The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, A Review

"Disarmingly funny, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur tells it like it is and yet never gives up on the little guy. After reading this book you'll feel like you can actually pull it off - because you can." --Donny Deutsch, Host of CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch and Chairman, Deutsch Inc.

Mike Michalowicz is hands down, the real deal. Get this book. I recently bought and studied a copy of the wildly popular book, “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur” and was floored by the way Mike communicated his message. It like he's talking with you one-on-one. How he presents the information is incredibly funny, which makes it a fun read (especially since most of us don't have much time to read).

I fell in love with Toilet Paper Entrepreneur in the introduction where Mike shows a brilliant comparison between the "Media Darling" entrepreneur and his "Three Sheet Path." In Mike's example of the media darling, at 18-years-old the future entrepreneur is recruited to an Ivy League school only to quit and launch a wildly successful VC. Meanwhile, Mike is picking colleges based on the guy-to-girl ratios, hahaha! Needless to say many of us can relate.

He explains why a business plan is a complete waste of time and instead offers the alternate, “Three Sheet Path”, a simple, practical guide for measuring where your company is going and what the immediate health of your business is. If you're like me any way to simplify the process of starting and running a business is welcomed with open arms :)

Some Background

Mike started his first business when he was an inexperienced 24 years old, moving his young family to the only place he could afford, a retirement village. With almost no resources and certainly no experience, he systematically bootstrapped a multi-million dollar technology business, sleeping in conference rooms to avoid hotel costs. After selling his first company for way too much money, Mike launched a new business the very next day, and in less than three years, sold it to a Fortune 500 company. With his newest multi-million dollar venture, Obsidian Launch, he fosters start-up businesses with his “get rich right” approach.

In a recent article Mike explains what he feels are entrepreneurs top ten mistakes and here's number one:

Trying To Do It All

The greatest mistake entrepreneurs make is to believe they can do it all by themselves. While an entrepreneur can do most things, they do most things poorly. Just like any other person, an entrepreneur has one or two God given talents. As an entrepreneur it is your job to identify what you are great and do those few things to your fullest. Surround yourself with people who are strong where you are not. Great companies are built on the foundation of exploiting a few strengths, not on trying to be masters of everything.

If you do a Google search for content by Mike Michalowicz you are going to find a ton of video blog entries, articles and photos that can be so edgy sometimes that they are offensive to some. But in every article he writes or video he posts you are certain to find it packed with a purpose driven message.

It's so simple that it's complex. Business is not easy but it should at least be fun and Mike definitely makes it fun in The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. Make no mistake, I strongly recommend picking up The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. It will inspire you and motivate you to keep pushing toward your entrepreneurial dreams.

Recommended Article: Make Money Offline with Internet Marketing

The SEO Success Pyramid

Matt Mcgee over at smallbusinessSEM.com recently wrote a column on the SEO success Pyramid.

I really liked the article because he explained in real terms that building a website isnt about making a ton of money really quickly. Its about building something worthwhile through hard work and proven principles, just like Thrive Learning Institute teaches. There are 5 levels of the pyramid culminating creating that all coveted “Trust”.

Commitment

this is a no-brainer but is such a hang up for so many. Your success is directly connected to your commitment to a project or a goal . This is true in every facet of life whether it be relationships, sport, business or spirituality. Anything worthwhile wont come to yo in a flash of undisciplined genius. Its often the steady and persistent that produce the greatest value and in fact produce the most imminent of geniuses. Commit yourself for the long run. Its worth it.

Planning

You can get far with a deep commitment to success however if you just work hard and have no plan or direction then all that work will no doubt dissolve to nothing. Set clear goals. Picture the perfect day, then break down all the steps necessary to getting there. Create several plans of action and prioritize them. Then get to work . You planning will pay off in the end as it steers all that horsepower you have toward the desired goal.


Product/Service

There is no substitute for quality. Tricky salesman ship might fool customers into buying something useless for a while but people aren't stupid and soon enough you'll find yourself out of business and out of money. Create or provide something that people need. This is the surest way to guarantee staying power.


Education/Information

In this industry access to education and information regarding the intricacies and nuances that are evolving are essential to creating a successful SEO strategy. Yesterdays success strategy could be wildly different from today's because of a new piece of software a new policy or a new up and coming competitor. You need access to high quality information so you don't get left behind in the stone ages of may 2009.


