Website, social media, blog. If you are a small business owner, chances are you've already checked off those must have boxes. If you have not, get those launched and then circle back to continue reading.

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Filing for bankruptcy protection to save a small business often costs at least $100,000 to $300,000—and sometimes twice as much in cases where creditors are contentious, lawyers say.

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From Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, mind-numbing startup jargon is stopping for no one. It winds up in TED Talks, pitch meetings and every tech journalist’s inbox in between.

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The skills gap is widening and workers are feeling it. In fact, Lynda.com recently conducted an online survey of nearly 10,000 respondents, and found that about half of them lacked confidence in their job skills.

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At one time or another, virtually everyone thinks about starting a business. The allure of being your own boss can be strong, but it is important to remember that launching a new business is risky: According to a recent SBA report, [about 50% of all small businesses will fail within just five years.

Managing a startup can be a minefield, especially when the pull of entrepreneurship clouds your decision-making – and when you go it alone with no business experience.

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Not heeding these warnings can lead to costly mistakes, such as litigation and employee turnover.

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Despite the warning, a number of extremely well known brands are still scrabbling to minimise the impact of Google’s mobile algorithm update, leaving smaller businesses with the advantage as long as they do not panic according to leading UK and US Search experts.

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By 2020, most small businesses in the U.S. will be powered by the cloud, according to Intuit. Is your business ready?

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Why you should you blog?

Through posting simple things such as helpful tips, special discounts or the latest industry news you can effectively maintain your customer relationships and give people a reason to visit to your website.

More recently blogging and content marketing has been widely used to enhance SEO strategy. Writing articles around the keywords that you are targeting will help to improve rankings in search engines. Furthermore, if you write unique and valuable articles, other websites will link to your content and as a result; this will increase your website's back-links.

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Do all small business owners need to pay sales taxes? Yes, the majority of businesses that are sales oriented are required to pay taxes to the home state or other locations where they do business. There are only a handful of states that do not require taxes from businesses - Oregon, Alaska, New Hampshire, Delaware, Hawaii and Montana, for the rest of us, sales taxes are something worth paying close attention to.

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All major wireless operators available in the U.S. offer some international roam, but the volume varies by network. To get an understanding of how your network will fare abroad, or to understand which carrier to choose if you are a regular traveler, you should first understand the two basic major technologies that wireless operators use.

How to Travel With Your Cell Phone Without Breaking the Bank

Starting a small business is tough, but growing one — or just keeping it afloat — is even harder.

Even though more than 500,000 small businesses are created each year in the U.S., only half of them survive past their fifth year, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

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Trucking companies and building contractors dominate the fastest-growing industries for small businesses, according to new data from Sageworks, a financial information company.

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From struggling with a business plan to hiring the wrong talent, there are a lot of opportunities for small-business owners to make mistakes, especially when starting out.

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Cloud-based services such as Spotify and OneDrive have irrevocably changed the way we consume, store and share content in our personal lives.

Similarly, many large organizations have become well accustomed to the cloud, having years ago turned to hosted storage and remote disaster recovery to boost productivity, reduce costs and preserve business continuity.

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Connections. Community. Mentorship. Immersion in management theory, market strategy and financial forecasting. A big, fat résumé boost.

The benefits of getting a business degree are multifold. But as many MBAs and their undergrad counterparts can attest, so are the falsehoods imparted.  

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There is a convenient narrative about small business that we have all heard a million times.  Small business represents a huge, underserved, and highly lucrative market for finance-oriented entrepreneurs and large organizations alike. The prevailing wisdom is that these businesses run on Intuits QuickBooks, which enables them to have organized, accurate, and timely financial information at their fingertips. By all accounts, the small business market should be an easy one to serve. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Organizations big and small have struggled to serve the small business market in an efficient and effective matter, and it is all due to what we call the 90% challenge.

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For the fourth year running, California and Rhode Island earned an F in a massive survey of small business owners rating state and local governments’ friendliness to small business. At the other end of the spectrum, also for the fourth year in a row, Texas and Utah earned an A+ from entrepreneurs.

What matters to small business owners? Nearly 18,000 entrepreneurs surveyed by Thumbtack.com said: Chamber of Commerce-style training and networking; regulatory and licensing simplicity, helpful government websites to cut red tape, and taxes.

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The Internet of Things includes, among many other items, sensors for monitoring business and home security.

