Characteristics Of Entrepreneur

Important Characteristics Every Entrepreneur Must Have

Are you planning to start and run your own business? Do you know the right qualifications and characteristics an entrepreneur must have to succeed? Does your profile match that of a successful entrepreneur? In this article we will explore and discuss the essential characteristics that every entrepreneur must have. There are several important traits and values that are common among successful entrepreneurs. Before you go and start your enterprise, it will be very helpful to think and reflect whether you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. If not, you can also start developing these character traits.

1.  Successful Entrepreneurs are Self-Confident – to succeed in the highly competitive business world, confidence and trust in oneself is an indispensable trait. Self-confidence means trusting your own powers and capabilities. The world of entrepreneurship is not alien to failure and disappointments. To survive in such a cutthroat world, an entrepreneur must have the ability to look within himself and find the drive and persistence to pursue his enterprise. An entrepreneur must have the gumption to face any adversity and tackle any problems that may be encountered in the world of business.

2.  Successful Entrepreneurs are Risk-takers – being an entrepreneur means having the ability to trust your hunches and acting on them. Great business ideas sometimes start as a hunch which enterprising individuals acted upon. There is always the risk of loss in any endeavor, and entrepreneurs have just the right confidence to take calculated risks to achieve their objective.  However, an entrepreneur’s risk-taking does not depend on luck, but on sheer effort and hard work.

3.  Successful Entrepreneurs know the value of money and are careful about their finances – to succeed in any business; an entrepreneur must understand the value of money and the cost of things. Typically, successful entrepreneurs learned how to earn and value money at a young age. Most of them started out by earning loose change as teenagers mowing lawns, doing groceries, babysitting for neighbors, etc.

4.  Successful entrepreneurs have the so-called head for business – many entrepreneurs are gifted with intuition: they know what product or service is going to ‘click’ next. However, this ability does not involve clairvoyance or extra sensory powers of some sort, but rather, keen observation and understanding of what is going on around him. A good entrepreneur is always on the look out for new ideas and new ways to make money.

5.  Successful Entrepreneurs are competitive – the world of business is a very competitive environment. An entrepreneur must be aggressive enough to pursue his goal despite having many rivals and competitors. An entrepreneur must know how to stay ahead of his competitors, either by introducing new ideas and exploring new ventures, all in the spirit of expanding his business.

6.  Successful Entrepreneurs are honorable and have a good work ethic – although it is a fact that the business world is ruthless, but the successful entrepreneur will strive to make every business deal honorable. The mark of a successful entrepreneur lies in a good personal work ethic that ultimately leads to good business practices, excellent reputation and good association with industry peers and business partners.

7.  Successful Entrepreneurs know the importance of leisure time – hard work and determination are very important values every entrepreneur must have. However, a good entrepreneur knows when it’s time to take a step back from all the rigors of business and enjoy some downtime with their family. Besides, we all do need a little relaxation to refresh the body and mind before plunging back into the challenging (and stressful) world of business.

These are just seven of the most important characteristics of an entrepreneur. Of course, the characteristics every entrepreneur must have are not limited to the ones mentioned. Having these characteristics is not a guarantee that an entrepreneur will be successful. But with these characteristics, an entrepreneur has just the right ingredients for success. All one needs to do is to find the right mix of these values, excellent timing, perhaps a bit of luck and, of course, faith in oneself. So, do you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? Go over these characteristics and values mentioned and reflect if you do have these.

Branding and Facebook Ad Success

Branding and Facebook Ad Success

Are you one of those entrepreneurs who is focusing on branding their business or company?  If your answer is "yes", you may want to link your Facebook ad to your Facebook page.

What's that?  Don't have one?  Well. Let's have a look at Facebook pages... and then you can tell me why not. Okay?

A Facebook page provides "a customizable presence for an organization, product, or public personality to join the conversation with Facebook users", according to Facebook. Its main focus is the "stream of content" provided by page administrators.

