The Week in Review
- GoogleTalk Tips
- In Small Business, No One Starts with a Masterpiece
- Turn your Press Release into a Podcast with PRWeb
- Print Your Own Brochures, Flyers and Mailers
- Small business branding for the web
- Think Twice Before Borrowing from Family
- How Do You Get More Clients
- 8 Simple Rules for Rating A Business Opportunity
- The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs
- Starting An Online Store: The Essential Checklist - Part II
- Five Ways to Brighten Your Business in Five Minutes
- My Favorite Business Model
- The ultimate tax shelter: Owning your own business
- Paypal Review by Yaro Starak
- Building Your First Business Website
- Guide to Basic Business Letters
- … for more in our coverage of small business see our Full Archives
Guide to Basic Business Letters
About.com’s English as a Second Language offers up a Guide to Basic Business Letters.
Obviously targeted at those who are learning English, this guide should be read by all as those of us whose native language is English can from time to time fall into lazy writing (I’ll put my hand up here!).
As they start out …
The basics of good business letter writing are easy to learn.
True. And the trick is to keep honing your skills until good business letter writing becomes second nature.
Read a Guide to Basic Business Letters over at About.com
Building Your First Business Website
Does your business have a website? If not, you may be missing out on a huge opportunity by not interacting with your current and potential customers in a timely and efficient manner.
By now most business owners are aware of how important a presence on the Web can be to their company’s marketing, sales and public relations efforts.
So says Melonie Murray of SmallBizMentor (a Know More Media blog).
In her post - Building Your First Business Website - she offers up a handful of must-haves when starting a website for your business. They are…
- An opt-in e-newsletter (this is an amazing marketing tool!)
- A shopping cart (even if you’re not selling anything just yet)
- A press room page (for media releases and media kits)
- A blog area (for adding a personal “face” to your site)
- A frequently asked questions (FAQs) page
Read the full post at SmallBizMentor - Building Your First Business Website.
Paypal Review by Yaro Starak
Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs Journey has posted an in-depth review of PayPal.
In his PayPal Review, Yaro gives us the good and the bad of PayPal.
Firstly, Yaro explains the need for an online payment processor…
An online payment processor is one of the most important parts of an online business. Without the ability to receive money online you can’t really run an Internet business. Sure you could work only with offline payment methods such as money orders, cheques in the mail or cash, but all of these methods are slow and you will definitely be losing potential customers if you don’t offer some form of instant payment method that handles credit cards.
PayPal - The Good: multiple currencies, cut and paste shopping cart functions.
PayPal - The Bad: Some bad horror stories (users kicked out, money being locked etc), Not great on customer service.
And Yaro’s conclusion…
All-in-all, for what Paypal does - primarily to allow you to send money through email and take credit card payments online - it does well. It makes what could be a terribly complex function, one full of potential security and privacy issues, and turns it into something as simple as sending email.
Read the full review at Entrepreneurs Jourtney - Paypal Review.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Editor’s Note: Yaro is famous for his longish posts. But they aren’t long just for the sake of it. This Aussie entrepreneur is writing with depth about his err… journey as an entrepreneur. Good stuff, Yaro.
The ultimate tax shelter: Owning your own business
Who’d like to reduce their taxes? Okay, after waiting for the deafening roars of “me, me, me” to subside lets go.
MSN Money offers up one of the best ways of doing so: owning your own business …
The surest way to reduce your taxes is to convert personal expenditures into allowable deductions. Turn even a hobby into a business and you’ll cut your tax bill.
In The ultimate tax shelter: Owning your own business, MSN Money takes you through the process.
But at the end of the day, focusing just on cutting the taxes you pay should be secondary…
Focus on your profit-making motive. Remember that it’s not what you pay in taxes that counts, it’s what you keep.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Editor’s Note: This article focuses on the US with discussion about the IRS and various compliance issues. Needless to say, every country has their own rules and regulations and you should follow up those etc., etc., In Australia’s case (where I’m from), from my reading of this article, you can pretty much follow the advice (but don’t hold me to this), just change the names…
My Favorite Business Model
A VC, the musings of a venture capitalist in New York City (Fred Wilson), offers up his My Favorite Business Model…
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.
Read My Favorite Business Model over at A VC.
Editor’s Note: sounds sort of web2.0ish, except for the premium priced value added services aka: having a revenue, which hiding behind the web2.0 moniker won’t hide the fact that many are forgetting the basics of business … but don’t let that get in the way.
Five Ways to Brighten Your Business in Five Minutes
Know More Media’s SmallBizMentor offers up five quick ways to brighten your businessfor the coming week…
Some of my colleagues like to use the weekends to prepare everything in their office for the upcoming week; others take a few minutes each day to prepare for the next. Others just fly by the seat of their pants and take full advantage of the weekend as time off.
Read SmallBizMentor’s Five Ways to Brighten Your Business in Five Minutes.
Starting An Online Store: The Essential Checklist - Part II
Following on from last weeks Starting An Online Store: The Essential Checklist, ecommerce-guide.com offers the last installment of their checklist - Starting An Online Store: The Essential Checklist - Part II.
They are…
Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
9) An Accounting Package
10) A Web Analytics Package (and Knowledge of Conversion Rates)
11) Awareness of Competitive Sites
12) A Shipping Rate Structure
13) A Security System and Data Backup
14) A Marketing Plan
15) Plenty of Gumption
Read Starting An Online Store: The Essential Checklist - Part II, over at ecommerce-guide.com
The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs
Guy Kawasaki has hit the blogosphere this year with a bang and with some buzz behind him (it does help that he’s coming at it with something behind him: a handful of successful books).
Guy’s post The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs looks at what many entrepreneurs get up to when pitching for venture capital.
Guy explains…
I get pitched dozens of times every year, and every pitch contains at least three or four of these lies.
And the top ten (plus one extra)…
- “Our projections are conservative.”
- “(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.”
- “(Big name company) is going to sign our purchase order next week.”
- “Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded.”
- “No one is doing what we’re doing.”
- “No one can do what we’re doing.”
- “Hurry because several other venture capital firms are interested.”
- “Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.”
- “We have a proven management team.”
- “Patents make our product defensible.”
- “All we have to do is get 1% of the market.
Guy discusses each point over at his post - The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs
8 Simple Rules for Rating A Business Opportunity
So you think you have found the one business opportunity that will bring you freedom, fame, and plenty of profits? Does it meet the 8 simple rules? Before you run out and cash in your life-savings, stop and separate your emotions from the small business opportunity.
The 8 simple rules for rating a small business opportunity…
1. Beta Test it
2. Find the Target
3. Apply Protection Armor
4. See What They Want
5. Play The Money Game
6. Bring Your Skills to the Table
7. View the Event Horizon
8. Use the People Factor
Read the full article, which goes into each point, over at About.com - 8 Simple Rules for Rating A Business Opportunity