Our article Simple Search Engine Optimization discussed how to increase the 'findability' of your web pages. This article discusses a file called 'robots.txt' which can keep search engines away from certain public pages and which can direct search engines to your public sitemap.

Block the Bots

Many websites will have public pages that should not be visible in search results, such as cobranded promotions with discount prices, expired offers, code, style sheets and broken pages. Truly sensitive material should always be served from behind login/password challenges, but promotional pages can inadvertently be indexed, and discount codes can be distributed more widely than was originally intended. How can you keep pages away from the major search engines? By telling them what they can and cannot inspect using a file named robots.txt.

robots.txt

'robots.txt' is an optional text file that can be placed in your website's document root directory. If it exists, the robots.txt file of any website can be viewed simply by typing the domain URL plus '/robots.txt', e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt. Software crawlers (or robots) from many search engines (including Google's googlebot, Yahoo's slurp and MSN's msnbot) will read robots.txt and use the contents as instructions for indexing a website's contents. There are no rules forcing crawlers to use robots.txt, so there are no guarantees that indicated files will stay hidden, but the major search engines make use of robots.txt.

At any given time there may be thousands of active search crawlers, finding and saving information deemed valuable. A software robot that can deeply inspect a list of websites is relatively easy for a programmer to write, and searching websites en masse is commonly done, e.g., spammers will search for email addresses and copycat vendors will collect prices and republish product data. The take-home lesson is that there is no privacy of information for your public web pages, but a well-crafted robots.txt file can keep selected pages off the big results lists.

Examples

Here are examples of robots.txt instructions. Individual search robots (user-agents) can be specified or all agents can be indicated with an asterisk (*). The first example allows all search robots (user-agents) to inspect and index the whole site. This is equivalent to having no robots.txt file:

The next example instructs all search robots to ignore the whole site.

Let's say your website has product discounts for your partner companies on the pages below; one discount for company Alpha and another for company Beta. Here's a way to keep those discount pages out of major search results listings:

Easier than listing every page is to hide whole directories. The next example acts for all Alpha and all Beta pages, and everything in the /partners directory:

Also useful is this HTML element:

  <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE">

This meta tag can be placed on individual pages and can provide another layer of protection. Not all web crawlers recognize this meta tag, but it will keep Google, Yahoo and MSN from indexing, following or caching pages. This meta tag can be redundant, but may be useful if robots.txt is temporarily missing, contains typos or if directory structures change.

Sitemaps

A representation of your website can be built into a special 'sitemap' XML format and referenced in your robots.txt file. A sitemap presented to a search engine crawler will allow for fast, accurate indexing of your site's content. CNN's robot.txt shows use of sitemap references.

Further Reading

Robot Exclusion Standard

Robots.txt at Wikipedia

Google's Webmaster Guide

Sitemaps

Site Examples

The New York Times

The Wall Street Journal

The White House

McDonald's Restaurants

We at E-Myth Worldwide place a high value on strategic thinking. Business owners can reap significant benefits by defining a long-term Strategic Objective, designing targeted strategies to reach that objective and implementing those strategies using tactical methods that will move the business towards the goal. We know this approach works, but how do business owners design and build out their strategies?

This article discusses a well-known matrix to assess your industry's potential for profitability, and discusses military history as a source for strategic guidance to help your business march ahead briskly.

Porter's Five Forces

Michael Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School, and in the late 1970's developed a framework now known as Porter's 5 Forces Analysis to understand the 'attractiveness' (profitability) of a given market by measuring the intensity of current competitive pressures. These 5 forces closely affect a company's ability to serve customers and make a profit:

• The threat of substitute products. If closely-related substitute products exist, then customers can be more easily persuaded to switch brands, especially if prices change.
• The threat of new competitors. Areas of business with high profit margins will attract firms eager to compete. Many new entrants in an industry effectively decreases profitability.
• Competitive intensity. The intensity of competition of established rivals is of major importance determining attractiveness of most industries. Barriers to entry in the form of recipes, special formulations, patents, copyrights, etc. can help in this ares.
• Customer bargaining power. Customer ability to bargain will apply pressure to a company's prices, and will impact the marketplace's sensitivity to price changes.
• Supplier bargaining power. A company can be pressured by those vendors supplying goods and services to the company and to the industry. Industry profitability will suffer as supplier bargaining power increases.

