I chose to do this profile because it shows that you can start your business part time while you are in school or have an existing job. You do not have to go full throttle right away to get a company started. Zelly’s Babysitting Service is a tutoring business focusing on children that was founded by Zelma Prentice, a 21 year old entrepreneur. She is currently studying Business Management and has always wanted to start her own business. Rather than waiting to complete the program she launched her business on a part time basis.

“After doing some research, I realized that a lot of parents, especially those working in the hotel industry such as Four Seasons often have to work late into the nights and may not have access to a sitter. A lot of kids are behind in their schoolwork for various reasons, and as an ardent believer in “Education is the key to success” I believe that kids should receive as much help as possible to improve academically.”

Zelma began marketing her service in December of 2006 through the distribution of business cards and fliers at local business events. She landed her first client in February of this year and has not looked back since.

“Now, I’m tutoring three days a week. For a new business I would say that I’m quite successful thus far. I have also been getting calls from persons wanting to know more about my services. So the feedback has been great.”

It just goes to show that with a little old fashioned networking and hard work you can get a business off the ground. As she finishes her education, Zelma will have a great opportunity building for her that she has started on a part time basis rather than waiting to get started.

Her advice for young entrepreneurs?

“From the age of 15, it has always been my dream to be an Entrepreneur. I would encourage young adults to not rely on just having one job; be go-getters. If your passion is fashion, learn how to sew and start your own clothing line; if your passion is cooking, become the most-talked-about Chef. Never underestimate yourself! Let your desire for success be greater than your fear of failure.”

Evan Carmichael

Following my post from yesterday on when an entrepreneur’s peak is, I came across this YouTube video that definitely made me feel old! It is of Anshul Samar, a 13 year old California native who is the CEO of a new company, Elementeo. His product may not be ideally suited for venture capital but he gives a presentation that puts many entrepreneurs to shame.

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD5zs-XJxgs.

What were you doing at 13?

Evan Carmichael

Last week the popular Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag, put together a list of the hottest technology entrepreneurs and how old they were when they started their companies. The result was that most of them were in their 20s. Some venture capitalists are also now suggesting that they will not fund anyone who is over 30 years old and trying to launch a new technology company.

The blog notes that most of the biggest technology success stories have been made by founders who were in their 20s and that the peak age was 26.

Bill Gates was 20 when he started Microsoft. Steve Jobs was 21 when he created Apple with Steve Wozniak (25). The Google guys were both 25 when they launched their business.

The hypothesis is that while older entrepreneurs mail fail less often because of the experience they have gained, they are also less likely to achieve spectacularly positive results.

Having just turned 27 on the weekend am I now over the hill?

Evan Carmichael

The Germany company SISTRIX conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then performed an analysis of the top 100 Google results for each keyword. Now that is a lot of data crunching! They looked at what on site factors were most likely to generate top rankings in Google. The results were as follows:

• Keywords in the title tag are important as well as in the body of the text but title tag keywords carry far more weight
• Keywords in H2-H6 tags can influence your rankings while keywords in H1 tags do not appear to have an effect (a very different view from most SEO experts)
• Keywords in bold or strong tags can positively impact your rankings
• Keywords in image file names and image alt attributes also improved a site’s rankings
• Keywords in the domain name often ranked higher
• Keywords in the file path did not help the rankings of the sites that were analyzed (again, a different view from standard SEO thinking)
• File size does not seem to have an impact on your rankings
• The number of inbound links and PageRank value had a significant impact on rankings (not surprising). They found that the number one result had 4 times as many inbound links as the number 11 result (on to the 2nd page of Google results)

The original report is in Germany but you can check out Google’s translated version.

I would encourage webmasters to test changes out for yourself. You may not be doing some of the above recommendations and it could be a good time to start. Some of the information flies in the face of traditional SEO thinking and I would not jump ship immediately. Try a few combinations out and see what works for you.

Evan Carmichael

I learned about Kari Herman through the Colorado Springs Business Journal (CSBJ). Kari is a 20 year old entrepreneur and owner of Synergy Dance Academy.

