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Welcome to the second edition of the Small Business and Startups. As many entries as possible have been including, based on my time to read through each. If your entry is not here, it may appear in the next edition, unless it is either not relevant to the Carnival theme, promotes your services, or promotes specific affiliate products.

If you did make it in to this edition, please give a link back as soon as you can. Preference for subsequent entries is given to new bloggers (those not already selected in an edition) and those who have linked back to editions they’ve been in. If you submit regularly, and get in but don’t link back, then your own readers don’t benefit with opportunity of being introduced to other blogs – which is part of the reason for a blog carnival: networking.

Where provided, summaries of articles have been published here, though in future editions, I will try to provide my own summaries, when time permits. Enjoy.

1. Entrepreneurship 101: Is Entrepreneurship Right For You? by Daniel Sweet of Free Resume And Career Toolbox Blog. It’s an unfortunate truth that not everyone is capable of entrepreneurial success. It takes a certain kind of personality. Daniel has a new series of articles that may help you determine if entrepreneurship suits you. This one is the index, along with an introduction.
2. Get More Done with Activity Logs by Dr. Robert Karlsberg of The Road to CEO blog. Having trouble with your productivity? Dr. Karlsberg discusses how keeping activity logs can benefit you, and offers a PDF download of a sample log sheet.
3. 10 Reasons Why I Love Google by Jimson Lee of Speed Endurance. Bootstrappers and startups are always strapped for cash. And software can be very expensive. So how can you not love free software. Jimson lists ten web-based applications or services that Google offers for free. (I might be wrong, but I thought Google Apps Premier edition is only free for 30 days.)
4. Not So Smart After All by Mike Buckley of Mine Your Own Business. Mike offers an amusing story of why it’s important for businesses to maintain integrity.
5. 3 Huge Steps On How To Leap From The Security Of A Job To A Home Business by Cade Krueger of Small Business Opportunity. Not everyone finds it easy to go from a salaried job to a starting a business, and sometimes running it from home is more fearsome. Cade offers a substantial explanation of three steps that you can take to make the leap.
6. Planning Out a Short Term Project by Matt of Realigned Living. As the title suggests, Matt points out that planning isn’t just for big/ long-term projects.
7. There are Times When Features are Better Than Benefits by Jim Logan of Jim Logan. We typically market to consumers in terms of the benefits of a product or service. Jim suggests that sometimes it’s better to talk about features.
8. If At First You Don’t Succeed by Adnan of Entrepreneur Buzz. Despite the title, Adnan’s article is about being cautious about sharks when you start an online business. Although, if you don’t succeed the first time around… Well, you know.
9. 13 Things a Successful Entrepreneur Must Know & Take Action On by Edith Yeung of Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act. Edith discusses thirteen building blocks that entrepreneurs of any industry should take note of.
10. Advertising Jingles and Commercials – Radio & TV by Matt Hanson of Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog. Matt offers five rules to consider if you are planning on using running ad jingles on radio and TV.
11. How to Write a Headline and Grab Your Prospect by the Eyeballs! by Chris Tackett of Direct Marketing News. If your company needs to do direct marketing to gain customers, read Chris’ very detailed copywriting guidelines.
12. You Can Make More Working Less by Eric Hudin of Everyday Marketing Ideas. Eric offers up the radical idea that you can earn more by working less, provided you learn to be more efficient in your tasks.
13. 5 Distractions To The Nesting Entrepreneur by Ant of The Beef Jerky Blog. Ant cautions “nesting” entrepreneurs of five distractions that they may face. These are entrepreneurs that are still dipping a toe into the idea of going into business and haven’t fully committed.
14. How to Influence Others by Terry Dean of Integrity Business Blog. Terry offers six tips for positively influencing other people as part of your general business proceedings.

Notes
Here are some reasons for an article’s exclusion.

• Resubmitting the same article to a carnival. I keep all unpublished entries that meet the requirements and publish them when I can. If an article does not meet requirements, it gets deleted in my list. Not honoring this rule means permanent exclusion from this carnival as my time is limited and I don’t want to have to read it all over again.
• I’ve become fairly tolerant of the occasional typo or bad grammar, but if an article consistently shows poor grammar or spelling, it will not be included.
• Submitting articles where 90% of the content are quotations from someone else’s article.
• Articles you took from elsewhere, that someone else wrote and had published elsewhere.
• Articles about home-based businesses are okay, home-based jobs are not. There’s a distinction: having your own business, which this carnival is focused on.
• Not relevant or promoting services or an affiliate product.

To summarize, this carnival targets existing small businesses and startups, or entrepreneurs on the verge. What advice can you give them – business and technical – to help them towards success? There’s a wide spectrum of topics, including branding, identity, marketing, hiring, online efforts, success, productivity and more.

If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

If you haven’t heard of Yahoo! Pipes, you’re missing out on an incredibly powerful, multi-purpose Web 2.0 service that you should seriously consider for your blogging research and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) toolbox. Here are just seven reasons to do that.

