It’s time for another SEO Advice post! Last week, I offered free SEO advice to Technogumption. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Michelle A Davis from All You Need Business Services.

All You Need Business Services - www.yourbusinessservices.com

Hello Evan,

I am not sure if you are still giving this advice for SEO, but I am in need of help! I just don’t have the funds to pay someone to assist me but know that if my website was up to the correct standards I could bring in money effectively through my site. Hopefully you are still giving advice!

Best Regards,
Michelle A. Davis

My Recommendations

1) Pick a different primary keyword

Virtual Assistant seems to be the primary keyword that you are targeting as you’ve listed it multiple times on your homepage and bolded it. You’ve done a great job in writing relevant content and not just keyword stuffing but virtual assistant is just too competitive a keyword for you to rank with. Using Google’s Keyword Tool you can see how competitive certain terms are. Virtual Assistant is maxed out on competitiveness so you might want to consider a less competitive key phrase such as online secretary, online administrative assistant, or virtual business assistant. They don’t get as many searches but you stand a much better chance of ranking for those keywords.

2) SEO consistency, 300 words

Each page you create should be consistent in the keyword you are trying to rank for. As an example, you use Virtual Assistant multiple times in the text on the home page but you don’t have it in your title tag or have an H1 tag with it. You should also make sure that each page has 300 words of text on it or more. It’s harder to rank in Google if you don’t have enough text on your pages.

3) SpyFu recommendations

A SpyFu analysis revealed that the top competitors for the key phrase “Virtual assistant” include the International Virtual Assistants Association, Wikipedia, Entrepreneur.com, Monster.com, and vadirectory.net. These are all big players that will be difficult to surpass, especially since your site only has a Page Rank of 3. Regardless of which keywords you end up choosing you should also get more links to your site to get that Page Rank higher and increase your chances of rankings.

Good luck Michelle!

Readers, what do you think about yourbusinessservices.com?

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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The Business Pundit recently put out a list of the top 25 visionaries who created empires from virtually nothing. The top 5 were:

1. Henry Ford

It’s tough to think of a man who carried the torch of business further than Henry Ford. Ford became famous for pioneering the assembly line and in the process, becoming the first man to successfully mass produce automobiles. Amazingly, Ford jump started the Ford Motor company with virtually none of his own money. As ‘Venture Capital Sources’ explains, Ford “raised a nominal sum of money from friends for initial working capital purposes. He then proceeded to cleverly negotiate deals with his suppliers that let him purchase parts on credit. This in turn motivated him to sell his cars quickly - at a profit - so as to repay his suppliers. After years of diligently reinvesting those profits back into the business, Ford Motor was an industrial giant - and its creator was forever immortalized as a business legend.

2. John Rockefeller

John Rockefeller is the business titan behind Standard Oil. After scratching and scrimping to buy his first oil refinery in 1862, he was already a dominant force in the industry by the 1870’s. From there, he almost single-handedly revolutionized the mass market for oil. By offering discounts to the railroads that carried his oil cross-country, Rockefeller was able to, in turn, sell it to customers for low prices that were previously unheard of. This helped establish Rockefeller’s legacy as one of America’s earliest business heroes, and he is still celebrated for his “ability to refine crude oil to produce kerosene and other products better, cheaper, and in greater quantity than anyone thought possible.”

3. Andrew Carnegie

Often referred to as the “king of steel”, Andrew Carnegie did for steel what John Rockefeller did for oil. His work in founding and operating U.S. Steel has earned him the reputation as the second wealthiest man in history. But long before that, Carnegie set to work as a lowly telegrapher in the 1850’s. By the 1860’s, his investments in railroads, bridges, and oil derricks (combined with a lucrative side job as a bond salesman. propelled him to build U.S. Steel into an enduring empire. In the 1890’s, after much work and toil, Carnegie’s was the “largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world.” By the time he sold his company to J.P. Morgan in 1901, Carnegie was ready for a much-deserved retirement filled with generous philanthropy and charitable giving.

