As many more businesses start up, many more are failing every day. A study conducted by the Journal of Small Business Management showed that 64.2% of businesses failed in the first 10-years. As Tim and I are starting our own business, we are going to have to face many risks that could essentially cripple us. However, if we calculate these risks correctly, it will help us immensely. The following are some tips and questions that you should ask yourself when assessing the risks that you will have to face as an entrepreneur.

1. Do you have what it takes to become successful?

Many people have some great ideas for a product or some sort of service, but actually persisting and trying to market and sell the product takes some discipline. To succeed, you must understand and respect the values of persistence, discipline, ambition, self motivation, organization, and dedication. Having these qualities are truly great assets that will lead to success. Sure, you might not need to have all of those to thrive, but having few of them is a risk that might injure your business.

The key to finding these qualities within you is to find something you are passionate about. If you do something purely for the money, somethng that you don’t enjoy, your work will suffer and hence you will be at a higher risk of failure.

2. Do you have a business partner?

You must ask yourself a simple question, do you want a partner or not? Sure, the answer is simple, yes or no, but each answer provides us with many factors that we must assess.

Let's look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each:

Sole proprietorship

Advantages

- You make all the decisions on a day to day basis and changes will be made in a quicker manner as you don’t have to discuss with anyone else. You have complete control.
- All the profit goes to you and you can decide exactly what to do with it.

Disadvantages

- All the decisions are made by you but this can monopolise your time and result in lost opportunities and profits. More importantly however, you won't always have someone to develop ideas with and you may not always make the right decision alone; this can lead to costly errors.
- It is much harder to financially feed the start up of a business as you might have limited income.
- Until you can hire people if you so choose, you must do all the work on your own, making starting up even harder.

Partnership

Advantages

- You are both working to fulfill your business needs so things get done almost twice as fast. The group dynamic can also help make working more productive and enjoyable.
- You are able to bounce ideas off one another. It is sometimes extremely helpful to discuss different ideas with your partner and together you can distinguish the bad ones from the great ones.
- Can pool resources together making startup easier.

Disadvantages

- You can get into arguments and decisions might take longer to find a happy medium.
- Profits are split, and financial decisions may not make everyone happy.

These lists don’t include formal arrangement issues, such as tax declarations or investor interests and agreements, but you can get the general idea of what would be best for you. As for Tim and I, a partnership was indeed what we were looking for. We’re always together, great friends, both imaginative thinkers and our personality traits compliment each other. In our case, it’s a perfect match; but do be careful when choosing a business partner. Be sure to always discuss the matter of money and how it will be handled up front or else when the time does come and something doesn’t go right, relationships can end very quickly. Money is at the root of all evil, sometimes tearing friendships apart.

3. Do you have any financial obligations?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had limitless hours you could feed into your business and help it strive? What if you couldn’t? What if you have a mortgage to pay off, a family to feed, cars to pay for, monthly bills to pay, etc. As you could guess, it is much more difficult to start a business when you have all these financial obligations to attend to, which usually means working at a job to pay for them , and then using the time that you’re not at work to juggle everything else and your business.

This creates a huge risk of failure which should be assessed right away. However, if you are truly willing, anything is possible. Don’t let financial or time restrictions immediately ruin your plans. Take careful considerations, and if you have the drive to succeed, then by all means, go for it!


In our case, we have decided to focus on this blog and our future businesses full time. This means we are leaving school for the time being. Sure, it’s a huge risk, but we have massive potential gain stacked in our favour. We have the sheer determination to make this work, two imaginative minds, a great partnership, no financial obligations and plenty of time. A recipe for success!

By examining your business risks, you can also find your path to success. Analyze what issues face you, and try your best to find either a solution, or an alternative before diving into the cutthroat business world.

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Blogs have really exploded over the past few years, and with good reason. They give people a voice to a global audience. Whether it be to a small niche of loyal readers, or a massive crowd, no matter how big or small you are, you will reach someone. If you wish to draw a larger audience to your blog however, a great way is to simply interact with others and get to know your fellow bloggers.