In other words, create a page for your company or yourself, providing real-time feedback, updates, screen shots and photos. Then give it a strong voice (yours), endowing the page with a definite, deliberate personality - one which you want aligned to your company mission and values. Chances are you will find you've created a powerful connection with your visitors. The content on your page and the feedback from real readers may help convince them to then click on your sales page link or the link to your main site, once your ad appears and people see that yours is a lively, positive page. 

Another thing a page can do is charm potential customers into regular visits - particularly if they know you are going to:

- Provide them with an "insider" peek into your company's heart

- Give them inside information

- Provide them with the latest news about your product or company

- Give them a "reward"; perhaps a special discount link, a game against other fans, or the chance to enter a contest or draw (run the latter two events by Facebook first!)

Regular users are your biggest asset - and a sure sign that you're doing things right.

Beware of "Selling"

One thing that is key to creating a successful, strong Facebook Page: Be honest and up-front with your readers. Avoid anything that even faintly resembles hype or a sales pitch.  

This should be the place they go that makes them feel as if you've let them slip into your private lunchroom, chatting with them like a friend and sharing things you wouldn't share with outsiders. (Your posts will also appear in their News Feed, adding to the feeling of immediacy).

On top of this, Facebook has provided some great features to enhance your readers' experience on your page: Options such as...

- Multi-media functional Wall (you can control what content you allow your fans to post)

- The ability to publish or not publish your posts to your fans' News Feed

- Easy-to-navigate topside horizontal tabs containing Facebook "core" tabs such as Events and Discussion (Which you can enable... or not)

- Status update option

Check Your Stats

But perhaps its most exciting option is allowing you the ability to check your stats on viewer engagement. You'll be able to see stats on comments and news feed use.  (This is provided through their Facebook Insights platform.)

The only real drawback?  Once you've created your page name, it can't be changed or edited. (Everything else on the page can be adjusted).  So make sure you take your time, picking exactly the right name, and putting it in the best category for your ad campaign. (The category also is permanent.)

Go visit your competitors' Facebook pages (and especially the professionally-produced pages of Big Guns like Nike and Coca-Cola) and see what features and elements you like... and what you don't like.

Facebook pages allow you a flexible range of applications you can choose to add... or not.  These include:

- Videos

- Photos

- Events

- Reviews

And if these don't meet your needs, check out the Facebook Applications Directory to uncover further apps that can help enhance your new Facebook page.

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

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Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
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Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element
of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to
improve your link popularity through legitimate methods.
Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of
dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link
popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out,
and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have
increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a
search engines tracks down such a site, that site is
demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search
engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely
above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page
criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in
the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index,
even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh
treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you
should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of
misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you
are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning
website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the
Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about
increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you
must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose
to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites
that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of
artificially boosting their link popularity. They have
actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods."

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be
penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site;
penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the
link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and
double-check, all the links that are active on your links
page to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages
you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way
to do this is to download the Google toolbar at
http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most
pages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented by a
sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the
scale. This is especially important when the scale is
completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages
have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you
may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be
difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose
scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale.
These sites have not been penalized, and their links may
grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that
you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that
at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have
linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to
artificially boost their link popularity is the use of
hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web
pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means
that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you
have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine
ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of
keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding
their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to
any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the
keywords but made them the same color as the background
color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on
a white background. You cannot see these words with the
human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot
them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to
index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it
goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but
search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a
search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the
page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit
overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For
example, if the background color of your page is gray, and
you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider
will only take note of the gray text and assume you are
employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty,
simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color
to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is
called "keyword stuffing." It is important to have your
keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you
can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please
those spiders. A search engine uses what is called
"Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to
artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of
keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search
engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a
keyword before it decides you have overdone it and
penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass
without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your
keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case,
it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword
is "renters insurance," be sure you don't use this phrase
in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so
that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not
repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword
should never appear in more than half the sentences on the
page.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To
those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should
be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when
the server directs a visitor to one page and a search
engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees
is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic,
and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engine
ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything
it needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of the
list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this
act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep
penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that
sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as
prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as
"pagejacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary these
days due to the use of "off page" elements, such as link
popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is
aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure
the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will
put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link
popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent
to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor
your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially
boosting your rankings.

