The majority of small business owners agree that online marketplaces have positively impacted their sales, according to a poll by Manta.

Nearly 70% of small business owners polled stated that marketplaces like Amazon and eBay have helped them increase sales, while about 30% believe they have had a negative impact. Most small businesses (81%) believe that online sales are critical to their companys success, but most rely on their own websites as an e-commerce channel. Sixty-six percent of small businesses sell products through their own websites, 24% sell on Amazon, and 22% sell on eBay.

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Want to be a better negotiator? Here are some simple tips.

1. Listen more than you talk.
It is easy to go into a negotiation focused only on what you'll say, especially when you are nervous.

The goal of a negotiation is not just to get what you want, but also to help the other side get what they want. (Otherwise, how will you ever strike a deal?) To do that, you need to actually know what the other side wants -- which means you have to listen.

Finding common ground means knowing common ground exists.

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U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry today announced that the Department of Energy will award 219 grants totaling $34 million to 183 small businesses in 41 states.  Funded through DOE’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, todays selections are for Phase I research and development.  

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The month of May begins with a focus on the importance of Small Business followed by the love for Mom. The charts and analysis that follow are from Prospers monthly survey of over 7,500 Americans.

We asked Deborah Weinswig, Managing Director of Coresight Research, to provide commentary on the data from the most important deciders for the economy… the consumers themselves.

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This week is Small Business Week, and on Thursday Amazon released its first Small Business Impact Report. Its position? Amazon has been good for small businesses.

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Want to get really, really rich? Starting your own business is the best way. Want your upside to be unlimited? Starting your own business is the best way. Want to be free to chart your own course, to make your own decisions, to make your own mistakes -- to let the sky be the limit not just financially but also, and more important, personally?

Starting your own business is the best way.

Still not convinced? Here are 15 more reasons why you should start your own small business today:

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Recently, American Management Services started working with the owner of a restaurant chain, made up of six locations spread across the Northeast. Since the first day they opened their doors, they approached paying vendors with a sense of loyalty by cutting checks the day the invoice was received. While being loved by their vendors, our client was receiving no discounts, and put themselves financially at risk by not safe-guarding their cash!

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The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards, designed to ensure businesses which accept and process credit and debit card information, do so in a safe and secure environment.

No matter what industry you operate in or what size business you have, if you accept card payments and process, transmit and store cardholder data, you must host your data securely with a hosting provider that is PCI compliant.

The PCI security Standards Council was formed in 2006 by the five major credit card brands — American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Japanese Credit Bureau (JCB) and Discover. While each credit card brand has its own compliance programs, the PCI standards are the foundation for all of them.

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Small business advocates largely grumbled after the nation's highest court overturned a decades-old decision on online sales tax.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that states now have the power to force online retailers to collect sales tax in states where they do not have a physical presence, reversing a ruling from 1992 in a 5-4 decision. The move also revives a 2016 South Dakota law that required large, out-of-state e-commerce companies to collect sales tax, one that big e-commerce players fought. Some online retailers, such as Amazon.com, currently collect state sales tax on products they directly sell but do not collect taxes from many of the independent sellers on the site.

The decision removes the sales-tax savings that consumers could reap by making purchases online instead of buying from local brick-and-mortar shops. Although the move does help to level the playing field for physical small businesses, it also places new burdens on small online retailers.

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This transformation from hobby to business creates entrepreneurial avenues for people who might not otherwise have chosen this path. There are several types of activities that can be successfully monetized.

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For most of us, that means establishing a nest egg in the form of an IRA, 401(k), or both. But a large number of small-business owners have a different sort of backup plan for covering the bills in retirement: their businesses.

An estimated 42% of small-business owners say that their businesses will serve as their personal pensions, so to speak, according to data from New York Life. But that's a dangerous proposition in several regards.

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Growing your business is an exciting task. It means customers are receiving your business well and you are bringing in a profit.

But, growing your business can be intimidating. Many things have the potential to go wrong. That’s why you need a plan. When you know what to do and what to avoid, you can avoid stumbling.

Use the following seven dos and do nots to successfully grow your business.


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Intimidated by negotiations? Focus on these five simple negotiation skills first and get much better.

Think of all the times in your business week you negotiate:  with new hires and existing employees; with sales prospects and long-term clients; with vendors and suppliers. If you're a business owner or leader, you need to know how to negotiate. This is non-negotiable.