4. Thomas Edison

While Thomas Edison is best known for inventing the modern electric lightbulb in 1878, he was one of the fathers of the modern electrical grid (Nikola Tesla was the other). The impact of this innovation has been staggering. Prior to the electrical grid, the only available lighting was sunlight during the day and gas-powered lamps at night. In 1882, however, Edison took the world by storm, introducing one of the first commercial electric grids in the world. As the Objective Standard observes, “within fifty years of Edison introducing the electric grid, gas light was all but forgotten, and electricity emerged as the power source for the masses.” Like Andrew Carnegie, Edison got his start as a telegraph operator, gradually working his way up to more rewarding and personally satisfying projects.

5. Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is one of only two living men who can truthfully boast a larger fortune than Bill Gates. (In fact, the two are now teaming up on the largest charitable giving project in history.. He generated his larger-than-life $60 billion net worth by becoming one of Wall Street’s sharpest and most successful investors. His secret, as William Grieder writes in his book “The Soul of Capitalism” is that Buffet “stays close to his capital.” That is, he will not invest unless he personally meets with the top executives and completely buys into their business strategy. This simple yet proven philosophy has served Buffet well, propelling him to previously unimaginable heights of wealth creation.

What about the remaining 20? Here is how the list finished off:

6. Sam Walton

7. Oprah

8. Lewis Ranieri

9. Michael Milken

10. Bill Gates

11. Steve Jobs

12. Steve Wozniak

13. William Hewlett and David Packard

14. Sergey Brin/Larry Page

15. Jerry Yang and David Filo

16. Niklas Zennström

17. Mark Zuckerberg

18. David Beckham

19. Alex Rodriguez

20. Tiger Woods

21. Scott Boras

22. Mark Cuban

23. Eddie Van Halen

24. Madonna

25. Ayn Rand

What do you think of the list? Who would be on your top 5 list?

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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For the first 39 years of his life, few people ever thought that Leon Leonwood Bean would amount to much. He floated from one undistinguished job to the next, and had little in the way of formal education.

Instead, Bean was a young man happy to retreat to the woods, whiling away his time hunting and trapping instead of reading books. But it was Bean’s love of nature that would eventually become what is today a thriving multimillion dollar business.

Named one of the Wall Street Journals Top Ten Entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Bean turned his passion into the internationally successful outdoor clothing and equipment company L.L. Bean.

When Bean died in 1967, the executives at the company he had founded were not sure if they should publicize his death. Bean’s attachment to the company was such that most customers believed he himself still personally tested each product and tended to each of their orders.

His successors feared that if people knew he was gone, that perception would be eroded and the company would lose ground. They considered keeping his death a secret, until a television news show got wind and broke the story. That was the importance that Bean, at 94, still had on his company.

But just how did this outdoorsman create one of the most successful and innovative mail-order catalogue companies of his time?

Outside of your gun, nothing is so important to your outfit as your foot-wear. You cannot expect success hunting deer or moose if your feet are not properly dressed.  

We consider our customers a part of our organization, and we want them to feel free to make any criticism they see fit in regard to our merchandise or service. A customer is the most important person ever in this office – in person or by mail. We have thrown away the keys to this place.

Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they will always come back for more. Above all, we wish to avoid having a dissatisfied customer.“

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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This week’s Entrepreneur University comes thanks to Dixie Schmatz. Dixie Schmatz is President and Co-Founder of Notyak - Gateway to Greener Living found on the web at www.notyak.com. Dixie is an expert on how you can improve your business while being environmentally friendly at the same time. Today she shares her tips on how to save money by reducing your energy consumption:

“In your business you have specific places you can cut energy use. Some of these may not be seriously noticed and others may mean a big shift in business practices.

o Heating and air conditioning may be an easy place to start. Did you know that according to the EPA if you turn your heat down 1 degree in the winter you can reduce the amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere by 46 pounds/year? If you turn your air conditioner up by 1 degree you save 55 pounds/year. The amount of cost savings is hard to gauge depending on your location but every little bit helps. A good investment might be an automatic thermostat so energy use can be significantly reduced when your business is not active. For many businesses this is an easy place to save some money.

