Small Business Essentials

Inc.com has a 6-part series that profiles solopreneurs who all made the leap from idea to six-figure incomes in a variety of ways. I’ve pulled out the key points here in hopes of both inspiring my readers and giving you practical advice you can use in your own business!

Inc. Online says that 2011 should be the year you finally launch your own business. Need help in getting off the ground? I’ve compiled this list of twenty articles to help you get started.

I came across the article Guidelines for Going Self-Employed on workawesome this morning, and it feels like they are leaving something out. Sure there are disadvantages to being self-employed, but they are not as bad as the article makes it seem. I’ll give you the reality of self-employment from my own perspective.

I learned a painful (and expensive) lesson recently, courtesy of Google Checkout. If you are a small business providing services to your clients, please read the rest of this story to decide for yourself whether or not you will risk offering Google Checkout to your clients as a payment method.

I have worked for clients with a wide variety of content management software and strategies — WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, ColdFusion, publishing through programs like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, proprietary systems, using PHP includes, no system at all (using flat HTML files) — and WordPress is by far the easiest for the web developer, the marketing/content person, [...]

The Carnival of Business and Entrepreneurship #2 is up at Bootstrapper right now. I wanted to point out the entry, The Single Fastest Thing You Can Do to Increase Trust, from Trusted Advisor. This interested me because Charlie’s reasons really did make sense, but I read a lot about Tim Ferriss and the The 4-Hour [...]

Disclaimer: I’m not picking on the people who really do live like that. Really, I’m not—if it works for you, then great. I saw a blog entry today on Problogger from someone saying she is a "location independent professional". After immediately thinking that sounded a whole lot like a "hook of a brand-like name" (straight [...]