Here are the five most important negotiation skills you should focus on first. Each of these skills has proved to be worth millions to my clients and to me over the past 25 years. This all recently came to a head when I had 35 of my top business coaching clients join me for a day-and-a-half program on negotiation in my hometown of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. These were 35 of the most successful entrepreneurs and business owners in the United States.

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Technology has started to feel like a four-letter word these days—especially in the business world. Stand by the water cooler and you might hear chatter among employees about what programs, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, will mean for the future of jobs.

As this technology comes to life, many people fear for their professional future. They worry that robots will soon sit at their desks while they’re out on the street struggling to find work.

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If you do not have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.

Remember this one, from, like, kindergarten? Apologies are one thing, but better to just avoid the whole thing altogether. Note: this is not the same thing as ignoring criticism. There are constructive ways of responding, though, that will not send your companys stocks plummeting.

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Amazon is often blamed for the demise of the Mom and Pop store and other local and cultural icons of Main Street USA. There may be some truth to this, but it is also just as important to say that the company has helped many small and midsize businesses to grow and thrive.

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There is something incredibly important in life that I do not hear enough people talking about. It is called your personal brand and it goes far beyond your career.

I started learning about personal branding over 10 years ago when I got into the entrepreneurial world. I noticed a big difference between some peoples brands and others. So I started taking notes.

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Here are seven reasons why your business is not generating sales:

1. You are marketing, not selling.

Reaching out to a networking contact is a sales call when that contact has expressed a need and interest for what you are selling, and you actually discuss your offer, your pricing, next steps and or other ways to move forward. If your networking meeting is to introduce what you offer or to reconnect in general, that is a marketing call. Many small business owners are busy on social media, tweaking their website, writing blogs, and catching up over coffee – all of which is great for marketing and may lead to sales eventually -- but these activities are not directly generating sales.

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The company has launched a new store focused on smaller U.S. companies.

For many businesses, Amazon operates as both a competitor and a partner. The online giant offers a platform for companies to sell their goods while it also competes with the same companies it works with.

Now, the digital retailer has launched Amazon Storefronts, a new store that exclusively sells products from small and medium-sized businesses from the United States. It offers more than 1 million products curated by Amazon from 20,000 small and mid-sized businesses.

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Then, as the recovery progressed, taxes and regulations reemerged.   But over the last year, those two concerns have been displaced by the availability of qualified labor.  Finding qualified employees is always a concern in a growing economy and has certainly grown in importance in this expansion, even more prominent than in 2000, when the ratio of employment to the population hit a record high.

Assisting its rise to number one has been the decline in the concerns about taxes and the cost of regulatory compliance.  The sharp decline in concerns about taxes and regulatory compliance are most likely due to the policies of this administration.  Record levels of proposed regulations peaked in the last two years of the last administration but dropped to practically nothing early in this term.  Since then, many existing regulations and rules have been eliminated or scaled back.

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It is not a one-time undertaking but an ongoing process that must be revisited throughout the life of any business. In fact, nearly half of all CEOs launch a company reorganization during their first two years on the job.

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Well, it turns out that, according to decades of academic research, introverts are more likely than extroverts to have those characteristics:

1. Introverts are generally more creative.
Introverts are famously more creative than extroverts. According to the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills, Creativity is a problem-solving response by intelligent, very active, highly emotional, and extremely introverted persons.

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Entrepreneurs start their own businesses or side hustles--which you can do in just a few hours--for a variety of reasons. Some want to be their own boss. Others want to make their living by doing something they love. Others seek the opportunity to make a bigger difference in the lives of others.

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These days, content marketing is considered a crucial aspect of any company's advertising efforts. Yet, for a new startup with a limited budget, trying to find a way to craft compelling blogs, social media posts or infographics can seem overwhelming.

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It is easy to see why text messaging is the most-used data service across the world. We send and receive five times as many texts compared with the number of phone calls each day, according to mobile intelligence firm Informate.

A huge 90 percent of the time, a text is read within the first three minutes of receiving. Customers who receive texts from businesses tend to have a 40 percent higher conversion rate than those who do not. Small businesses could benefit from this consumer behaviour.

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A few rules of SEO, like publishing great content and providing a good user experience, are universal.

But not all websites thrive by using the exact same set of SEO guidelines.

News websites, in particular, place greater emphasis on certain elements than other types of sites.

Here are five best practices you should keep in mind to optimize your news site for search.