Of course, not all companies in a given industry will achieve equal profitability, as companies differ in business model, strategy, access to resources and ability to execute. And as these 5 forces vary dynamically, a company will need to regularly assess and update its approach to the marketplace. The cycle of process innovation, orchestration of changes and measurement of effectiveness will need to regularly be applied.

With a Strategic Objective identified and an honest assessment of the marketplace completed, you are ready to define strategies to move ahead. We will assume that you have embraced E-Myth's Seven Centers of Management Attention™ as a business model, and that you will develop a strategy for each of those categories. What rules of strategy can be applied to good effect?

Strategize Like a General

Many influential business teachers and practitioners have adapted strategies of armed conflict and applied them (with appropriate revisions) to the business world. Many concepts of battle and business parallel one another, and so can some lessons of armed conflict be applied to commercial contests. Note that these military strategies will apply most often to your positioning with respect to your competitors, not to your customer interactions.

Sun Tzu

"So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself."

Knowledge of the field, of yourself and of your opponents is central to success. Another of Sun Tzu's points is that good strategy requires quick, effective response to ever-changing conditions. A simple plan may work in isolation, but competing plans interfere with one another, creating less predictable outcomes. One must always be ready to re-evaluate the competitive landscape.

Captain B.H. Liddell Hart

Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart was an English military historian who greatly influenced the 20th-century development of strategic theory. He spent time in the trenches during the First World War and was driven afterwards to understand why casualties had been so very high. He began publishing his works in 1920's, based on a set of strategic principles:

• Adjust your ends to your means
• Keep your objective always in mind
• Choose the line of least expectation
• Exploit the line of least resistance
• Take a line of operation which offers an alternative objective
• Ensure that all plans and dispositions are flexible and adaptable to circumstances
• Don't throw your weight into a stroke while your enemy is on guard
• Don't renew an attack on the same line (or in the same form) after it has failed

Captain B.H. Liddell Hart believed that direct attacks against a firmly-entrenched opponent almost never work and should never be attempted. He also held that to defeat an opponent one must first throw him off-balance, which must be done before the main thrust of a campaign can succeed. He eventually formalized his theories of the Indirect Approach and the Expanding Torrent effect.

Indirect Approach and Expanding Torrent

The Indirect Approach advises against launching simple frontal attacks in favor of using surprise and flanking maneuvers to gain control of opposing positions. Successful use of the Indirect Approach requires delegated decision-making, as conditions on rapidly-changing ground require on-the-spot choices.

The Expanding Torrent effect describes the concentrated, expanding force applied to points of weakness identified in the Indirect Approach. Speed, exploitation of disruption and enabling those on the ground to act autonomously are crucial to success. The aim of the Expanding Torrent effect is to achieve confusion, disruption and demoralisation. Ironically, German military leaders embraced Captain B.H. Liddell Hart's theories, applying their Blitzkrieg strategy (an Expanding Torrent) against Britain and the Allies during World War II.

Synthesis

At E-Myth we believe that business owners should have a strategy for each of the Seven Centers of Management Attention. For example, in Lead Conversion, Liddell Hart's precepts can be used to inform a robust strategy with respect to your competition.

• Stay within your financial means
• Use innovative closing methods that competitors aren't using, e.g., coupon specials or free tech support.
• Identify and use tactics that deliver optimal return on investment
• If prospects resist buying, be ready with alternatives
• Give your sales people some flexibility in pricing
• Stay away from tactics that have not performed well

Liddell Hart's approach can of course be applied to the other six areas requiring strategic planning. And once you have formed strategies for your particular industry and marketplace, stay alert to changing conditions and be ready to revise your tactics based on current and anticipated conditions.

Further Reading

Porter 5 Forces Analysis

Foundation Strategy Group

McKinsey: Thinking Strategically

Strategy & Tactics for Sales Teams

The Art of War

Military Strategy

Miyamoto Musashi

Carl Von Clausewitz

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an efficient way to improve the 'findability' of your business website. Proper use of a few HTML elements and sensible formatting of content can raise your site's position in web search results.

There's no guarantee that your site will be shown on the first page of results (unless you pay), but SEO can make a big difference. This article is an introduction to the broad topic of SEO and includes some simple improvements that can have far-reaching effects.

How Web Search Works

Some search directory companies hire people to read and categorize web pages, which are then added to an ever-increasing directory of listings. About.com is an excellent site that uses this approach.

The largest search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN, have sets of computers that constantly browse billions of web pages. These sets of computers are called 'spiders' or 'robots' and follow rules which determine the sites to visit, how many pages of each site are to be processed, and how frequently sites are to be visited.