How IoT Can Help Small Business Compete
Here are two examples of small businesses that have figured out to compete against Goliath by finding low-cost ways to incorporate IoT into their operations:  

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There is a reason it’s called exit planning -- the steps involved in determining how to ultimately leave the company you have built require careful thought, deliberate consideration, and plenty of time.

There are many directions you can take in the sale of a company, and considering who you’ll eventually find at the other side of the negotiation table is one of the most important things to understand as you get started down the path to an exit.

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Why devote 10 minutes a day to Facebook? There are many reasons why, but most importantly Facebook can help strengthen your relationships with your customers. The smaller your business, the more important these connections can be to help keep your company thriving.

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There is a lot to be said for those rare few that possess the ability to create huge companies with hundreds or thousands of employees that are all just ecstatic to be at work. It is exceptionally difficult and equally as impressive, which is why they end up taking up space on the front page of a major magazine or journal.

Although it appears flashy and glamorous, particularly with the amount of celebrity that todays super entrepreneurs wield, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility that is lost, almost by default, once you pass a certain size. Now, not only am I not one of those few, but I really do not want to be.

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Up to a point, it behooves small business owners to be resourceful and handle the lion's share of the work. But before it's too late and their companies lose out on its market timing, entrepreneurs need to hire in order to grow, even if that means taking on more costs.

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As entrepreneurs, we are told we should expect to fail at our first, second, or third idea before becoming successful, and that is often true. Coming up with an idea and then profiting from it within the first year is very rare. But after speaking with Caleb Garrett and Alex Moreno of Hawkers Co., a two-year-old D2C eyewear brand poised to hit $60 million this year, I'm beginning to believe they have somehow cracked the code that so many product-focused, bootstrapped startups have been looking for.

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In fact, a prominent study from the financial services company U.S. Bank found that as many as 82 percent of startups and small businesses fail due to poor cash-flow management. So, even if you are a brilliant entrepreneur in every other way, you must stay squarely focused on managing your company’s cash flow to avoid putting your business in imminent danger.

Here are five of the most common cash-flow problems:

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Over the last few years, a new generation of digital apps such as Uber and Just Eat have been available to download to our smartphones and tablets. They are designed to make it easier to find a taxi or order a meal, but have received as much criticism as they have praise for the way they have taken control of traditional markets and damaged business models.

We spoke to two businesses – one in the takeaway industry and the other in the private minicab industry – about the challenges these disruptive companies pose, what they are doing to combat them and how other small businesses can follow suit.

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The question becomes, what would your customer do when they turn to you and then you hire an independent contractor?

You are not ready to bring on a fulltime employee yet. But your customer is thinking at this point, why do not I hire the independent contractor and save some money? Does this scenario sound familiar to you?

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The best sorts of business plans tell a clear story of what the company plans to do and how it will do it. Given the high failure rate of startups in their first year, a business plan is also an ideal opportunity to safely test out the feasibility of a business and spot flaws, set aside unrealistic projections and identify and analyze the competition.

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How to Manage People (Without Making Them Hate You) - video

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Up to a point, it behooves small business owners to be resourceful and handle the lions share of the work. But before it's too late and their companies lose out on its market timing, entrepreneurs need to hire in order to grow, even if that means taking on more costs.

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Fortunately, there is a better way. Here are 17 simple things to do sometime in 2016. They are all one-time events (although you can certainly repeat them as many times as you like). And each is a lot easier to accomplish than some hopefully-life-changing-but-in-the-end-never-accomplished New Years resolution.

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These founders embody the reasons so many Americans are drawn to entrepreneurship: passion, purpose, fulfillment, and financial success. This year they all shared with Inc. readers the secrets to how they did it.  

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Starting a business is a bit like falling in love for the first time: it is exciting, exhilarating, and new. You want to savor each moment and be your very best every minute of every day.

After the adrenaline rush subsides, however, reality sets in and you may discover that not everything about running a business is so wonderful. There will be tasks you don’t like to do, activities you find stale and boring, technical difficulties to test your patience, and clients and vendors who might challenge you.

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With the positive effects of social media marketing becoming more and more apparent, most small businesses have started working on a social media marketing strategy.

One of the main aims of social media marketing is to stay relevant to your audience. This might be harder for small businesses as they have more to juggle, in terms of handling tasks. Social media tools and apps can help reduce the stress of multi-tasking and keep your social media activities consistent. Below are social media tools for small business to help make your life as a social media marketer easier.

