Lessons From a Blue-Collar Millionaire
Source: http://www.inc.com
"Everyone I knew who'd had a business told me, 'No one cares like an owner. No one works as hard as an owner,'" Sarillo says. "They said, 'Watch out. People are going to steal.' I set out to prove them wrong. I wanted a place where everyone worked hard and cared a lot; where people enjoyed coming to work, felt good afterward, and weren't motivated to steal. If I couldn't have that kind of business, I didn't want to have a business."

Payvment Lets You Launch A Storefront On Facebook
Source: http://www.downloadsquad.com
Finally, beyond the sale of virtual gifts like hugs and angel wings, Facebook has an app that allows you to open an ecommerce storefront via Payvment. In addition to its Facebook app, Payvment has a shopping cart web service which allows you to add a shopping cart to any website by adding just a single line of code.

You've Been Yelped
Source: http://www.inc.com
The Web is littered with the testimony of business owners who claim to have been shaken down, slandered, or otherwise damaged by Yelp and its users. Go into any service business, find the owner, and ask her what she thinks about Yelp, and you are liable to get, at best, a mixed response. A restaurateur in Phoenix told me that reading Yelp reviews is like "panning for gold in sh**." "Anybody can ruin your business," said another restaurant owner in Lafayette, California. He urged me to "come out and expose these guys."

List of Legal Resources For Startups and Entrepreneurs
Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com
Regardless of whether lawyers are something entrepreneurs should loathe or love, it seems as though a curation of legal resources for startups was in order. The following is a list (in no particular order or rank) of blogs, articles, websites, VC tips and other online resources for entrepreneurs and startups.

10 Small Business Trends and Opportunities
Source: http://smallbiztrends.com
What are some of the key trends affecting small businesses? And more importantly, what do these trends mean and what kind of opportunities will they lead to for your business?

Retail Store Industry Benchmarks
Source: http://www.smallbizsurvival.com
A great source for business intelligence: the Retail Owners Institute offers industry benchmark data on six key financial ratios. In a section called Store Benchmarks, they break down industry averages into 51 different retail lines. They give five years of data for the six financial ratios.

How to Take Advantage of Online Review and Answer Sites
Source: http://www.inc.com
A look at using customer forums and review sites such as Yelp to generate sales, tips on responding to negative feedback, plus how and why to make it simple for customers to review you.

A Tradeshow Checklist
Source: http://blog.asmartbear.com
Tradeshows are a combination of high-level strategy and low-level minutiae, so a checklist comes in handy.

How to Target GMail Users with Highly Relevant Ads
Source: http://www.ducttapemarketing.com
If you are a GMail user you've probably noticed Google's highly relevant ads running in and around your emails. For example, if someone sends you some information about a new car they are thinking about buying there's a good chance you're going to see car related ads when you open this email.

Hidden Value of Weak Social Media Relationships
Source: http://www.jmorganmarketing.com
Research shows that weak ties can prove much more helpful in networking, because they form bridges to worlds we do not walk within. Strong ties, on the other hand, tend to be worlds we already know; a good friend often knows many of the same people and things we know. They are not the best when it comes to searching for new jobs, ideas, experts, and knowledge.

Book Review - Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Source: http://www.chrisbrogan.com
This is about Chip and Dan Heath's really amazing new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. It's the best book about understanding the mechanics and switches of change that I've ever read. The book has LOTS of how-to baked into it, and by the end, you'll be re-assessing all kinds of projects in your life.

10 Steps to Create Ready to Buy Customers
Source: http://www.whitepapersummit.com
Finding quality customers during tough times really is achievable. Here's some recession-proven steps any business can take to attract great customers-directly from a leading marketer who's business was nearly crushed by the economy.

13 Tips for Getting More ReTweets
Source: http://sem-group.net
For those looking to spread their message far and wide on Twitter, attracting ReTweets (RT) is a must. When your followers RT your content, it can create a snowball effect. Your followers RT it, then their followers RT it, and then their followers RT it, and so on. But to enjoy that snowball effect, it all starts with knowing how to attract those initial RTs. Here are 13 tips for getting more people to RT your content.