Other bloggers also have important things to say, and as you explore blogs similar to yours, you may be inspired, entertained, or enlightened. If you are new to blogging, as we are, you will learn to write more interesting and informative posts. Every time I look around at other business sites, I learn a ton of new things that I can then use to develop new ideas of my own. Take this post for example; this came as I noticed that when I would comment on other blogs, some of those bloggers would then come check out my blog as well.

There is nothing better than being a blogger and receiving feedback from a reader. It gives you a great sense of pride and makes you feel that you have made a difference. Just remember that feeling, and remember that you too can help other bloggers by giving them feedback as well. Developing friendships in the blog world is great, as you may link each other and help one another get new readers. This helps a great deal when you are just starting out.

In the end, it all comes down to giving your readers quality content that they can appreciate. With help and feedback from other bloggers, your skills and abilities can only increase, not to mention that you can make some really cool friends!

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As I was researching a bit more information on tags, relating to yesterday's post, I came across the term "meta tags". I checked them out, and I must say that they are a great tool when it comes to SEO for the same reason as regular sorting tags. They are almost the same in terms of usage, but these affect the tech side of things.

A meta tags is in essence an HTML tag. If you don't know what this is, check this HTML tutorial out. Meta tags are placed before closing the head tag. The main purpose is to let non-human surfers, like search engine crawlers, know about your site. For example, when your search listing pops up, it will display the Meta description if it is available. Some other meta properties include abstract, copyright, geourl (see Geo URL site), robots, and keywords, which I mentioned the importance of in the last article.

So if you don't have these on your site yet, I highly recommend you check them out. You can find loads of information on the web, but what is included here should be plenty to get you started. And if you are using firefox, check Search Status 1.18 out. It is an extension that will allow you to easily check the meta tags of any page, as well as inform you about a site's Google pagerank and Alexa rating (terms we will talk more about in future articles).

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You might have noticed that we have now implemented tags in all our posts; these can be seen right below the title of the entry. Tags, in essence, are a way of grouping entries by category to make them easy to view by topic. This is a great way to organize your site and help your users find content they are interested in, particularly if you have a lot of it. You can see examples of this on sites like Technorati and Del.icio.us. There is another benefit, however, that is quite often overlooked, but can be just as important.

First of all, let me start with a brief overview of something called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I may have briefly mentioned this in another post, and I will most likely go into more detail about this in a future one as well, but there is a fundamental concept that applies to tagging. Many search engines rely heavily on keywords to rank which websites are listed highest for certain searches. This means that the more the search engine finds this keyword on your site, the more it considers your site is relevant to the searcher's wishes. I have heard that the optimum number of keywords to use in your site is 1 keyword for every 100 words. By using tags, your keywords will be displayed more often without disrupting your content. They will help in defining your site, and search engines will know what your subject matter is about.

The main point is that tags not only help you organize large quantities of content, but they help define your site as a whole. Please comment with any thoughts you might have about tagging!

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Hi everyone,

Sorry for the late update, Chris and I have been really busy with school lately. We just finished all of our midterms, so we should have a few calmer weeks, that is until finals in a month!

Our journey to a million is still on of course, and we are making some good progress and a bit of money. Chris has been busy developing the contest system we mentioned earlier, and I have been continuing the never ending quest for traffic. So far we've had visitors from Canada, the States, and even some from Australia! It's pretty exciting seeing people build an interest in what we are trying to do, and we hope we are helping you so far.

We have also been brainstorming for a few new big ideas that hopefully we can spring into action after school is over, so stay tuned for that!

Before I go, I found a very interesting article from StevePavlina.com entitled "10 reasons you should never get a job". If you weren't convinced before that it is totally possible to become "self-employed", you will be now! There's a lot of very inspirational material at his site, and you should check it out. We've learned a lot ourselves.

Alright, that's it for now. We'll be back soon with some more news, so stay tuned!

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