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To trust or not to trust. That is a question small and medium-sized business owners often find themselves asking when it comes to relying on certain brands for day to day business operations and other needs.
Keeping their interests in mind, Alignable, a Boston-based platform for local businesses, has launched the SMB Trust Index. It measures companies based on an assigned Net Promoter Score, submitted by contributors on the Alignable platform.

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Many people who work a regular job dream of walking out of their cubicle and starting their own business. And every year, about 800,000 Americans do just that.

Dave Selden is one of them. His business grew out of his passion for beer — glass after glass of it. That is immediately clear when you take a look at a video on his website.

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Without further ado, then, here are some of my favorite Instagram ads, as well as some that I would have handled differently, and the lessons you can learn from them.

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There are 28 million small businesses in the country, and they provide most of Americas jobs and sales. According to the Small Business Administration, large companies have cut four million jobs since 1990, while small businesses have created eight million. Most small businesses want to become big businesses, so a new dog-walking service is probably not going to turn into the next Uber (though you never know! Dream big!).

Here are some of the top, best, most promising industries you might want to consider where businesses are growing. They are also ripe for disruption.

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I work with a ton of small businesses, and I love it. I love seeing different business models, helping entrepreneurs with limited resources and experience, and getting unique perspectives that you just can not find in bigger, often more cookie-cutter business establishments. One-on-one, we can share information and insights, and build a strategy that is helpful for their business.

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Having a small online marketing team doesn’t mean your company can not scale content marketing initiatives. It means you must know what the best strategies are and have your team focus on a few they can do well.

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Big data and business intelligence (BI) used to be only for enterprise companies. Now, however, thanks to the software as a service (SaaS) revolution, even small businesses can afford to track and tap into a wealth of information.

However, becoming a data-driven small business is not easy. Because you are dealing with complex troves of records that have multiple sources and are therefore highly unlikely to be structured uniformly, it can be difficult to process it all and interpret it into insights your business can actually use.

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Some people think starting a business will be this great thing to do and then as they move forward with the process quickly learn it is not always rainbows and unicorns.

Sure, it has it perks - you become your own boss, choose your own hours and the clients you would like to work with along with how much to charge them. Then, theres one of my personal favorites - you choose the dress code!

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Marketing a business online can be a bit tricky with cost being a concern to most business owners. Some have to work with a low budget with most opting to find a free way to market their trade online.

There are tons of free tools businesses can turn to when it comes to marketing online. With that in mind, it may all boil down to where to start and which tool is best used first. The tools mentioned range from actual sites to free tools integrated with their marketing plans. Below are some of the tools that companies can consider using.

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More new businesses fail than succeed, according to the Kauffman Foundation. And U.S. Small Business Administration data shows that it is only a matter of time before at least half of all businesses go under: Nearly two-thirds of businesses with employees survive at least two years, but only about 50 percent survive at least five years.

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Is your business protected from a data breach? The largest data theft in history:

1.2 billion internet user names and passwords compromised
420,000 websites impacted
Well-known national brands and small companies affected.
Here are ten things you can do to protect your business.

1. Secure sensitive customer, employee or patient data.

Store paper files and removable storage devices (such as thumb drives and CDs) containing sensitive information in a locked drawer, cabinet, safe or other secure container when not in use.
Restrict access to sensitive data to those who have a need to know. Give employees access to only the information they need to do their jobs - whether it's online or in paper form.

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With the ongoing move of smart phones towards near-ubiquity, much of society has come to take these do-all devices for granted. In overcoming the novelty of smart phones, many of us have lost our one-time sense of awe at this technology, and have ceased marveling at the effect it has had on the world around us. However, it is undeniable that smart phones have exerted a huge and multi-faceted impact on society, and continue to do so to this day.

The Advent of Access: How Smart Phones Have Changed the World

One of the most valuable possessions that you have is your reputation -- and it is important to guard it at all costs. Profits can be lost and regained, but rebuilding a damaged reputation -- that is far more difficult.

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Small business owners have a problem with thinking big.

Thinking big doesn't mean getting a big head.

Small business owners mistake successful crowdfunding campaigns with success.

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Why Your Business Needs Virtual Assistants

If you are looking to de-clutter your business life so you can focus on serving your clients and customers, then virtual assistants are the perfect solution. They excel at the everyday tasks that keep your business up and running and can also handle the more complex tasks that you’re ready to hand off to someone else.

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With this tumultuous year behind us, I am fixing my mind on what's to come in 2017. Change is the only constant in life, and with a new administration about to take over--I am truly optimistic about next year since entrepreneurs seem to be looking forward to the potential changes that this new year might bring.

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