30 Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter

9 Tips for Being a Better Entrepreneur

7 Companies Getting the Most out of Social Media

Image vs Reality: The Importance of Follow-Through

I really hope you enjoy this Sunday recap!

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Here is what he had to say:

We know you’re a “Young Go Getter”, but so our readers know, how old are you?

Hello everyone, my Name is Michael Dunlop and I am 20 years but started my first business venture when I was around 10 years old.

Can you tell us the quick history about yourself, and what drives you to succeed?

So many things drive me to success, mainly I want a life style that allows me to do what I want when I want. I hate the idea that I am not FREE just to do that, everyone has so much holding them down, not me and never will I. Being an Internet entrepreneur means most of the time I don’t know what time it is and what day it is, because it doesn’t matter!

History… Well I dropped out of College here in England at 18 years old with out doing my exams, which is high school for you Americans. I failed most things at school and I hate to play the Dyslexic card as it seems to be over rated and used as an excuse but I was very bad a reading and writing. I remember even at 13 years old my mum trying to get me to read and fulling asleep because I was so bad.

At 15 I won an award from the Young Enterprise foundation for the top website in our district and that was my first site ever built. I then realised I enjoyed working online and did a lot of eBay till I finally created my first successful website. It was called ShoutGFX which was a graphics forum, whats funny is I can’t design to save my life and didn’t know what GFX standed for at the time. I simply saw a lot of people had these forums and were doing well but seem to do so many things wrong, with in 6 months I had the biggest website and was the most known guy in the niche. This lead to my first “Failure” where I was hacked multiple times from competitors as they didn’t like how quickly I progressed and how quickly they were losing members. After a long battle to keep the site online, the hackers finally won and I had to move on.

Now I run arguably the biggest Young Entrepreneur website in the world, Retireat21.com and one of the top blogging sites called IncomeDiary.com

What has been your biggest asset while building your career?

My Dad has been an entrepreneur from a young age, he has helped me a lot from pointing things out I do wrong to taking me to seminars where I can further my learning. One of the most important things you need to do is keep learning.

Adversely, what has been your biggest vice?

Focus, being young we have so many options and distractions. You really need to work out your end goal and make sure you surround yourself with the right kind of people to prevent you going astray. Seminars and workshops have been great for me to refocus and get around great people.

What can we expect next from the talented Michael Dunlop in the near future?

I think its important to not do to many projects at once, so many people do this and lose momentum with their biggest project. I want to focus on IncomeDiary and make Retireat21 a Advert FREE website which is soaly focusing on showing of young talent and have a FREE accedemy to help young people.

I would also like to write my first book, Retired at 21 ;-)

Everyone starts to feel burn out on a project every now and then. What do you do to keep yourself motivated and focused?

Focus on a new area on the website, I think we lose interest because we get bored at looking at the same website or business every day. Make sure to keep refreshing your business and that will keep you excited.

Can you give us three tools that you use every single day to make your life as a younggogetter more efficient, productive, or fun?

Twitter – Driving 10,000s of visitors monthly to my website, if you don’t use it, then start to!

Wordpress – Not sure if it’s a Tool, but it saves me so much time as its so simple to add content to my websites and the customizations and options are perfect.

Taskus.com – I outsource all the nasty stuff so I can have more fun. Although I do outsource, the one thing you can’t do is outsource your passion so make sure you don’t ask them to write any direct content, just research and tasks you hate doing.

What is your favourite quote?

Have the end in mind and every day make sure you are working towards it – Ryan Allis

And last but not least, if you could give one piece of advice to fellow Young Go Getters, what would it be?

Just do it, everyone says that they will do something with their lives, 99% never do the things they say they will. Get off your ASS and start is 90% of the battle, the other 10% is easy.

More importantly, be Happy, there is no point to life itself, if you can’t live it.

You can catch up with him at Income Diary or check out his eCourse!

Hiring a logo design company is not enough. You need to do your homework before asking your logo designer to design a logo for you otherwise all your money and your designer’s time and efforts would go wasted in the end.

Logo creation is a delicate process; therefore, you need to make it easier for your logo designer by clarifying few facets before asking him to start your project.

Write down a detailed Creative Brief:

You as a business owner, must know what exactly you require in your logo because your logo designer is only the creator of the image, you should be the one to guide him what your logo should look like. Prepare a creative brief and clarify the following points to your logo designer to avoid disagreement in the end.

Make my logo Simple

Always ask your designer to come up with a simple logo as it is a proven fact that simple things are easier to recall. The more complex your logo is the less people would remember it. So, before starting your logo design project, you need to clearly communicate this to your logo designer to create a simple yet impactful logo for your company.

Pick up a list of successful logos to date, you will see that the best ones are the simplest yet creative logo designs. Adidas is a good example one can come up with when defining simplicity.

Define the Essence of your business

Ask your designer to grasp the essence of your business. It doesn’t always mean that you specifically portray what your company does, but it should be portraying which industry you are in and the nature of your business. If you require a hospital logo, probably it would be of serious nature and a cartoon design would certainly not fit in. While it is sometimes appropriate to depict what your company does, but it’s always considered better to create a design that can be taken over as a ‘Brand identity’.

Vector-based Software

This is an important matter, because at times it happens, that logo designers try and take shortcuts when they receive bundles of orders from everywhere. Here your job is to clearly mention, that you need a logo created by vector-based applications, just in case your logo designer is an amateur. Usually, designers use Adobe Illustrator for logo creation. Remember, prevention is always better than cure, so a reminder to your designer won’t harm you anyway!