Information collected during visits is stored in gigantic indexes and cataloged according to content and importance. When a web user visits a search engine and enters a specific phrase, the index is searched for matching results, with the most relevant results returned first. Let's look more closely at how Google handles web searches.

Google

Google enables web searches with three main processes;

• Googlebot is a web 'spider' that retrieves web pages. Googlebot locates web pages by following links it encounters as it crawls the web, and by having URLs submitted directly. (Googlebot image above by Ben Rathbone).
• The Indexer receives web pages from Googlebot, sorts every word on every page, and assigns each URL a 'pagerank' based on more than 200 factors. The indexer then stores pagerank, key words and a copy of each page in an enormous, searchable index.
• The Query Processor accepts search terms from users and compares them to the index, returning the most relevant links first.

Google handles hundreds of millions of searches every day and has indexed billions of web pages. So how can your site be seen by potential customers? The answer is by rising high in the organic results set. Before we offer suggestions on how to raise your site's visibility, let's define a couple of terms.

Organic Search

Organic search results are non-paid search listings returned from queries. 'Organic' refers to the natural process of assigning pagerank (topic relevance) to web pages, and then ordering those results based on that ranking.

Search engine optmization is the adjustment of web page content so that pages have higher ranking in organic search results. Most customers consider organic search results as more reliable than paid search (advertised) listings.

Paid Search

Paid search is a form of advertising where bidders jockey for position above or alongside the organic search results. The more you're willing to pay, the higher your ad will display. Paid search results are shown in lists separate from organic results, in sections typically labelled 'Sponsored Links'.

If your company produces baking pans, but your website isn't well known, it may make sense to pay for search terms like "baking pans", "baking supply" or "baking" for a while. Paid search can quickly become expensive, so if you pay for search terms, check your costs every day and calculate the return on your investment.

What You Can Do

Here are some things you can do to optimize your web pages for higher placement in organic search engine results.

Meta Tags

Include and edit these HTML tags to reflect your content:

<meta name="description" content="">

<meta name="keywords" content="">

These meta-tags should clearly indicate overall site focus and page contents, respectively. Below are examples of description and keywords meta-tags from two well-known websites. Apply the same sort of treatment when describing your site.

CNN News

• <meta name="Description" content="CNN.com delivers the latest breaking news and information on the latest top stories, weather, business, entertainment, politics, and more. For in-depth coverage, CNN.com provides special reports, video, audio, photo galleries, and interactive guides.">
• <meta name="Keywords" content="CNN, CNN news, CNN.com, CNN TV, news, news online, breaking news, U.S. news, world news, weather, business, CNN Money, sports, politics, law, technology, entertainment, education, travel, health, special reports, autos, developing story, news video, CNN Intl">

Southwest Airlines

• <meta content="The official Southwest Airlines website with Ticketless Travel reservations, Southwest Airlines schedules and fares, and general information about Southwest Airlines." name="description">
• <meta content="Southwest Airlines, Southwest, Airlines, swa, iflyswa, ticketless, Ticketless Travel, Rapid Rewards, frequent flyer, Airlines, vacations, vacation, travel, traveling, travelling, trips, reservations, fares, schedules" name="keywords">

Highlight Your Search Terms

If you want those searching for "baking pans" to find your site, and "baking pans" is one of your key word phrases, then use the phrase "baking pans" in your page contents, title, headers, body text or all of the above. Headers are said to be given more importance than body text, for instance. Be literal and give seekers exactly what you want them to find.

And make sure to use text characters to display key phrases, not graphics. Search engines can't read text embedded in a graphic.

The <title> element

The <title> is an important element of an optimized web page. The page <title> should be text that accurately summarizes each page contents. Note that the page <title> will be shown in:

• bookmarks
• search engine results
• browser title bars

Try to use a different, accurate title for each web page. Note the title of the article you're reading is specific to this content.

Get Other Sites to Link to Yours

Search engines track the number of incoming links to your site as a measure of your site's relevance and popularity within your industry or subject matter.

• Encourage those in your field to link to your site
• Encourage all others to link to your site
• Post your URL in topic-centric blogs.
• Let viral word-of-mouth take your message and run with it.

This is an important measure that will increase your site's rank, and efforts encouraging others to link to you should be concerted and consistent. A link from a high-visibility site like CNN or DIGG will be much more important than a link from a low-profile site.