Patience

Patience is perhaps the most important quality to possess in the field of search engine marketing simply because it just takes time for the best strategies to take hold and start working their magic. There are no quick fixes or paths to instant success. There are some exceptions but they are just that, exceptions. So hunker down and get to work. Thrive Learning Institute guarantee's you'll see abundant success, just be patient.

5 Ways to Build Links to Your Site

Dominate the Niche you choose with Quality Content

If you've done a lot of research on blogging or on internet marketing in general you've probably heard a lot about how important it is to have valuable, quality content. Like an echo I and Thrive Learning Institute are going to say that this is absolutely true. If you're just rehashing other people content chances are your blog or website will turn into another one of the mediocre, lost websites floating around on the web that no one reads. You'll be shouting as loud as you can in the middle of a forest.

You need to come up with interesting insights and passionate rants. You need worthwhile how-to's and engaging guides to draw people in and make people want to read your content and want to link back to it.

Find a topic you won't mind spending a lot of time with and then start asking yourself or others what they want to know about it. Then get started creating content that thoroughly answers those questions. As you increase the quality of your content the quality and number of back links you get grows exponentially.

Get Involved

One principle that I learned very well from Thrive Learning Institute is that once you have created a nice helping of yummy content then go join the community surrounding your niche. Make a list of some of the best and most authoritative blogs and websites on your topic ans start commenting, helping and answering question they have.

If you do this with gusto and always provide your own website in your signature you garner a lot of respect, a lot of traffic and unsolicited back links from others in your community.

Get Press

Obviously the more press you get the better. You can submit your press releases to free online press release directories that the big news chains sift through to find good stories to include. If you write a good article with a compelling headline you could get picked up by the new york times, The Globe and any number of other reputable newspapers and media companies. Its always a good idea to ask them specifically to link to your site because a link from a big news conglomerate will have a ton of weight. And will help out a ton with your rankings.

A great tool that Google provides is the ability to search for news stories by keyword so you ca keep track of the latest happenings in your niche. When you catch the latest news you can blog about it as soon as it comes out or contact the reporters doing the stories to build good relationships with contacts who could potentially give you a lot of press in the future. You may even be able to provide them with a source so they refer to you in their next story.

Directories

It's always smart to submit some articles to the best article directories out there so you can get some quick back links. You'll need to be careful though to make sure you vary the anchor text as Google will penalize you for what is called “Google bombing”.

Its very important not to get too stuck on this one method. It very easy to just because you can do everything yourself and its not dependent on someone else liking your content. Know that having pure article back links will not take your website to the level you probably want. Related niche sites linking to you and news companies linking to you are much more valuable.

Give people incentives to link to you.

Often times it'll feel like your trying to pull teeth to get bloggers and webmasters to link to you so you'll need to devise some potential incentives. You could propose link trading, writing a featured article about their website, or allowing them to write a relevant, valuable article that will give them some attention and allow them to demonstrate their talent and the value they can provide to your community.

When all else fails you can always offer to pay them to put a link up on their site but if you can avoid that if you create great content. So do that instead :)

Whatever you do don't give up on link-building. The heed you give to link-building alone can make or break your website. So have patience and stick with it. Get into a daily habit of link building and you'll see success sooner than you might think. Remember, if you have any questions be sure to give Thrive Learning Institute a call and discuss it with your team.

Make Money Fast

Tons of people are always asking how to make money fast on the internet. Thus we see the birth of trillions of get rich quick scams that make only the dishonest and shady money while the honest are left in the dust with $597 less than before and a few sticks when they thought they were getting power tools. Thrive Learning Institute delivers those power tools.

Creating Fast Income will obviously be riskier because if it weren't then everyone would be doing it. So here's a few ideas you can use to start making money today.

Affiliate Marketing

You can make a ton of money very quickly with affiliate marketing. All you need to do is get some highly targeted paid advertising that's directed to a landing page where you advertise other peoples products. That traffic buys those products and you make a killing with a simple web page and some seed money for advertising.

Obviously there's a downside. If you mess up your ad or your site is horribly optimized for conversions then you could realistically end up in the hole instead of going down to get your new Harley. I would suggest starting with a bit of seed money that is dedicated solely to learning good PPC techniques and learning how to optimize a landing page for conversions so that when the rubber meets the road you can really rake in the dollars.

