He took a small-town newspaper and turned it into a billion dollar operation, gaining control of the information flow to nearly half the world in the process. He is loved by some, hated by many and even feared, but the power that Rupert Murdoch has in this world is undeniable. By thinking beyond national boundaries and embracing the opportunities presented in new technologies, Murdoch has created the first truly global media empire.

Murdoch’s success was never a sure thing. He was considered a lazy alcoholic with a penchant for nothing but partying. How did he turn his reputation around and become one of the most well known, albeit controversial media moguls in the world today?

“For better or for worse, our company (The News Corporation Ltd.) is a reflection of my thinking, my character, my values. News… communicating news and ideas, I guess.. is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read and alternative television channels.

In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

I try to keep in touch with the details… I also look at the product daily. That doesn’t mean you interfere, but it’s important occasionally to show the ability to be involved. It shows you understand what’s happening.

I’m a catalyst for change … You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place. The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow. 

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard. You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy and lost contact with the readers or the viewers.

We have no intention of failing. The only question is how great a success we’ll have. You can’t build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own. The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks.”

For this week’s edition of Entrepreneur University we tapped Business Coach Melanie Benson Strick. Melanie is the Entrepreneur’s Success Coach and she teaches entrepreneurs how to stop feeling overwhelmed so they can create more money and more freedom.

Melanie discusses the 6 common mistakes entrepreneurs make and how to avoid them:

“Have you ever felt like you were running a rat race? Everything seems like it takes forever, costs 10 times as much as you expected and you still feel like you are a million miles away from achieving your financial goals?

That’s because people often approach their financial growth with the wrong strategies. You may have heard the saying, “The strategy you used to create your million is drastically different than the strategy to maintain it.” It’s the same thing here. The strategy you used to get started is drastically different than the one you need to grow consistent six and seven figure revenue.

Here are six of the common mistakes entrepreneurs make when trying to grow their bottom line.

Mistake #1: Setting unrealistic expectations. I conducted a workshop where one of the students shared she planned to create $500,000 in new revenue in the next 12 months. She was barely making $50,000 and was launching a brand new business. This plan seemed unrealistic to me. Unrealistic expectations are different than setting ‘stretch goals.’ When you are unrealistic, you will often over spend and under perform because you believe you have everything on track for a huge leap in income.

Mistake #2: Focusing on price versus payoff. This being so focused on what everything will cost you that you miss the opportunities that will allow you to leap forward. The saying, “It costs money to make money” means that when you invest in high payoff opportunities, you will leap forward. Many people who are stuck financially don’t have the financial resources to invest in the tactics that would actually position them for a huge windfall.

Mistake #3: Making short-term decisions that sabotage the long term goal. I once knew someone who would say yes to any opportunity that crossed his desk if it meant he might make a couple thousand dollars. The problem was that most of these opportunities took a lot of his personal time, time he wasn’t spending on his own goals. This man couldn’t understand why his own programs weren’t profitable – when he spent up to 50% of his time on short term opportunities at the expense of his long term, more profitable projects.

Mistake #4: Trying to keep up with the “Jones.” Just because your competitor is experiencing huge financial wins with their strategies doesn’t mean it will work for you. It’s dangerous to just watch what others do and try to replicate it without understanding the entire strategy. A carefully crafted growth strategy will have many steps – you can probably see only one part of it. This mistake can be very costly because you invest your time and money “following the Jones” strategy only to experience a flop because you invested in only one piece of the whole puzzle.

Mistake #5: Doing everything themselves. I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs find themselves in a growth trap because they won’t build a team. If it is just you, then you can only accomplish what you have time to accomplish. When you build a team, you can leverage your time exponentially. Think of it as a way to finally clone yourself. Delegating and outsourcing is one of the fastest ways to grow your results and your bottom line.

Mistake #6: Sacrificing quality for revenue growth. This is absolutely one of my big pet peeves. And I know it’s the opposite of what many gurus teach. But here is the deal. If you are so focused on growing your bottom line that you sacrifice the quality or experience of a client along the way, you will impact your future revenue opportunities. Unhappy clients don’t come back. And usually they tell A LOT OF PEOPLE along the way.

If you are making one of these mistakes, what should you do? Here are three quick fixes to get you back on the fast track to bottom line bliss.

1. Know your high payoff opportunities. Typically they are based on your values, priorities and goals. If you need help with this step, check out the Unstoppable Goals Method.

2. Slow down and evaluate the real profit story. Just because it looks good doesn’t mean its profitable and a good use of your time. Create a cost analysis for your opportunities. Look at things like: when will it make me money, how much money and time will it take, what are my “hidden” costs, etc.

3. Respond, don’t react. Opportunities will always come at you. If you have a strategic plan mapped out, you will be able to take action on the right ones. Without a plan, you are just reacting to “Bright Shiny Objects™.” Successful people create and follow a strategic plan.”

Here is a great young entrepreneur success story that will inspire you to get your own business going! Meet Artin Afsharjavan.

When Artin was 13 years old he received $100 as a birthday gift and decided to put it towards starting his first business. He used the money to get into the soft drink vending machine industry. $20 was used for his first month’s lease payment and $80 was used to buy the drinks.