Kari went to a prestigious dance school, gained experience in teaching classes, and lined up a roster of clients for her new business. She then ran into a problem that many young business owners face at some point - the business world did not take her seriously.

Despite having clients ready to pay, she could not find a landlord who would treat her like a businesswoman. They all said she was too young and would not succeed. She finally found someone she could work with but had to pay a full 8 months rent in advance to get her location.

Not having the money needed to pay the massive rent payment she turned to traditional lenders who turned her down because did not have a long credit history and few assets to her name.

Like most young entrepreneurs who succeed, Kari had to think outside the box. She turned to 10 of her clients and spoke with their parents to explain the situation. She managed to convince all of them to pay for the lessons of their children one year up front. Kari used the money to secure her location and start her business.

Just three months after writing her business plan Kari was up and running. “I was sanding the wood floors and putting on the finish the night before we opened. I was 20 years old so I could stay up all night,” she said. “In some ways being young worked against me. In other ways it was an advantage because I had a lot of energy and a lot of time to invest.”

Evan Carmichael

This weekend is a Canadian holiday (today included) and yesterday was my birthday. I like to take time every year to think back on my goals and look at what I am working on (in addition to testing out the Wii that I just got). One of the things I have come to realize and try to remind myself of is that your time is your most important asset. If you look at what you do for your business, chances are there are a few tasks that generate most of your income and the rest play a very small role. It is the old 80-20 rule. 20% of the work you are doing generates 80% of your income. So why not focus in on the 20% that brings in the real money?

When I made my list this weekend I was again surprised to see how many “other” tasks have been eating into my time. The plan going forward?

• Outsource more of the work I do not enjoy doing.
• Stop doing many of the tasks that are not bringing in income.
• Ramp up on the activities that are generating the bigger money.
• Run a few tests on new ideas that have strong potential.

The goal of every entrepreneur should be to automate their business so that they can remove themselves from it eventually. The sooner you can get to that point the sooner you can free up your time to do the other things in life that bring meaning to you beyond work. There is a difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. By focusing in on the work that brings you the highest income for your time you can build up your company to support the lifestyle you desire instead of buying yourself a job.

Evan Carmichael

Earlier this month I wrote about Google’s Broken Link Filter and how important it is to make sure all the links on your website work. For internal links I recommended using the GSiteCrawler program and asked my blog readers to suggest a tool to check a site’s external links as I have not yet found a good option to use.

Enter blog reader Dan Chase who recommended trying out Xenu’s link Sleuth. I downloaded it last night and began running a report on my website to see how it works.

The Pros:

• The program is a free download that is easy to install and straightforward to use
• It crawls a website extremely quickly and will find all the links (internal and external) that you are listing
• It validates the links to make sure they exist and gives you a fairly easy to understand report on what is broken
• Unlike the Google Sitemaps tool it not only tells you which links are broken but also tells you on which page the broken link is listed so you can fix the problem
• It found a number of broken external links on my site (including to one of my sponsors - yikes!) that I am now able to fix

The Cons:

• Because the program works so quickly it seems to have trouble accessing pages that do exist on my site. As a result it tells me in the report that I have many internal broken links when they are actually fine
• Note: My case is not the typical one as I have almost 20,000 pages of content on my site that the program has to sift through. Because the program includes internal links it will have to analyze around 500,000 or so links!
• There is an option to only test your internal links but, as far as I can tell, no option to only test your external links (which is what I am looking for) so you end up having to test both your internal and external links

Overall:

• It is a easy to use, valuable tool to test your internal and external links
• My preference for internal links remains to be GSiteCrawler program as I find it much more reliable
• I will likely continue to use Xenu until I can find a tool that gives the option to show only external broken links and can handle the size of my website

Thanks for the suggestion Dan!

Evan Carmichael

Yesterday I had a call with a reporter who was doing an article for the New York Times. The topic was how to make yourself look big. Apperance is important when you are selling your products / services because most people do judge a book by its cover.