There's no quick solution to this important measure of relevance, but the longterm benefits are well worth the attention and effort.

Start a Blog

Starting a blog on your site is an excellent way to get people interested in what you do and to get your word out.

Structure Your Content

Build anchor links with target text equal or similar to your key words. It also helps if file names reflect keyword phrases. Here are examples:

Not So Good:
<a href="/catalog/page2.html">Next Section</a>

Better:
<a href="/bakingpans/muffinPans.html/" >Muffin Pans</a>

Use <h1> for your top-level heading, and use smaller heading tags, like <h2>, <h3> in appropriate order on the page

Headings and section titles should also reflect subject content, like 'Glass Baking Trays', rather than 'Section 2', 'Subhead 3', etc. Consider using your key words as headings.

Use your listed keywords in the body copy of your pages. Sensible reiteration of keywords will lend strength to the page's relevance rating.

Don't overuse your key words. Rampant duplication and overuse of keywords was a trick that worked for a few months in the early days of web search. Overuse now has a negative effect; don't go there.

Use Alt Text for Images

Describe your images using the 'alt=' text. Your graphics may be great, but search engines can't read a picture. Using the alt text in the <img > tag will enable the text to be indexed and will also help those readers with text-only web browsers. Note that its also useful to give sensible names to the image files themselves. Here are examples:

Not So Good:
<img src="/ext_images/qv_IMG_8316-1.JPG" />

Better:
<img src="/baking/MuffinTin_SKU_2338.jpg" alt="Muffin Tin: SKU 2338" />

Manually Submit URLs to Search Engines

Don't use an automated service or software package to submit URLs to search engines; do it yourself. Here are links to URL submission forms at four search engines:

• Google Search
• Yahoo Search
• MSN Live Search
• About.com

If your website has a sitemap, then consider using a sitemap submission tools to submit multiple pages at once. Here's information on sitemap submission at Wikipedia.

Keep Your Old Domain Name

Older, established domain names are considered to be more trusted than new ones, and so receive higher rankings.

Keep Your Page Fresh

Fresh content will indicate that your site is active. Keep things fresh and lively.

Resources

• SEO at Wikipedia
• Google's "Making the Most of Your Content"
• How Google Works
• Network Solutions' SEO Do's & Don'ts
• About.com
• HighRankings.com SEO Articles
• PageRank Link Analysis
• TrustRank Link Analysis
• TrustRank.org

Up Next

Simple Search Engine Optimization discussed ways to get your web pages indexed by the large search engines. The next article in our technical series will focus on how to exclude certain pages from the search engines using a file called 'robots.txt'.

There’s an old joke that goes: How do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time of course!

Maybe you’ve heard that in relation to business ownership too: “having a business is like eating an elephant.” Over the years, I’ve worked with business owners from many different industries, with businesses of all shapes and sizes. There is a common sentiment when we begin working together, and it goes something like this:

There’s just too much! I need to make sure my clients are taken care of. I need to make all the sales calls. I need to talk to the newspaper about the ad. I need to make sure the bills get paid (On time? Don’t make me laugh!). And somehow—in the midst of all that—I have to perform a small miracle to get my employees to show up to work on time and do their jobs. How can I possibly do all that? I don’t have time to sit down and develop all these systems, scripts, forms and standards. It would take me a solid six weeks of work just to get this place organized!

Does that sound familiar? Can you hear some of yourself in that tirade? You’re not alone. Every business owner since the beginning of time has struggled with how to do it. How do they develop their business, when they can barely get it to run in the first place?

I’m sorry, but I have some bad news for you. You can’t. You will probably never find the time to do it all, if you’re focused on how to do it. Why? Because your focus is off. It doesn’t matter how many times you release your arrow of good intentions, you’ll never hit the target if you’re not aiming at it. Oh sure, you may get lucky every now and then, and hit the target out of sheer luck. It happens. But you’ll never achieve consistent, predictable results if you don’t take careful aim each time.

You Can’t Hit a Target if you’re Aiming at the Sky

At the risk of seriously mixing my metaphors, that’s why you can’t eat that elephant: your aim is off. It’s not about how. It’s about what. The problem is not how to eat the elephant. It’s identifying the elephant in the first place. Once you’ve identified the elephant, then you can focus on having a system to prioritize where you’re going to start.

You need a vision of what your business will look like when the elephant has been eaten. Without the vision, nothing you do in your business will make much of a difference. You may make some small changes, and you may even see some good results of those changes. Everyone gets lucky, once in a while. But without the vision, your business will never truly become a great business. You have to stop focusing on the work, and start focusing on the results.