The business took off and six years later the serial entrepreneur owns an investment company, a fine dining Persian restaurant, a limousine company, apartment buildings in Virginia, and gas stations in Florida.

He graduated from high school when he was 16 and was one of the first advertisers on Google Adwords. He has also started other companies, some of which he has sold including an online marketing company that he sold to a private investor in 2004.

Not resting on his laurels, Artin still finds the time to improve his education and is taking his degree in corporate finance from John Hopkins university.

Not bad for a 19 year old entrepreneur!

His next step is trying to buy Moby Dick’s House of Kabob, a quick service chain with 13 locations. He has offered $8 million in cash for the chain and has plans to expand it across the eastern United States.

‘‘Moby Dick’s current owners have done a good job, establishing a fantastic brand and growing the chain to its present size. With our capital resources and their management, we can expand rapidly.”

Moby Dick’s, meanwhile, has no intention of selling. According to owner Mike Daryoush: ‘‘We are doing great and plan to open our 14th restaurant [this] week. That one will be in Virginia. We also have an expansion plan in this area beyond that.”

Who knows if this deal will work out but I wouldn’t rule Artin out!

Today I’m going to continue my series on onsite SEO factors. If you haven’t been following the series you can check out the first five posts here:

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 1 - The Document Title

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 2 - Meta Tags

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 3 - Body Text

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 4 - URLs

The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 5 - Headline Text

Our topic today is link text. Link text, also known as anchor text, is the text that is underlined in blue on a link. For example, in the link above, the link text is “The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 5 - Headline Text”.

Link text is important because if you are going to use the text in the link itself then the content of the page that follows is likely to be highly relevant to the text you used. Therefore Google sees that link text as being extremely valuable and will take it into consideration when ranking your site.

Many website owners make the mistake of using the link text “Click here” or “Learn more”. While it may be a useful method to get people to click through on the link, it won’t help you with your rankings. Chances are you are never going to rank for “Click here” or “Learn more” and even if you did, they aren’t keywords that will drive qualified traffic to your website.

You therefore always want to put your keywords in the link text of all internal links that point to other pages on your site. Make sure that the keywords are actually relevant to the page that you are linking to or the linking benefit won’t help.

You should also make sure to check the people who are linking in to your website from their own. Are they using “Click here” or “Learn more”? Are they just using your domain name which you already rank #1 for?

Ask website owners to use keywords in their link text to help you get higher ranking positions in Google. I would also suggest that you have them come up with what they believe are descriptive keywords for your site to use in the link text. If you get too many links to your site with the exact same link text then you can actually be penalized and dropped from the index for that keyword.

If, instead, webmasters are using their own descriptive keywords then you will have the variety needed to get the positive link text exposure and not get penalized by Google.

Fortune recently put out their list of the top 25 most powerful business people. Some are household brands while others you may know their companies but not their names. The top 5 are:

Chairman and CEO, Apple

During the first two decades of his remarkable 30-year career, the Apple Inc. founder twice altered the direction of the computer industry. In 1977 the Apple II kicked off the PC era, and the graphical user interface launched by Macintosh in 1984 has been aped by every other computer since. Along the way Jobs conceived of “desktop publishing,” gave the world the laser printer, and pioneered personal computer networks. As a side gig he bankrolled Pixar, which fostered the development of the technology and a brand-new business model for creating computer-animated feature films.

Chairman and CEO, News Corp.

News Corp. is a global force across the board - film, television, print, and even online (it owns the social networking site MySpace).

Murdoch wanted more, and he got it with the $5 billion acquisition of Dow Jones. It was the crowning achievement of a career that started in 1953 when he inherited control of two Australian newspapers. Murdoch expanded to Britain in the 1960s, the U.S. in the ’70s, and Asia in the 1990s. In Britain he owns the biggest tabloid, the Sun, and in the U.S. the New York Post and his Fox News Network are known for their take-no-prisoners attitude.

Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs

Wall Street firms are taking multibillion-dollar write-offs. Titans of finance are losing their jobs. But through it all, Goldman Sachs keeps making money. The i-bank reported stellar third-quarter results: Earnings per share almost doubled from the prior year, and return on equity was 36.6%.

CEO; President, Products; President, Technology; Google

The ambitions of Brin and Page, Google’s 34-year-old founders, are pretty much boundless. Sure, they’ve already revolutionized - okay, massively disrupted - the advertising industry. But the billionaires aren’t stopping there. They’ve set their sights on altering how mobile telephones work, fixing climate change, utterly redefining the very nature of work, that sort of thing.

Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

Of course it matters that Buffett has built Berkshire Hathaway into a massive holding company with interests ranging from underwear to private jets (2006 revenues: $98 billion). Of course it’s impressive that since 1965, Berkshire has performed more than twice as well as the S&P 500. Of course it’s amazing that Buffett has made millions from something as toxic as Enron bonds. And of course it is somehow unsurprising that he managed to help broker a deal between A-Rod and the New York Yankees.

Rounding out the list are:

The man who had one of the most fertile imaginations in history, who managed to turn his musings into a billion dollar company and whose legacy would continue to live on for decades after his death, was born Walter Elias Disney on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois.