Rahul Patgaonkar
vedpublishing.com

Paid URL Inclusion

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Paid URL Inclusion
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There are many ways to promote your website and one of the
most efficient ways is to use search engines. Search
engines are the first stop for most people trying to find
information, services, and products online. Because of
this, it is essential that your website appears quickly in
search results.

The Internet contains numerous search engines, some of
which offer what is known as "paid inclusion." This means
that you pay the specific search engine an annual fee for
your web page to be included in their index.



Of course, every search engine already has an automated
program commonly called a "spider" that indexes all the web
pages it locates online, and it does this for free. So
whether you pay or not, your web page will eventually be
indexed by all Internet search engines, as long as the
spider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is,
then, how quickly your page is indexed.

A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an
extra spider that is programmed to index the particular
pages that have been paid for. The difference between the
spider that indexes pages for free and the spider that
indexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid for
inclusion, the additional search engine spider will index
your page immediately.

The debate over paid URL inclusion centers around the
annual fee. Since the regular spider of these search
engines would eventually get around to indexing your web
page anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary? The fee is
necessary to keep your pages in the search engine's index.
If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be aware
that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines,
your page will be removed from their index for a certain
amount of time.

It's easy to get confused about whether you would benefit
from paid inclusion since the spider of any search engine
will eventually index your page without the additional
cost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paid
URL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros and
cons that you will be able to decide whether to spring for
the extra cash or not.

The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid
re-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will be
indexed quickly and added to search results in a very short
time after you have paid the fee. The time difference
between when the regular spider will index your pages and
when the paid spider will is a matter of months. The spider
for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or
two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your
pages, the regular spider will never locate them at all.

Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your
pages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is
that you can update your pages constantly to improve the
ranking in which they appear in search engines, and the
paid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matter
of days.

First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten
page website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from
$170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have to
pay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the cost
factor is will depend on your company.

Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the
limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search
engines, Google, Yahoo, and AOL, do not offer paid URL
inclusion. That means that the search engines you choose to
pay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of the
traffic to your site on a daily basis.

Google usually updates its index every month, and there is
no way you can speed up this process. You will have to wait
for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how
many other search engines you have paid to update their
index daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updates
their index that your pages will show up in Google, Yahoo,
or AOL results.

One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good
deal for your company is to consider some common factors.
First, find out if search engines have already indexed your
pages. To do this, you may have to enter a number of
different keywords, but the quickest way to find out is to
enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear when
you enter the URL address but do not appear when you enter
keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This
is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked
by the regular spider. If this is the case, your money
would be better spent by updating your pages to improve
your ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this,
you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want to
speed up the time it will take for the regular spider to
revisit your pages.

The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid
URL inclusion is to decide if it's a good investment. To
figure this out, you have to look at the overall picture:
what kind of product or service are you selling and how
much traffic are you dependent on to see a profit?

If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires
a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may
not be the best investment for you; the biggest search
engines do not offer it, and they are the engines that will
bring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if you
have a business that offers an expensive service or product
and requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, a
paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.

Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated
frequently. If the content changes on a daily or weekly
basis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages are
indexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed by
the paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywords
are entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion in
this case will guarantee that your pages are being indexed
in a timely manner.

You should also base your decision on whether or not your
pages are dynamically generated. These types of pages are
often difficult for regular spiders to locate and index.
Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamically
generated website will insure that the paid spider will
index them.

Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search
engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few
months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen,
but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the
possibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pages
are indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, the
search engine will be on the lookout to locate them
immediately.

As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when
it comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable
investment depending on your situation. Evaluate your
business needs and your website to determine if paid URL
inclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.