Other energy savings may require creativity or investment.

o If you make deliveries, maybe some mapping software could help you lay out better routes and in the end save more than the software cost – plus reduce your carbon footprint.

o If possible, you may decide to reduce office or cubicle size, or increase the number of customers you can serve per area so that you can get more productivity for the amount of space you have to heat or cool.

o You may need to replace some of your equipment so it is more energy efficient. If several of your employees have their own small refrigerator, it might cost less to get one larger one with a good Energy Star rating.

o You may want to turn equipment off or down during unused times. Computers should go into sleep mode if not actually turn off when your business is closed.

o Some businesses are actually changing their hours so they are not open as late at night. Others are turning off the lights they used to use for advertising while the store was closed.

The good news for the environment is whatever you can do to save energy reduces the CO2 put into the atmosphere and saves you money as well.”

How have you saved money and helped the environment with your business?

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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David Hauser - GotVMail Communications - www.gotvmail.com

Blog: davidhauser.com/MINDdrift
Title: Co-founder & CTO
Industry: Telecomunications
Type of company: The Entrepreneur’s Phone System
Year founded: 2003
Location: Needham, MA / Austin, TX
Number of employees: 45

1. What is the startup story behind gotvmail.com?

As entrepreneurs we started the company to fill a need that we had at other start-ups. A professional image and enhanced productivity.

2. What is your definition of success and has your company achieved it?

Empowering entrepreneurs to succeed every day

3. To what do you attribute your company’s recent achievements?

The amazing people that we have here who embody our core values every day

4. How important have good employees and team members been to your success?

The most important thing for sure. You have to hire the smartest and best people, setup them up to succeed and do everything you can to get out of their way.

5. Where did your organizations funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it?

We have self funded everything and been profitable since our 2nd month of operations

6. What stops you from throwing in the towel and giving up during those frustrating days of running your business?

The sense of accomplishment in helping entrepreneurs every day

7. Do you believe there is some sort of pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur?

Passion, the idea does not matter, the technology does not matter, you have to have passion for whatever it is and put everything you can plus some into it.

8. What book has inspired you the most?

Good to Great is an excellent book and not just a business book. Also the Alchemist which has nothing to do with business and all about passion and dreams

9. How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?

We do a lot of online marketing Google, Yahoo, etc. Also more traditional mediums such as print, radio and TV. Branding is very important as well and has helped push us to the next level and will continue to do so.

10. In one word, characterize your life as an entrepreneur.

Exhilarating

11. Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?

Google

12. How do you achieve balance in your life? Or do you?

This is very difficult and I am sure those around me have a different view. As an entrepreneur there is no off time but you have the flexibility to change your time and schedules as needed. Also personal health is critical and the best change I made in the past year has been going to personal training at least twice a week in the mornings.

13. Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 years? 10 years?

GotVMail will be serving entrepreneurs with the services and products they need to succeed.

14. What’s your exit strategy?

None at this time

15. If we could introduce you to anyone, who would it be and why? (you never know who we know!)

CEO of Rackspace or Richard Branson

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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We’ve decided to change around our Entrepreneur Poll this month for the Young Entrepreneur blog. Every handyman has a set of tools that he uses to go to work. And just like a good handyman, every entrepreneur should also have a set of tools to help make work a little easier.

We would like to know what’s in your toolbox? It is a particular book that you read? A business plan template? A search engine optimization resource? A CRM tool? A new productivity software release?

What are the tools that you just can’t live without in your business! We’re hoping to put together a top 10 list of the best tools for young entrepreneurs so please share your ideas and help the rest of the community!

Looking forward to your replies! You can vote by replying in the Young Entrepreneur forum entry that we have created here.

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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After a series of posts discussing strategies from SES Toronto 2008, I’m now turning the attention back to you for the Internet Marketing posts with more SEO Advice! In May, I offered free SEO advice to Boycott Software Sweatshops. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Tom from Technogumption.

Technogumption - http://www.technogumption.com/

Hey Evan,
The community consulting concept is a great idea. I would love for my site http://www.technogumption.com to be featured.

Thanks,
Tom Beaton.

My Recommendations

1) Homepage Title Tag

Your homepage has a Page Rank of 4 and will have the best chance of ranking in Google for important keywords. Your title tag, however, for the homepage simply reads “Technogumption”. Technogumption is not a popular keyword (at least not yet!) and you’ll already rank at the top because you own Technogumption.com. You should put some of your important keywords up in this title tag to help drive Google traffic.