Focus on the Results, Not on the Work

What is your vision of your business? What do you want it to look like?

As the a business owner, your most important job is the development of your vision. That’s it. It’s not taking care of your clients, it’s not making sales calls, it’s not advertising your services, it’s not paying the bills it’s not even managing your employees. Your job, your most important role, is defining what your business will look like when it’s finished, and effectively communicating that with your staff.

This is such an important concept we created a two-day Leadership Intensive seminar to help business owners work on their business vision. It can be a real struggle for some people. But think about it this way: this isn't about how you’re going to produce a widget. It’s not about how you’re going to deliver your widget to your customer. It’s not about how your employees are going to help you make your widgets the best on the market. You need to focus on the what. You need to focus on the vision. What is the widget going to do for your client? What will it look like? What is your promise to your customers? What will your employees feel like, coming to work every day? What will set your widget company apart from every other widget company out there? Focus on the results, not on the work.

Now you might be thinking, “I have a vision for my business, but my employees aren’t helping me achieve it!” Of course not. If your employees aren’t helping you achieve your vision, it’s because you haven’t effectively communicated that vision to them. They can’t help you hit the target if they don’t know where the target is. They can’t help you hit the target if they don’t know what it looks like.

Approach that Elephant Strategically

To determine what bite you need to take first, you need a strategy. With a defined strategy, you can choose where to start. What is your system for prioritizing? Without that system, you’ll get stuck in reactive mode. You’ll develop whatever system seems most important right at that moment. You’ll deal only with your biggest frustration that minute. And while you’re putting together a system to deal with that frustration, five more problems will show up, each seemingly more important, more vital to the survival of your business than the one you’ve started working on. You need a system to prioritize. You have to pick and choose your battles.

At E-Myth, we use the Seven Centers of Management Attention™ business success model. Each Center focuses on a key element in your business. Whether you know it or not, your business does each and every one of these seven things: Leadership, Management, Money, Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Conversion, and Client Fulfillment. If you take that elephant that is your business, and break it up into those Seven Centers of Management Attention, you’ll start to see how to take smaller bites.

Which Center needs the most attention in your business this week? Focus there. Spend an hour thinking about all the systems you will need for that Center of Management Attention, and write them down. Rate them on a scale of 1-10: which is more important than another? Sort your list by the most important ones, and select just one system to develop right now. Repeat this process regularly, starting each time with the question: “Which Center needs the most attention in my business this week?”

Take small bites out of your elephant. Take the right bites. But most importantly, determine what your elephant will look like when you’ve eaten the whole thing this will help keep you focused on the results, not the work.

Once you’ve made the decision to work on your business instead of just in your business you’ll be brimming with excitement. It’s extremely empowering to make the decision to take action and build a company that fulfills your entrepreneurial vision. You might also feel slightly overwhelmed, especially if—up until now—you’ve been focused on the day-to-day work of a Technician.

But hear us: do not lose your enthusiasm! You can do it. As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and your business won’t be built in a day either. The important thing is to keep the momentum, keep focused and keep moving forward.

Baby Steps are Better than Nothing

Sometimes the best—and only—option is to take incremental steps toward your goal. For example, how many of us have flirted with the idea of regular exercise? Although experts recommend 30 minutes of physical activity each day, not many of us do it. We know exercise is good for us, we know we should do it—but time is precious and 30 minutes a day can feel like a huge commitment.

But did you know that the same experts also tell us that three 10-minute sessions are just as effective as a single, 30-minute workout? When you think about it, three smaller workouts seem a lot less daunting, and are much easier to fit into your busy day. Simple things like taking the stairs instead of an elevator or parking in the spot farthest away from your destination provide the opportunity to get those 10 minutes of exercise.

This incremental approach can serve you in business as well. In this article series, we’ll take a look at how strategic work can be done incrementally with powerful results.

Making the Most of Your Time

One of the issues you’ll face as you shift your perspective away from the Technician and into the role of the Entrepreneur is time management. Now that you’re working on your business, you need to make time to do the strategic work of the business, and this can be difficult at first.

The first step is to free up some time. Here are a few things you can do right away to manage your time and allow for the crucial strategic-thinking time you need to take your business to the next level of success.

Take Control of Your To-Do List

What does your to-do list look like? If it’s overwhelming, you’ll kill your motivation before you even get started!

