Mark Mugleston. Editor’s Note.

This issue of Mormon Entrepreneur highlights three fantastic entrepreneurs in our community: Rich Christiansen, Jay Bean, and Dave Bascom. Their companies, CastleWave, OrangeSoda, and SEO.com, respectively speaking, are three of the largest and fastest growing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies in the world. All were founded in Utah Valley and each has been awarded as a “Top 25 Under Five” by the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum.

If you are unfamiliar with SEO, I would encourage you to read “Search Engine Optimization” found at Wikipedia.com to get an overview of this topic. Reading the first section should give you a good picture of what SEO is about before reading our interviews. If you’re a more technically minded person and you want a bit more before starting this issue, I would recommend that you read “Beginner’s Guide – What is SEO?” found at seomoz.com.

In this issue, my interviews with Dave Bascom and Jay Bean follow the tell-me-about-your-business-and-industry format found in our first issue: I probe for light and they enlighten our entrepreneurial path. Their interviews are brilliant. My interview with Rich Christiansen varies slightly from this format. Instead of talking about CastleWave and the intricacies of SEO, I chose to interview Rich about his new book Bootstrap Business, co-authored by Ron E. Porter.

Some time ago, Rich decided to pour all of his entrepreneurial knowledge into one straight-forward book for aspiring entrepreneurs. Though this task was more difficult than originally expected, he persisted and came out with one fantastic business survival guide. He shares, in one of our conversations, “Anyone can start a $600,000+ business. It’s easy. Anyone can do this by following the principals in this book.” —and Rich isn’t joking! To prove this point, Rich and Ron founded CastleWave as a test case for the principals found in Bootstrap. Three years later, CastleWave is now generating over $110,000 monthly sales revenue at a 65 percent profit margin. Yikes!

Rich’s success with CastleWave and Bootstrap is the perfect segway for a new exciting feature for Mormon Entrepreneur: book summaries. In this issue, we provide a thorough summary of Bootstrap Business. Learn how to filter through business ideas with Rich’s business-evaluation toolkit and to hone in on principals essential to your success. Do you like it! We plan on summarizing one book, preferably recommended by one of our entrepreneurs, in every issue of Mormon Entrepreneur.

Thank you again for visiting Mormon Entrepreneur. We hope that you will enjoy this issue on Search Engine Optimization.

— Mark Mugleston

If you would like to help and join Mormon Entrepreneur, please feel free to contact me at editor at mormonentrepreneur dot net or on Facebook.

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