2) Posting Frequency

I see that you posted from January until April of this year and then stopped. What happened? If you want people to subscribe to your blog and Google to come back often you need to continue to post new information. Posting fatigue can easily set in for new bloggers. You don’t need to post almost every day (as you were doing when you first launched it) but you should identify a posting schedule that you can stick to and then… stick to it! Even if you’re just posting once per week you can build your blog credibility and not feel overwhelmed by the time commitment to the blog.

3) SpyFu recommendations

I put Technogumption.com into SpyFu but they couldn’t find your domain yet however the search was logged and will most likely be included in the next data set.

Good luck Tom!

Readers, what do you think about Technogumption.com?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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Andrew Chen writes a great blog on viral marketing and recently came up with a list of the top ways to ruthlessly acquire users (customers online). The top 5 were:

#1 - Email/IM features for invites and content

It’s obvious that you need to make it very easy to share content, invites, and other things for your site. So anything that might be an e-mailable article or detail page, put an “Email this to a friend” link there. Same for invites. And don’t have it just be e-mail, remember that lots of people use IM and you can use “aim:goIM” as a prefix to make it easy to send it to a AIM buddy.

#2 - Blog/MySpace widgets

Another super obvious feature is to widgetize the most core content on the site, and allow people to embed it into their blogs. They might do that because your site is solving something they want for their site (music-sharing/chat/slideshows), but it might also be something to help them make the site more sticky or content-rich (popular links, interesting news, etc.)

#3 - Auto-invite for email, social networks, etc

This is not new, but requires a bit more work. In the case of Flixster, after you sign in, it recognizes that you’re a hotmail.com or gmail.com or whatever user, and asks you for a username/password for that e-mail service. If you agree, it’ll go through and invite users from your address book and folks you’ve corresponded with. Annoying, but a great way to blast several hundred people all at once.

#4 - Auto-embed for blog widgets

Same for blog widgets - why trust users to copy and paste when you can get their MySpace credentials, save them, and make it a 1-click experience to add your widget to their spaces?

#5 - A/B tested signup pages

Using one headline versus another can create a 5x difference in signup percentages. If you want to make sure you’re not using a bad one, make sure you A/B test your signup pages. Try different value propositions - focus on Free versus Sharing versus MySpace versus whatever Web 2.0 proposition you have. Try them out, and keep a hidden field in the signup on the source. Then track them over time to see what works.

In fact, before you even launch your product, you can build a landing page through something like Survey Monkey. Then, drive traffic to it, and see how people respond to differences in layout, headlines, copy, and others.

Offermatica is the king of this kind of stuff. If someone would like to build a long-tail version of this used by bloggers and such, that’d be a great business.

Rounding out the top 10 were:

#6 - Smart adwords buying

#7 - Viral referrals

#8 - SEO/landing page generation

#9 - Push through RSS/Email, etc.

#10 - Reduce user “drag” through the entire funnel

How many of these methods have you tried? What has your success rate been?

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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It seems to be almost impossible to talk about entrepreneurship and not, at some point, come across Bill Gates’ story. He’s the world’s third richest man with an estimated network of $58 billion - not bad for a university dropout.

We’ve featured him a number of times on the YE blog:

• Jared and Vicky want to meet him
• He was voted our #3 top celebrity entrepreneur
• He was mentioned in our Top 10 Movies for Entrepreneurs
• He was #7 on the Top 25 Most Powerful People in Business
• He’s Warren Buffet’s friend
• He’s a role model for entrepreneurs
• His hindsight is 20/20
• And he was the second youngest founder of a company that “made it”

Today I thought I would delve deeper into the Bill Gates story and share some of his advice on the importance of “Never Stop Learning”

“Every now and then I like to pick up a copy of Time magazine and read every article from beginning to end, not just the articles that interest me most,” says Gates. “That way you can be certain to learn something you didn’t know previously.”

Learning is an essential ingredient of any successful business. As soon as you close your mind to the possibility of another reality, you are closing yourself off to other greater opportunities that lie waiting for you. “In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself,” says Gates. “Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.” In order for Microsoft to have maintained its competitive edge for the past three decades, it was crucial for Gates and all his employers to engage in a process of continual learning. For Gates, “‘I don’t know’ had become ‘I don’t know yet.’”