Unanswered Email Undermines Your Productivity
Source: http://lifehacker.com
We often blame our lack of time-management skills for an overflowing email inbox. Lifehack.org's Francis Wade says our overflowing inboxes might be the reason we're so unproductive in the first place. Nowadays, we'll often glance at an email and then file it away to answer "soon." Often, it only takes a couple of days for the inbox to start overflowing and pretty soon we're overwhelmed with too much email to answer and not enough time to get to it. That's enough to make a person feel completely unproductive, and it's all downhill from there.

3 Tools to Sync Your Files with Google Docs
Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com
With these apps, you can transfer and synchronize your local files to Google Docs without having to upload them one-by-one. But which application is right for you? We took a look at the options Google suggested and have summarized the features, drawbacks, and pricing information.

Spredfast: How to Keep Up with the Social Web
Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com
The entirely Web-based application is a full set of tools to not only manage and measure the message a company sends out among various social media, but also track the people who send the message. With fully customizable user roles and permissions, Spredfast looks like a great way to target multiple audiences on the Web from multiple directions. We think the key word here is multiple. This is a tool that can make a single person appear, to the average Web user, to be an entire community of people talking about your product.

New Data on Twitter Usage Can Strengthen Your Twitter Outreach
Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com
HubSpot also has some excellent insight into when people are using Twitter. This is essential data to have a grasp on if you're looking to build a Twitter marketing strategy. After all, getting your message heard above the chatter on Twitter is difficult on a good day...post it on a day or at a time when no one is paying attention and you're entire campaign can come to a screeching halt.

Stop Marketing Features over Benefits
Source: http://marketingtechblog.com
Don't get me wrong, there will be specific buyers that are looking for features that may give you the edge over the competition - but those should be neatly identified on a Features page that's easy to find and read. I believe comparison charts work best. Your home page and marketing content should be focused on the benefits of using your platform. Keep features on a features page!

What Experience Are You Creating for Your Customers?
Source: http://smallbiztrends.com
You know you want your customers to talk about you, but... what do you want them to say? What steps have you taken to build experience-making into your marketing strategy and the way you do business? After all, if you want people to spread your buzz, you have to give them something to share.

24 Hours With Google's Nexus One
Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com
Would your business benefit if you were able to browse the web, make calls, send emails and text messages, take photos, find important places locally and turn spoken words into text, no matter where you are? What do you need to be doing to make sure your business is keeping apace with how people live and do business as we enter the second decade of the 21st century? I do believe that Google's Nexus One is hinting at the answer.

Google Is Now Apple's Greatest Enemy: Here's Why
Source: http://mashable.com
It's time to call it: Google is now Apple's greatest enemy. Soon Google will be entering its OS turf with Chrome OS. Apple increasingly sees Google as a major competitor over the next few years. While the company Steve built doesn't particularly like Microsoft, it knows that it has to work with the lesser of two evils in order to succeed. Say hello to the new dynamic. It's Apple + Microsoft vs. Google. May the new battle begin.

How to Extend the Profitability of an E-Book Beyond Launch Week
Source: http://www.problogger.net
Once all the bells and whistles of the initial offer fade - do E-books continue to sell or do you need to keep launching new ones (or re-launching the old ones) to keep turning a profit? These are some of the questions I've been pondering lately. Don't get me wrong - a $72,000 opening week is fantastic - but what happens next?

The Art of Zen Copywriting
Source: http://www.copyblogger.com
With hard sell copywriting, you try to beat your prospective customers into submission with line after line of copy. With Zen Copywriting, you offer something of high quality that people want, then focus on making it so easy to buy that people can't refuse.

Billings Touch: Handle Your Invoices on Your Phone
Source: http://freelanceswitch.com
All in all, the iPhone application is easy to use. The interface is easy to work with: while I wouldn't want to have to site down and type out a whole stack of invoices in one go, Billings Touch is perfect if I need to time a project, update a client's expenses or get an invoice out right away. And that's just the iPhone version. The computer version is equally easy to use, and makes importing information from your Address Book and similar task just as easy as on your phone.

How to Apologize the Right Way and Keep the Business
Source: http://www.damniwish.com
An email had just gone to corporate. Someone was unhappy. He was still in the hotel. We had 36 hours to fix the problem before he left unhappy and told everyone. The on-the-scene crash team descended on the situation.

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