There is no shortage of sites on the internet offering information on starting a business. Here are some of my personal favorites.

1) The U.S.Small Business Administration

2) The Internal Revenue Service’s Tax Information for Businesses

3) Locate your local Small Business Development Center

4) Entrepreneur.com

5) Score- Counselors to America’s Small Businesses

6) Wharton’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Blog

7) Business 2.0

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While researching statistics on the number of small businesses that fail yearly here in the Unites States, I came across these interesting figures and thought I’d share them. Based on the stats below, small business is en extremely important part of our economy here in the U.S.A.

Small firms

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ half of all private sector employees.
• Pay more than 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade.
• Create more than 50 percent of nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Supplied more than 23 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts in FY 2005.
• Produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
• Are employers of 41 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers).
• Are 53 percent home-based and 3 percent franchises.
• Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 28.6 percent of the known export value in FY 2004.

Sources:

U.S. Bureau of the Census; Advocacy-funded research by Joel Popkin and Company (Research Summary #211); Federal Procurement Data System; Advocacy-funded research by CHI Research, Inc.(Research Summary #225); Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey; U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration.

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Participating in the most recent Problogger.net writing project has renewed my enthusiasm for blogging! I have been spending a lot of time reading and discovering new blogs. Awesome nuggets of information are being shared in most of the entries. Today I decided to post some of the entries I have found especially useful in my quest to improve my blogging.

1- The Geoffreport.com Top 5 Fav WordPresss Blogging Tools

2- Simplehelp’s Top 5 OS X Dashboard Widgets for Bloggers

3- Scribbit’s Five Blogs to Watch

4- Fried Beef Tech’s Top 5 Ways to Redirect Traffic from an Old Site

5- Savvy Affiliate’s Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Have

Email this • Stumble It! • Discuss on Newsvine • Digg This! (6 Diggs) • Add to del.icio.us • Save to del.icio.us • Submit To Netscape

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This post is a result of my participation in a Top 5 Group Writing Project over at Darren Rowse’s blog. This is my first time participating in one of his projects and it have been a great experience finding hundreds of blogs I didn’t know existed! Anyway, here’s my entry and thanks for stopping by.

~~~Amanda Gladden

If you’re considering starting a business, here are five of the top things you should consider:

1. Research and analyze the target market you plan to serve and compete in

• Check out industry magazines, websites and blogs devoted to your perspective niche. Sites like Entrepreneur.com, Business 2.0 and Startup Nation are full of all types of useful business start up information.
• Contact related professional organizations and associations for information. Check your local library for the Directory of Professional Organizations to find listings of US professional organizations related to your niche

2. Establish a strong sense of purpose

• Have a clear idea what you are offering your customer base
• What will your customer expectation of your product or service? Know this and then plan on exceeding their expectations every time.
• Look at your experience and background. Is this business idea something you can be enthusiastic and passionate about.

3. Establish how you will measure success

• What criteria will you use. Will you consider yourself successful if you net $2000.00 month or have website traffic of x number of visitors each day
• Plan your business’ growth

4. Believe in yourself and trust your instincts.

To quote Oprah:
“Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.”

• Surround yourself with positive people
• Be focused and tenacious but also realize that your dream business may not get to the levels you wish for overnight.
  

5. Choose your business name and your domain name with care

• Your domain name (url) should be as short as possible, easy to spell, clear and easy to remember.
• It should tie into your brand and based on your service offering so potential customers have a clear idea what you offer.
• Avoid urls with too many hyphens. I have one business url with 2 hyphens. You know what? Nobody can remember it!
• The other extreme is a domain name that can be pronounced in a couple of different ways. For example the site Who Represents when spelled out as a url looks like this: http://www.whorepresents.com– a far cry from the intended meaning : ) To see other hilarious url foul ups, check out this old post at Poor Excuse for a Blog.

Please tell me more! »

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