Business Blogs: Trends, tips, and real-life anecdotes from industry experts.

The vast majority of the companies in the Fortune 500 started out as small business enterprises, many created to bring one specific new product idea or design to life.
We live in the land of Thomas Edison, who by his own admission failed a hundred times more often than he succeeded.
But when he succeeded - oh [...]

My uncle and small business owner, Mark Burris, could be your typical 21st century businessman. Let's take a look at his typical morning (pulled from his "IdeaBlog"):

Tuesday, July 31.

"It’s 5:50a as I write this, and I’m watching via iTunes last night’s
“NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” 23 minutes with no advertising,
only programming promotions from NBC [...]

I began answering this question from one of my readers, and then just figured I might as well turn this into a blog post so others can benefit from it. The following question was asked:
Q: I was wondering if you would mind taking time and jotting down a few
pointers for me to follow in starting [...]

For most people, their eBay business dominates their lives… Day in and day out, business owners are working IN their business, looking for new products to sell, listing items for sale, answering customer service emails, organizing their inventory, packaging up orders….
Does this sound like you?
It used to sound like me, but it doesn’t anymore… Don’t [...]

One of the challenges faced by anyone running a start-up or small business is learning what you need to know, before your lack of knowledge trips you up big time.
Reading business books and accessing online info like StartupNation are two important ways to learn. (Have you checked out 10 Steps to Grow Your Business lately?)
Another important [...]

One of the major advantages of the web is that it makes cross promotion simple.
This is easy when you use multi-channel marketing. For example, I typically use
blogs, RSS feeds, surveys, and videos to communicate with my
customers. However, when I want to convey the most important information, I
always use email.
If you publish to multiple places, you [...]

When I read this from Seth Godin, my first thought went to parenting.
Contagious
 
 Andrew Field is President of PrintingForLess.com, known by its thousands of happy customers as "America’s Print Shop." He works and lives along the Yellowstone River in southwest Montana.

This is a quick gem for today:
I don't have a landline. (Yes, in our house, we have 3 Nextel cell phones, in 3 area codes, but not a single landline.) So when a client needs an invoice faxed or wants to fax a print project markup to me, I end up having to get in [...]

An article in today's NY Times, Don't Go West Young Man … Buy Yourself a Franchise Instead,  
asks a very interesting question. Should recent college graduates without any real-world experience forgo corporate America and buy a franchise? Our research shows that less than 1% are currently doing that. But that doesn't mean it isn't a [...]

Always remember that with the web, your content needs to be relevant to each
reader. It has to be less about selling and more about providing. One way to do
this is to maintain multiple contact lists or list segments. Not every message
you send will be relevant for every customer. With web technology you can
easily provide relevant [...]