The family quickly moved from the increasingly dangerous city of Chicago to Marceline, Missouri, where they purchased a farm.

Because he was too young to work, Disney spent most of his time on the farm playing with his four siblings and the animals. He would later reflect on this period as the best years of his life.

He created the world’s first multimedia empire and he did it by making people smile. An entrepreneur with a natural flair for animation, Disney became one of the world’s most well-known and respected entertainers, creating a company that continues to gross over $30 billion yearly.

What was the secret behind the magic?

“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. And one thing it takes to accomplish something is courage.

Somehow I can’t believe there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C’s. They are Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, and Constancy and the greatest of these is Confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.

When we consider a project, we really study it–not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.

Biggest problem? Well, I’d say it’s been my biggest problem all my life. MONEY. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true. From the very start it was a problem. Getting the money to open Disneyland. About seventeen million it took. And we had everything mortgaged including my personal insurance.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. If you can dream it, you can do it.”

This week’s Entrepreneur University comes courtesy of Eva Gregory. Eva is the International Coach of the Year 2006, “America’s Feel Good Coach”, speaker and author of The Feel Good Guide To Prosperity. She shares with us her tips on how to live an inspired life and not a tired one:

“Do you feel like you are just going through the motions and nothing you truly want in life is coming to fruition? Do you feel tired and drained more often than not? Are there things you know you have to get done, but you are lacking the motivation to do them? How about changing things around so that they become “inspired actions”, and not “required actions”?

One definition of inspire is “to exert an animating, enlivening or exalted influence upon”. Even the definition sounds fun, does it not? I will go one further and say that it is also powerful and empowering. I call it powerful because it can create a great deal of positive energy, and empowering because you will gain control back over a situation. Can you image finding joy in everything, having life be lively and exciting on a regular basis? Inspired actions are those that you get so excited about that wild horses could not stop you from doing them and will usually flow effortlessly and quickly. Believe me, it IS possible.

How does one become inspired and create a world of inspired actions? It goes back to setting your intentions for what you want, visualizing it, getting into the feeling place “as if” it has happened exactly the way you want it and let the inspired action “come to you”. Cool, huh? Sounds easy? It is. But if you get stuck, you can work backwards by focusing on what motivates you to complete your project. Is it your family, having free time to play, or perhaps just the satisfaction of having everything checked off of your “to do” list? Better yet, write down your tasks and your motivations. Things seem to become more concrete, more “real” when they are written down. These tools will help you turn a project or task into something that provides you with major inspiration. Just like Jack.

Jack was in the process of writing what he termed his “great American novel.” In fact, he had been in the process for four years and despite what he told his friends and family, he was not feeling very inspired. His novel had become the joke amongst his friends and the proverbial albatross around his neck. When Jack decided to set his intentions and visualize the outcome, he had a difficult time doing this. He realized that he could not get into his feeling place because the story he was writing did not fuel his passion. He could not even visualize himself completing this book. His writing had taken a wrong turn, and instead of backing up or starting over, he had felt compelled to continue because of the expectations of others. Jack was so surprised and energized by this realization that he immediately started outlining the book he wanted to write. Writing had become an inspired action and Jack did not feel like it was a required one.

So, what are you waiting for? There is NO time like the present. Find a little quiet, turn on your favorite music, light a candle, and get busy setting those intentions to create inspired actions. Remember, inspired actions will make you feel alive; before, due to the planning and anticipation, during, as you will be relishing actually putting your desires to action, and after, when you are remembering the task and your feelings while it was being done. So, get out your pen and paper and get busy. The time has come to be inspired, not tired!”

Congratulations to YoungEntrepreneur.com co-founder for being mentioned in a recent BusinessWeek article, Globalization, Small Biz-Style.

Some of Adam’s quotes are:

“Over the last nine years, we have had the opportunity to witness extremely strong growth of entrepreneurial members from all over the world. Within the last couple of years, we have noticed more and more members networking within the YoungEntrepreneur.com community from less developed nations.”

“Web experts and designers from less developed nations have created small yet rapidly growing businesses that assist small- to medium-size businesses with their Web site design, coding, illustrations, and even live technical support. It really seems as though the Internet is starting to bring all continents, races, cities, and villages together into a global network of trade and communications.”

Congratulations Adam and keep up the great work!

Well the results are in from our poll last week on why young entrepreneurs decide to go into business for themselves.

The most popular answer, with over 82% of the votes was “To see your dream come true.”

Tied for second with almost 53% of the votes were “To be your own boss” and “To do what interests you.”

Rounding out the top five were “To make more money” with 47% of the votes and “To be creative” with 29% of the votes.

The least popular answers were “To set your own deadlines” (17%), “It’s easy to startup” (17%), “To learn new skills” (11%), “To have a second career” (5%), and “To cut the commute” (5%).

The YE Blog Poll will be a regular series in the coming months to explore how young entrepreneurs feel on a variety of topics.

For our next YE Blog Poll we’re interested to learn who you think are the top celebrity entrepreneurs? To cast your vote, click here.