The ability to be open to change and to continue to try and improve oneself and one’s business is crucial to success, according to Gates. “People always fear change,” he says. “People feared electricity when it was invented…there will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear.” If you ignore your surroundings and stop asking questions about how to improve, you will be destined to failure. In the highly competitive world of computer technology, where the likes of Google and Apple are becoming bigger threats to Microsoft, it is not difficult for Gates to stay on his toes.

Many outsiders attribute Gates’ success simply to his high level of intelligence. But for Gates, “Smart is an elusive concept.” Instead, he attributes his success to his desire to never stop learning. “There’s a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts; to ask an insightful question; to relate two domains that may not seem connected at first.” It is this curiosity that Gates tries to inspire in his workers, encouraging them to not only find answers but to ask the right questions.

Gates now spends much of his time devoted to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to researching new innovations concerning health and education on a global scale. In this role, he continues to ask questions about the current state of the world and what he can do to both educate others and help relieve the problems. “Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live?” asks Gates. “If we were aware, we would want to help out, we’d want to get involved.”

For Gates, no matter what you spend your time doing in life, you should never stop asking questions; never stop learning. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a doctor or a software developer, it is only by increasing your understanding of the world around you that you will be able to have a significant impact. This is why Gates can still exclaim today, “I’m excited by the possibilities.” If you never stop learning, you will never stop seeing the possibilities.

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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This week’s Entrepreneur University comes courtesy of Kim Castle. Brand Visioneer and BrandU Co-founder, Kim Castle teaches entrepreneurs and small business owners how to turn their business ideas into a money-making marketable brand. If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank, get started now at www.brandu.com. Kim shares her advice on how you can achieve big brand status as a small company.

“When it comes to creating a business brand, small business owners often feel they can’t do it alone. No surprise. You can’t! Yet throughout school we’re taught that we have to “do it” on our own otherwise we’re “cheating.” This lone ranger approach is the demise of millions of businesses.

I learned the power of leverage early on. My younger sister and I were given the chore of washing and drying the dishes after dinner. Unskilled in enterprise, she and I decided that one night she would do it, the next night I would, and then alternate each night. This arrangement was great…on the night that SHE did the dishes. It was excruciating on the night that I did them. It was long, tedious, and no fun…alone.

After a three long weeks, I proposed to my sister (granted I was 10 and I wasn’t in the habit of making “proposals”) that we should do the dishes together—taking turns who washed and who dried. Despite the customary sibling rivalry that sparks between sisters at age 10 and 7, she too felt the torture of doing the job alone and agreed to try it. You know what? Not only did the job get done faster, and more effectively, those nights of washing, drying, and laughing with my sister are some my fondest memories.

The dictionary defines applying leverage as it applies to people as:

the power over other people, especially something that gives an advantage but is not referred to openly.

Doesn’t sound like a nice thing to do, does it? It’s easy to see why “nice business owners” don’t think of leveraging someone else as a strategy. It sounds win/lose bad.

BUT if you look up leverage as it applies to a task it means:

the mechanical advantage gained by using a lever.

Demonstrations of successful leveraging in business are everywhere—yet they are often hard for entrepreneurs to apply them. Here are four examples of business issues solved by leveraging. See if you can find your situation and benefit from one of them.

• New brand needs fast-tracked reliable expansion OR yoga instructor meets 23-year old aerobic clothing manufacturer—Los Angeles-based yoga instructor Shiva Rae had built a solid fan-base of students throughout her many years of establishing her dedicated approach to yoga. As she became known, it became harder to get into her classes. This demand caused her to create a yoga video so that she could assist more and more people. She furthered her following by writing articles for a top yoga magazine. A logical brand expansion for her would be to go into yoga clothing BUT she was an expert at yoga NOT manufacturing active wear. Enter the Marika Group, a 23-year old company who was on the forefront of aerobic clothing in the early 80’s and…the Shiva Shakti Collection was born.