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There's a lot of advice out there for the lazy and unmotivated: Take baby steps! Set a timer! Enlist an accountability partner! But what if the best way to tackle lack of motivation is not to give any sort of advice at all, but to ask for it instead?

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Whether you are a small business owner, a consumer, or the CEO of a big corporation, you likely know that small companies are a pretty big part of the economy. This year, show your support for small enterprises by participating in Small Business Saturday® (SBS).

My accounting and payroll software company, Patriot Software, is an advocate of Small Business Saturday. And personally, I am a major supporter of small businesses. I know how much time, dedication, money, and hard work entrepreneurs pour into their small companies.

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The growth of cybercrime will cost the global economy more than $2 trillion by 2019, according to the Better Business Bureau’s 2017 State of Cybersecurity Among Small Businesses in North America report.

Cost of a Cyber Attack
When it comes to small businesses, the report said the overall annual loss was estimated at almost $80K or $79,841 on average. And as more small businesses become equal parts digital and brick-and-mortar, securing both aspects of their company is more important than ever.
The risks small business owners face in the digital world has increased their awareness of the dangers of this ecosystem. A survey conducted by GetApp in 2017 revealed security concerns ranked second as the challenges small businesses were facing.

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Despite recent stock market turmoil, everywhere you looked this year someone was heralding the strength of the economy, which grew at 3.5 percent in the third quarter. However, not all economic growth favors small businesses, and some even detracts from it. The Inc. Entrepreneurship Index, which measures the quarterly health of the U.S. startup economy, currently sits at 83 out of 100 for the third quarter of 2018. This is down two points from the second quarter and a full nine points from the first quarter of 2017, when our Index peaked. Our indicator sees one factor in particular still dragging like an anchor on the startup economy: job growth.

Even though overall economic conditions have been largely favorable, small businesses have hit a growth ceiling as larger companies--bolstered by generally strong market conditions, favorable tax policies, support from local governments, and easing federal regulations--have been gobbling up talent. This is why, for the past year, the Index has shown a startup economy that is strong but slowing.

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This past year, 2018, has been a very good one for innovation. We've seen the blockchain boom, the increase in low-code and no-code app development, the start of the rollout of 5G technology and AI and AR: All came into their own with countless programs and applications for both business and consumer life.

On the coattails of such a year, I believe that 2019 has the opportunity to show even more promise. Here are the trends I predict we will see in small businesses and across the industry as a whole:

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The end of the calendar year is a natural time to reassess how your business did in the previous 12 months and then devise a plan for improving. By almost every measure, 2018 was a good year for the economy. Small business optimism is high, holiday sales were the strongest in years, unemployment is low, and consumer confidence hit an 18-year high in September before tempering a bit in November.

It would be hard to duplicate the atmosphere that prevailed in 2018. The impact of President Trump’s tax cuts will lessen, interest rates have risen again, and the Dow Jones dropped from 25,862.43 on December 3 to 21,792.20 on Christmas Eve, a sign that the economy may be slowing.

Small business owners need to take all of these factors into account.

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2019 Marketing Automation Trends

If you want to use marketing automation to help your business succeed in 2019, your approach to automation will predetermine much of your success. To start out strong, consider bringing the following marketing automation trends into your strategy for the year ahead:

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As a Texas real estate broker, one of the things I do at my company, Goodwin Commercial, is educate our clients on the commercial investment process. We offer a step-by-step process evaluation to protect our clients when making the decision to go from leasing to purchasing a property for their business. That process often includes making recommendations about how they might leverage a good situation or opportunity into a great one, often via strategic financing and purchasing decisions. In this case, the couple initially tried to go the SBA (U.S. Small Business Administration) route but were turned down by the first national bank they approached. They were definitely discouraged!

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The 2018 holiday season is in the books, and small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) sold big on Amazon. In fact, SMBs had their best holiday shopping season ever.

The e-tail giant itself had a record-setting holiday season as well: More items were ordered worldwide on Amazon than ever before.

But it was not just corporations like LEGO that benefitted from all this shopping. More than 50 percent of all items sold came from small and medium-sized businesses.

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On one hand, year-on-year improvements are what makes companies great; on the other, firms can’t control many of the factors that dictate whether, say, revenue rises or not.

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As we welcome 2019, attention is shifting to what’s on the horizon for small businesses in the year ahead. The reality is that the nature of work is evolving. During my more than 25-year career, I have held a number of leadership positions. Early in my time in the health insurance industry, compensation reigned supreme among my employees, while health and wellness were perceived as a nice-to-have benefit.