Step 1: Organize

The first thing you can do is decide which items on your to-do list are strategic in nature, which ones are managerial, and which ones are purely technical. If your list has too many technical tasks on it, it’s an indicator that you need to do some prioritizing.

Step 2: Prioritize

If you can’t scratch the managerial or tactical items off your list right away, a good first step is to find a balance. Try identifying one strategic, one managerial, and one tactical item to accomplish today and focus only on those. Eventually, you’ll learn to identify the strategic tasks and it will become easier to move those up on your priority list.

Step 3: Book It

Once you’ve identified your priority list, set aside time on your calendar to work on them. Tasks that you want to accomplish must be scheduled or your will never find the time to work on them. At E-Myth we post “Do Not Disturb” signs so we are not interrupted while we’re focusing on our strategic work. It’s okay to let your staff know that you need some undisturbed time—sometimes it’s the only way to get strategic work done. And once you’ve accomplished your three to-do items, go take a 10-minute walk around the block to celebrate and get 30% of your exercise for the day!

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

One of the group workshops in the Embark Live™ program, “Effective Time Management” is all about the process of keeping a Time Log. A time log enables you to learn how your time is actually spent, and will allow you to put a value that time. The process shows you just how expensive you are to employ. That’s because you’re probably doing a lot of technical work that you could pay somebody else to do—just as well—for less money.

If you keep doing all the little daily tasks that you’ve always done, then you’ll forever be trapped doing them and never free up the time to work on your business. Take a look at all the tasks on your to-do list that you’ve flagged as technical and ask yourself, “Does this really need to be done?” and then, “If it has to be done, can it be done by somebody else?”

If letting go of these tasks is scary to you (and sometimes it is, especially if you’ve always done it and have your own particular way of doing it) then try baby steps.

• Identify a small task that you want to delegate.
• Document the correct way to perform this task, step by step, including the quality control standards for each step. At E-Myth we call this type of system document an Action Plan. Click here to see our 'Coffee-Making Action Plan'.
• Have someone follow your Action Plan. Then be ready to revise your document, until you and your tester are comfortable with the newly documented system.
• When the new system document is ready, give it to the employee responsible for that task, and insert a copy into your company's Operations Manual . Your collection of system documents (action plans) will form the backbone of a functioning Operations Manual.
• Repeat these steps on the next task.

Some people, like our friend Tim Ferris, author of “The Four Hour Workweek”, take delegation to a whole new level by outsourcing tasks and errands to virtual assistants.

However you decide to go about it, delegating is a big first step toward freeing your time so that you can focus on what’s really important.

In the next article in this series, we’ll discuss the benefits of an incremental approach to product innovation.

Want to know more about time management from the E-Myth Point of View? Read this article. And if you have any time management tips that have helped you create time for strategic work, share your comments with us, we love to hear your stories.

Check out this interesting article "True entrepreneurs are the original key to growth" written by Vuyo Jack in the online version of the South African Business Report. He discusses how concepts from Michael Gerber's new book apply to the South African entrepreneur.

I recently read about the different realities pertaining to the entrepreneur in Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, the new book by entrepreneurship guru Michael E Gerber. Some of the realities are particularly apt for South Africa...

Read the full article here.

Santa Rosa, CA – 8 July 2008

E-Myth is pleased to announce the launch of E-Myth Spanish, a new program that supports the business development efforts of Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs world-wide. E-Myth has partnered with Más tiempo, más dinero, más vida S.A. de C.V. which has exclusive distribution rights in Mexico.

Learn more in the press release.

If you listened to NPR's Marketplace this week you might have heard an interesting story: microlending–the practice that has spread like wildfire in the developing world–is getting its start in the US. For a small business owner struggling in these tough times, a small loan can make a big difference.

Flickr Photo Credit to ppdigital

For one international  microfinance institution now operating in the US the average loan is under $6,000. While that kind of money probably won't get you started, it can help you make some of the small changes that can make a world of difference to a small business.

Here at E-Myth, we encourage business owners to work on their business, not in their business. By examining your business for areas of improvement, you can often find some small fixes that yield big results. One loan provider, Accion USA reports that over three years their borrowers increased their overall take-home income by 38 percent.

Of course, borrowers need to document how they will spend money on business improvements, so that lenders can be assured that money is well spent. We at E-Myth believe that well-documented business systems are where the rubber meets the road in a successful business.

What sort of improvements could you make in your business with a small loan?