Blogging

Blogging is another way to make a good amount of money online. You'll need to find a niche that you know a lot about and can write a lot about or you will burn out quickly. But with some basic SEO knowledge and a lot of useful, entertaining content you can monetize in so many different way IE advertising networks like Adsense, affiliate marketing, and you can even create your own products over time. That's where the real money is and Thrive Learning Institute will get you there.

Start Small, Dream Big

Its good to be ambitious in business. You're rewarded handsomely for it however you must have the right perspective if you're actually going to realize your ambitions. Thrive Learning Institute provides the experience and knowledge to focus those ambitions into simple, actionable tasks.

When starting an online business its never a good idea to target the broad, general terms like “health care”, or “Beauty”. There's way too much competition and unless you can wait around for 10 years all the while posting amazing content daily you will never get ranked in the search engines. You must start small if you're going to see any degree of success within a reasonable amount of time.

Select a low competition, usually long-tail, keyword phrase within the subject you want your niche in and then work to get to the top of the search engine. The process of getting to the top of the search results is pretty long and involved. Thrive can walk you through the detailed, step by step process of discovering capitalizing on, and ranking first for these keywords.

Once you've achieved the top ranking for your first keyword, choose a related keyword with the same level of competition and difficulty and repeat. Now you have two strong holds in a niche. Keep repeating the process and you'll eventually be able to start competing for those highly competitive keywords. You'll begin to dominate the market and when you dominate a market you have a fat wallet.

An example:

recently, after doing some research, found a potentially profitable keyword, “DJ speakers”. So I decided to throw up a niche site all about how to find the right DJ speakers, with videos and other related material all optimized for DJ speakers. Soon enough I'll be in the top spot when people search for that keyword and I'm already set up to begin optimizing for other keywords with related pages in my site. The next step might be “how to become a DJ” or maybe I'll just expand into the broader “DJ equipment.

So remember start small, be patient and in time you'll get that authority site you've dreamed of. Milk before meat my friends, milk before meat. Thrive Learning Institute will help you get the meat faster:)

A brief explanation of web analytics

Web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives. (You'll want to pick up Avinash Kaushiks Web Analytics: An Hour a Day) Thrive Learning Institute teaches how to set up, analyze and make profitable decisions from your web analytics.

Web analytics should be the lens that all business owners view the success or failure of their business and the basis for strategic decisions and tactics. They'll be able to set realistic goals by analyzing what has and hasn't worked in the past and be gather information and trends across all their marketing campaigns to discover which strategies are having the greatest impact on their customers and therefore determine which areas of the company are thriving and which could use a little more work.

For example, businesses can determine what is attainable in their future by evaluating past successes and failures. Also, by analyzing trends across marketing channels, marketers can learn which strategies have the most impact on their consumers, and therefore determine which areas of the company are thriving and which need improvement

The history of web analytics is miniscule compared to the massive tomes that grace our libraries about various subjects that have dramatically effected the human race. However, while the field is still very small,Web analytics is having a huge impact on the world of internet marketing and is making many people very, very rich. I'll give you a very brief explanation of how It's birth.

In the beginning navigating the internet was very straight forward. Type in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and a file with links and text would be 'served' to you by a server and that was it.

Servers record their transactions in what is called a log file. Some clever person realized that these files could be read by a program to provide data on the popularity of the website. He subsequently wrote that program and thus we see the birth of Web Analytics.

These logs were capturing data on not only page hits (the number of times people accessed a websites files) but also file name, time, referrer (the website making the request) IP address, browser identification, operating system and so on. So things began to get interesting cause you got to learn about where these hits were coming from and each hit became unique.

Soon enough business people and marketers began to get interested in this information but it was unfortunately all Greek to them … or php. So another sneaky person built a program that would automatically sort out the information in the log files to produce basic metrics. The first true commercial log analyzer was released by IPRO in 1994.

The last 15 years has been a trend of gathering more useful data and making it easier for the common webmaster to analyze and from said analysis make profitable decisions.

what serious business owner wouldn't want to know what marketing techniques are actually working and which are not?

For a more comprehensive and in depth look at web analytics and how the everyday internet entrepreneur can use it effectively check out Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik.
Or sign up with Thrive Learning Institute for one on one coaching on any online business subject you want.