Never use Clipart

Warn your logo designer beforehand not to pick clipart images to design your logo. Clipart designs are already being taken by so many people that if your logo is based on any of the clipart images, there are 99% probabilities that your logo would not be unique.

So, don’t let your designer create a clipart logo, or download a design from any template sites, because anything created out of these sources would not be original at all.

Define the right Size

Tell your logo designer, what size your logo should be. We are all aware of the fact that size matters. It gets even critically important, when designing a logo. You need to tell your designer to create a beautiful logo which would be simple enough to retain its visual impact when resized, either smaller or bigger than its usual size. Remember, your logo is a waste if it isn’t the right size. It has to be so well designed, that it could be used in a number of ways.

Balanced height and width

You need to pre-define your designer that your logo design should be proportionate. Your designer must know the right height and width for your logo. Your logo should be balanced from all the sides so it won’t look bad when displayed on your website or printed on your business cards, letterhead or any other marketing collateral. So your logo designer should be told about this aspect as well.

Don’t mix artwork with words

If you want your logo to be a combination of both image and text, ask your designer to put both the elements in a clean way. At times, it so happens, that the designer intertwines the elements which results in an awful logo. Don’t let your logo designer commit this mistake. Ask your designer to picture them together, but don’t let them overlap. Though, there isn’t any hard and fast rule for this but it is observed that this practice makes a logo simple and easy to remember. See how ‘Dunkin Donuts’ has managed to have distinct elements in its logo.

Do mention the Colors

It is said that design is the primary element of any logo, which is true to some extent but one can’t ignore the significance of colors as well. Once you’ve defined the look and feel for your image, you further need to come up with the colors for it. However, why colors are not given prime importance is the fact that they can always be changed or edited later. Ask your designer to play with minimum colors as this would reduce your reproduction cost in future. Moreover, there are some colors which cannot be converted neatly on some media. So, think wisely while choosing colors for your logo.

Once you’ve mentioned these points in your creative brief, I’m sure you would end up in a perfect logo for your business instead of an argument. Comment on it, if you think I have skipped out anything which is a must tell to your logo designer.

A small bio:

This is guest post from Hasan Shirazi of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK.

Thirty years ago, Inc. Founder Bernie Goldhirsh challenged the editors of Inc. to “think of the business-person as an artist using both sides of his brain.”

In celebration of Inc. Magazine’s 30th anniversary, the publication has launched “The Great Garage Hunt,” an interactive online game. We’d like your help in celebrating Inc.’s 30th anniversary by challenging yourself and your readers to re-discover 30 great companies featured in Inc. over the past three decades. This interactive birthday party can be experience via an interactive online game at www.inc.com/greatgaragehunt.

So check it out and try and win some stuff!!! Jump to it HERE!

LeBron James. And yes, the last sentence was full of puns.

LeBron “The One” James. The 24 year old basketball wunderkind who has made leaps and bounds from a young age at doing things well. We know he dominates on the basketball court as part of the Cavaliers but did you know that he has been a force to be reckoned with in the personal branding world? LeBron has taken full control of how his image is seen by people around the world. He understands that he has alot of influence through corporate endorsements and decided to create his own path to secure his dream of becoming the first billion dollar sports brand.

Yes, billion dollar.

Check out this video interview from 60 Minutes which gives us some insight into the thinking of the branding smart guy.

I just got this email from Matt Wilson about his new project, Factor77 TV. There are interviews with authors and business leaders that you may find interesting. Check it out here!

And here they are explaining what this project is all about, enjoy!

Just got that video from YGG member Satish Kanwar, what a great idea and a result! Get more info here!

So I came across this page featured on the West Virginia Surf Report via Twitter and couldn’t help but to laugh. As I took I quick skim over the site, it became pretty obvious what the images represented. The photos are basically fast food concoctions that many of us are familiar with – e.g. Wendy’s Chicken Club, Arby’s Beef ‘n Cheddar sandwich, etc. The ones on the left side represent what we see when the commercials or the billboards try to lure us into the restaurant to quench our stomach churning hunger (induced by the said advertisements, of course). The photos right next to those represent…what we actually get when we open up the wrappers. Now, depending on how much you like any of these foods will determine how much you shake your head in disgust or sigh at the glaring difference in what you actually pay for. The bottomline here is that there is a big difference between what you’re shown/told you are going to get and from what you actually wind up with.

In life, there are plenty of opportunities for us to be duped into believing that everything we see on television or on the Web will be exactly what is shown. It’s tough sometimes but after awhile, you learn from your mistakes. On the flip side, there are even more opportunities for us to tell someone we are going to do something, add on some verbal fluff about what it will be and how much it will help them do something and then it turn out to be a soggy, 2.5 star version of what it should have been.

Whether you are applying this to business (working with clients), social life (helping a friend move) or in relationships (picking her/him up on time) – it is always important to follow through on what you advertise to someone. You’ve pegged yourself as someone who wants to make a difference, who wants to put their energy into making something great and moving forward. How are you going to do that when people expect greatness from you but get mediocre results at best? Each time that happens, you undermine people’s ability to trust that they will get what you tell them and eventually they will look to another establishment/individual for their needs (or hunger!).

You’re better than that. Give your best and you won’t ever have to worry about websites popping up making a mockery of you or your product.

Then we will be back to posting regularly. Also there will be a pretty cool contest and some ways for everyone to get involved.

Cheers!