Here are some suggestions for you to make yourself look professional and potentially bigger than you actually are:

Create a fantastic website - If you have a great looking website people will assume that you are an established, reputable business. You no longer need to spend the big money on the marketing fliers and brochures as long as you have a fantastic website that you can reference. Spend your money where it counts!

Hire people to work part time - The first person I hired was for one hour per day. As I grew I could afford more hours and I could also tell my customers, partners, media, etc that I had people working for me (I just did not say full time). You do not need to make the leap to full time right away, especially if money is tight, hiring part time can be a great way to get some of the tasks you hate doing done.

Share an office - If you do not have the money to rent an office yourself, share it with another business. If that is not feasible and you need an office to entertain a client, borrow one from a friend. Especially in the B2B businesses, customers will often want to meet with you at your office before making a purchasing decision so you have to look good!

Align yourself with experts - For one of my businesses I contacted all the top people in my industry and asked them to contribute one article for a Guide to Professional Success. I also wrote an article and put it all together into an ebook. I immediately became associated with all of these experts and it was a huge credibility boost for my new business.

Bring in friends - I once did a media interview with a television station in my early years and only had one person working with me at the time. I wanted the place to look busy so I brought in my friends. They dressed up in suits and pretended to work behind me while I was on camera doing the interview.

Have professional business cards - Do not print your own business cards on the tear-away sheets. It makes you look like an amateur and people will not take you seriously. Through companies like VistaPrint you can now get very nice looking business cards for practically nothing. You no longer have an excuse for not having a good business card.

These are just some of the things that I did when I was first getting started to look bigger than I was. I hope the New York Times uses the material from the interview!

Do you have any additional tips that have worked for you?

Evan Carmichael

If you have been following my series on Google Filters you will already have had a good introduction to some of the things Google looks at when deciding on where to rank your website versus your competitors. Today we are going to tackle the Too Many Links Filter.

The Importance of Building Links

As previously discussed, link building is important to any SEO campaign. The more quality websites that link to you the more Google will see you as an authority website and the higher you will rank in their search engine. It should therefore follow that you want to get as many links as you can as quickly as you can to rise in the rankings, right? Well, not exactly. Enter the Too Many Links Filter.

Google’s Too Many Links Filter

Google likes to see that you have created a progression of links to your website. They expect that you will, at the start, have very few links to your site and then continue to grow as your content base grows. This would be a natural progression. If you have a sudden increase where you have too many links created all at once it can set off flags with Google’s system. What’s even worse is if you have many links created at one point in time and then no new ones or very few are created afterwards. This is a good sign that you are trying to game the system and can earn you major deduction points. You could drop significantly in the rankings or be banned altogether.
How To Work Around The Filter

The key to working around this filter is to continue with your link building campaign. If you generated many links in one month make sure that the following month additional ones are created. This is especially important when you are first starting a website and Google does not have a rich history to base your actions on. Any solid SEO campaign should have ongoing link generation as a core component. As you continue to build new quality links each month you will continue to rise in the rankings and will not trigger the Too Many Links Filter.

Happy link building!

Evan Carmichael

Inspired by a post on the YE Forums about a member’s challenges in selecting a business name I thought I would share some tips on how to choose the right name for your company.

Make It Memorable

You have only a few moments to capture someone’s interest before they move on to the next company. Having a name that is memorable will help you stand out from the competition and get your target’s attention.

Make It Easy To Spell

The harder it is for someone to remember your name or spell it the harder it will be for you to land a customer. If they cannot spell your website address, for example, they will not be able to find you.

Tell People What You Do

The easier you make it for people to understand what you do, the more likely they will sign up. For example, Young Entrepreneur is a good title for this webpage because it contains information that would be of value to young entrepreneurs. If the company was called HMC Communications, for example, it would be meaningless to the general public and make it more difficult to attract visitors.

Keep It Short

People like names that are short and sweet. The longer the name is the easier it will be to confuse you with someone else or forget you altogether. A short, descriptive name that stands out will always be your best bet.

Note that there will always be exceptions. You do not have to follow these 4 tips to be successful, it will just make it harder for you to stand out and generate business.

Evan Carmichael