1. Feed mashups.
   The fundamental purpose of Yahoo! Pipes appears to be the ability to take numerous RSS feeds from endless sources and mashup them up. This includes filtering (which doubles as search), sorting, and data transformation. Of course, since Pipes outputs results in RSS format, you can subscribe to the results of any Pipe. They have subscribe buttons for several feed readers, or you can copy the auto-generated RSS URL.
2. Data analysis.
   At the time of this writing, Pipes just released eight new modules, many of which allow transformation and/or analysis of input feed data. They’ll likely be adding more modules in the future, possibly until the point that Pipes’ operators rivals XSLT – a poorly supported, standard XML querying language. (RSS feeds are a form of XML – eXtensible Markup Language.)
3. Plug and play Web 2.0 logo components.
   Not only can you take the output of a Pipe and send it to a compatible Web 2.0 application, you can pull information into Pipes from numerous Web 2.0 services. There are both custom and generic modules to do this. Or you can simply take the output of a pipe and feed it to an HTML badging, to display a block of snippets on your website.
4. Visual interface.
   Pipe-building is done on an empty, visual canvas, with drag-and-drop blocks that you drag-and-connect up with “tubes”. Pipes is sort of the visual equivalent of XSLT, which requires learning a whole ‘nother language.
5. No need to be a programmer.
   Photographers that I know managed to learn Perl and PHP web programming. But with Pipes, there isn’t any regular programming. There is the visual equivalent of programming operations, but if you understand their functionality, you can learn to string the modules together to do what you need.
6. Complex applications.
   Multiple Pipes can be snapped together like blocks to build complex Web 2.0 mashups.
7. Resusable applications.
   Each Yahoo! Pipe has one of two modes that it can be in: published or unpublished (default). Once you publish a Pipe, someone else can use it, either just to run it, or they can clone it and tweak it to customize. You can also clone and tweak your own Pipes, even if they’re not published. Cloning saves a great deal of time for Pipes development.

Yahoo! Pipes is still in beta mode, so on occasion there’s quirky behavior, unresponsive servers, and changing modules. And yet, it is arguably one of the most powerful Web 2.0 services to date. It’s free, although you do need to be signed up for a Yahoo! Mail account.

Watch this blog for custom Pipes, as well as the occasional video screencast tutorial explaining how to to build a Pipe.

We, entrepreneurs, are mostly involved in running the day to day operations. As we continue to grow the business we will need more employees to meet our business targets.

The problem with some entrepreneurs is they resist delegating responsibilities, do not allow employees to make any decision without consultation, fail to listen to sentiments, and somewhat focused on the details of the projects. If you are doing this then you are guilty of micromanagement.

This lack of trust in your employees wastes time and energy, and often leads to business failure. One of the remedies to avoid being a control-freak entrepreneur is to be result-oriented.

Instead of worrying about how your employees will do the tasks, focus on the endpoints or final outcome. If they constantly meet your expectations and their commitments, get off their back and let them handle the tasks at hand.

Take time to discuss with your employees the things that must be done immediately and solicit their thoughts on the matter. You must come up with a definite timetable to accomplish all tasks and must make your employees liable to their commitments.

Additionally, allowing employees to handle situations boosts self-esteem and commitment to the company.

Via Lifehack

Advertising is such a dreaded word for many starting entrepreneurs. After all, tapping television, radio, and newspapers require heavy spending. The reality is you need advertise your products one way or the other. You need to get noticed otherwise you will compromise the entire business. Good thing there are some creative and cost-effective alternatives for entrepreneurs like us.

T-shirt Advertising

Placing your company or brand logo on t-shirts and giving it to your regular customers will help increase brand awareness. Use bright colors to easily catch attention. Asking your employees to use these t-shirts on their way to office is a good alternative of this approach. Better yet, make this your official employee uniform!

Windshield Wiper Flyers

Some people might find it annoying but putting flyers under windshield wipers easily attracts customers to try your products. However, this is not applicable to all products, so be very careful when using this approach.

Video Sharing

Sharing business tips or how-to video clips to top video sharing Websites like YouTube, Dailymotion, and Metacafe has become very popular these days. You just need to have a simple video camera, a bit of software (much of it free), and an Internet connection.

Before you think of using these approaches, visit Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog to know the 12 types of ads you can use to your campaign.

Entrepreneurship is a series of negotiations among different parties like suppliers, employees, venture capital firms, tenants, and customers. It requires that you know when to change your negotiating style. Sometimes you need to be tough but there are times when you need to compromise.

You are already familiar with general negotiating tactics like low-balling and silent treatment. It is now appropriate to learn different tactics for different parties.

With Suppliers

As a startup company you do not have enough leverage or advantage to demand lower prices because your starting volume is very low. It may appear you do not have any choice than to agree with the price set and simply ask for small discounts.

The first thing you need to do is to make these suppliers believe in the promising future of your business. To do this, you must have a powerful presentation backed by realistic financial projections. If you manage to impress your suppliers, they will start to lower their defenses and be more flexible with their terms.

Suppliers love to hear “long-term partnership” and I’m sure you do also. Make your promise credible by signing long-term contracts. To make it more appealing you can buy supplies for the next two years. The catch is you demand to spread payments and ask for longer payment terms.

With Landlords

If you need to get rent a commercial office space, The Texas Property Lawyer lists some issues that should be negotiated, many of which are applicable regardless of the state you operate in.