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

Earth Day may have been last week, but it doesn’t mean you should stop thinking green.  As an entrepreneur you may not have made the leap (or may not want to) to an office building.  Instead you may be working from home, or chose to have a home office.  Whatever the reason, it doesn’t mean [...]

Referencing my prior post on Creative Capitalism, here is another business with a 1 for 1 model.
A new project by California eco-urban design firm LJ Urban aims to make giving more concrete—quite literally—by matching its sales of homes domestically with funds to build homes in the impoverished African nation of Burkina Faso.

Urban has designed a [...]

To follow up on a previous post requesting feedback on topics and offering to highlight members of the community, I learned of Padosa.com. Their goal is to provide the public with innovative and practical ideas that they can put into action today to save money, make money, and promote sustainable businesses and a sustainable planet-that is [...]

When you consider your business model (which includes your marketing efforts), you generally concentrate on these core components:

Why will people pay you? (money, votes, donations)
What does it cost you to sell your item…margins?
What protects you from competition, price-feature battles?
How will you turn an agnostic audience into loyal customers?

Early on when transactions had no costs, doing [...]

Recently, I was contacted by a PR firm (Attention) and asked if I would profile Blake Mycoskie on my blog(s). I’m ashamed to say how long it’s taken me to turn this piece around, however seeing the latest ATT commercial featuring Blake after a long day of meetings (at my day job) shamed me into finishing. My [...]

Usually, the acronym, ROI (”Return on Investment”) is reserved for use in characterizing how much money you get out of a deal as an investor. It’s basically a financial stat.
But the ROI for us at StartupNation is something quite different, which I realized as soon as I received this unsolicited email at 7:41pm. Beyond the [...]

Hard to tell if this qualifies as innovative or if it should be put in the “people-will-pay-for-anything” category…but I can say I’ve seen it all now.  I suppose it’s green, technically… I suppose it’s home based. Clearly niche, if you believe that only a small segment of the population would actually put money behind the [...]

It’s tough slogging out there, entrepreneurs, isn’t it?! That’s why we’ve created an opportunity for one among you to win a Small Business Startup Kit, designed to get your home business’s world headquarters in gear! And it all happens right here in this blog post.
The Small Business Startup Kit was assembled in collaboration with Office Depot, [...]

Late last year (as if it was so long ago) I attended a keynote presentation featuring Larry Brilliant of Google.org and Malcolm Gladwell author of The Tipping Point. Larry Brilliant shared his inspirational story of leading the first organization of doctors to rid the world of smallpox and how it eventually lead him to his [...]

It’s possible if you manufacture or sell products for children under 12 years old.  The phrase “National Bankruptcy Day” was coined by toy manufacturer Rick Woldenberg, President/CEO of Learning Resources, in reference to the new CPSIA legislation that passed on October 18, 2008.  The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) is a direct response to [...]