. When someone is trying your patience by being nasty or rude, it makes selling even more challenging. Each action you take in the sales process requires a level of patience that people outside of sales may not fully appreciate. When a prospect is doing things that could make you angry, that makes it even more important to exercise patience. It’s tempting to say, “Hey! I don’t need this crap. Take it or leave it.” Obviously, you can’t actually say this. Instead you have to be patient and tolerant to get through these rough spots and pursue your goal.

6. Play the game. Realize that your prospect may just be testing you to see if he can frustrate you enough to give him more concessions than he is entitled. So play the game too. This is part of the negotiating phase and your ability to negotiate successfully will be fully tested with this type of prospect. You should always negotiate from a win-win position. However, your prospect may only care about himself or his company and may try for a win-lose scenario, where it’s he that wins at your expense. By understanding that this may be the case and being patient (see previous tip), you can play the game and reposition him for a win-win negotiation.

7. Different strokes. Everyone is different. That’s what makes the world such an interesting place. Different personality types make selling even more interesting, and I believe more fun. Your perspective on a situation, as well as how to handle it, may very well be different from your customer’s. Adapt to his style but, as mentioned previously, don’t resort to the same negative and unprofessional behavior. Simply remember that he thinks and behaves differently and that’s his style while remaining professional and courteous without showing anger.

In the heat of the moment it is very easy to lose one’s temper and show anger. In sales, as well as sports, this can prove to be fatal. Practice controlling your emotions and temper so that you maintain a professional and mannerly style in everything you do.

Good luck and good selling!”