Now, workplace norms are beginning to align more with employee wants and needs and new rules about conducting business are being established — particularly when it comes to employee health and wellness. I believe this shift, which I have witnessed within my own team, will continue to dominate work environments across the nation in the new year.

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I am pleased to bring you my top five tricks for disconnecting – and at least temporarily escaping the job stress.

1. Make the business case.

Taking time to recharge is not just good for your mental and physical health -- it is the smart thing to do for your business. Studies have shown that increased stress leads to reduced productivity, while decreased stress levels lead to increased productivity.

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Like departments and agencies throughout government, the Air Force is tuning its acquisition methods to get closer the speed of technology, and will be holding its first live pitch day in March, with an available funding pool of $40 million.

The Air Forces Small Business Innovation Research program has issued a call to start-ups and small businesses—those with fewer than 500 employees—to offer pitches on innovative technologies for secure communications, down-range battlefield operations and digital technologies.

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Not every step you take to move your business forward will be a big one. But sometimes, even small steps can make a large impact on your future. Here are some recent tips and insights from members of the online small business community about big and small steps you can take to really make an impact on your business.

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Procrastination is an odd compulsion. Everyone has experienced it, but the underlying reasons can be tough to pin down.

After all, procrastination delays the very activities that bring people closer to their goals -- whether that is building a thriving business or stronger triceps. So why do not humans just sprint toward that brighter, fitter future?

The science.
Scientific studies of procrastination have spiked over the past 20 years. Researchers once considered the issue a basic time-management problem, but they now view it as a complex and highly individual phenomena.  

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A new report is saying that almost half of people recently hired (41%) used an online job board to find work and 61% flagged automatic job alerts as helpful. What is more, a full 14% found their present job using social media. The findings from How Do People Find Jobs? published by the B2B research firm, Clutch, highlights how today’s candidates are connecting with small businesses and vice versa.

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Many small businesses start out with a single location or product offering and grow over time. Expanding your business is a good way to increase your long-term profitability and reach a wider audience.

But while growing your venture might be something you'd like to do eventually, now might not be the ideal time to dive in. Here are four reasons you might choose not to grow your business, and instead stick with the status quo.

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Now, I do not want to burst any happy bubbles for those of you who are already treading the traditional pathway, but that traditional narrative no longer makes much sense, because over the past two decades, big corporations, big academia, and big corporatist government have rigged the business world so that the longer you wait to start your own company, the less likely you are to be successful.

Because of this, young entrepreneurs (Mil

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Big companies often have big perks. That is especially true in the technology Opens a New Window.  space, where free meals, gyms, and even day care are quite common. Even more traditional large companies that do not offer those kinds of benefits still have things that smaller businesses Opens a New Window. do not -- there are more opportunities for advancement, more training opportunities, and maybe even the option of transferring to another location.

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Cybersecurity remains one of the most challenging issues for small business owners. And the problem leads small business owners to seek out managed service providers to present them with solutions.

But a new report from Continuum says the state of cybersecurity among small businesses in 2019 still needs to improve. The data suggests great opportunities for service providers who offer cyber security as part of their package.

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People have a lot of opinions when it comes to debt and borrowing. At one extreme, some believe that all debt should be avoided and there’s no room for argument on the subject. Others perhaps borrow a little too freely, taking out new financing with little thought about whether doing so will be a benefit or a hindrance in the long term.

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As your small business grows, it will eventually become too big to run out of your home. With steady clients coming in or an expanding workforce of people you have hired, you probably don't want to keep conducting business in your basement or at your kitchen table.

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If you want to change your circumstances, you need to change the way you think. You have to stop believing that you are stuck in your situation and passively accepting that you’re incapable of doing anything about it.

Many people allow themselves to be caged by their fear and anxiety. For these people, an inner critic always seems to be whispering in their ears, keeping them from succeeding. The truth is, negative thinking will shackle you to a life that’s both mediocre and unfulfilling. If you want to stretch yourself to your fullest potential, you need to escape your self-imposed prison of negative thinking.

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Being a small business owner puts you in control of your destiny, but there are major costs that go along with being the boss. With licences, office rent, and staff payroll to deal with already, some aspiring entrepreneurs shrug off the idea of purchasing business insurance in the start-up phase.

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