While aerobics is not “in” anymore, Marika had a successful track record for creating and distributing active wear and could benefit by supplying clothes for the current fitness trend—yoga. Regardless of whether Shiva Rae intentionally went to Marika or the other way around, this is marriage made in commerce heaven.

Learn from this example if you’re figuring out how to expand your business beyond your immediate expertise. Just remember, you have to establish a following FIRST in order for this partnership to work. It has to be a win-win for both companies.

• Successful brand needs a positive way to get back into people’s lives OR domestic diva turns to real estate turned entertainment mogul—Lifestyle queen Martha Stewart lost her crown by her personal dealings in the stock market and went to jail—a public fiasco that would normally break the most successful of the successful. Enter billionaire Donald Trump and his smash hit reality show The Apprentice. In a brilliant use of reality television turned positive PR, each week on national television Martha gets to parade her many brands and make the public fall even harder in love with her as a resilient benevolent. Trump and The Apprentice brand benefit as well because the brand of the show is expanded beyond “the Donald.”

This pairing proves that the strength of a brand can withstand even a jail sentence. Again, it doesn’t matter who came to whom first, what is important that both brands had establish themselves before and gained greater status together.

Learn from this example if you are coming out of a bad decision or back from a many year hiatus. For this leveraged partnership to work, you convert a current weakness while expanding on another’s strength— the power of a win-win in full glory.

• National chain store needs new breath of life OR dinosaur needs a shot in the arm to stay alive—First opened in 1902 as The Golden Rule, 100 years later JCPenney had lost its appeal and was known for cheap clothes and for serving low-income needs. It’s no wonder that towards the end of the decade, it closed many of its national stores and struggled to stay afloat. JCPenney didn’t take the route of developing their own line of products…like Sears’ Kenmore or Costco’s Kirkland; they in relied on lesser known independent labels like St. John’s Bay.

After reaching their 100th year mark the company reorganized, got hip and…got SMART. They entered into partnerships with brand name home designer Chris Madden, and hip fashion design labels Bisou Bisou, and Nicole Miller all of whom developed their own following but had nowhere near the distribution reach that a 100 year-old chain had developed. PLUS, this paring gave these typically pricey high-end brands an entry into a world of volume with low and mid-income households.

Learn from this example if your business has been around for a long time and it needs an infusion of FRESH life. For this leveraged partnership to work, infuse your established history with innovation that has limited access to the marketplace. Another kind of win-win in action And finally,

• Fast growing new company known for empowering entrepreneurs with business branding needs a fast way to complete the tool set for the “whole” of business success OR two dynamic businesses complete the picture for each other—BrandU® was created in 2003 after its parent company successfully served the design and marketing needs of business owners, large and small, since 1991. It was built upon a powerful theory of practical manifestation—Unified Conscious Development (UCD)—and provided easy to implement processes that were changing people’s business lives through brand communication BUT clarity is just a portal to a business’ success.

Successful business also need: business systems, marketing and business plans, target market knowledge, positioning, product development, a deep understanding of all kinds of relationships, the process of making choices, establishing sales, management and money practices, and much more. A practical MBA! Enter the author of The Accidental Millionaire, Stephanie Frank, with a track record of building two multi-million businesses and a full arsenal of practical business strategies and tactics shared through a variety of brands. This powerhouse of information needed a context to build a full range curriculum, which could be fueled by UCD.

Both firms had a long term vision of helping independent business owners worldwide make an impact in their lives and in the lives of their customers. This powerful combination created the Whole Wealth™ Institute and the four-pillar approach to business acceleration. The first non-MBA—MBA made available to anyone in business. This dynamic paring makes for a much bigger business years faster than either business attain could separately.

Learn from this example if you realize your business is only part of the picture and can benefit from adding someone else’s expertise. For this leveraged partnership to work, find a common goal or bond to solve that meets a need in the marketplace.

You see…it doesn’t matter what size business your business is, how long you’ve been in business, or even what your specialty is, you don’t have to build your brand alone. You can:

• Establish a following and look for a win-win

• Convert a current weakness looking to expand another’s strength

• Infuse your established history with innovation helping both partners

• Find a common goal or bond and join together With a solid commitment to building your business piece and inspired leveraged partnerships, you too can create a big brand and experience all the success you can imagine.”

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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