I thought it would be good to showcase some of the other great small business blogs out there that we regularly read and admire. Congrats to all of the great content being generated out there.

• Church of the Customer Blog
  
• Small Business Unplugged
• Small Business Trends
• Businesspundit
• Bizinformer
• Duct Tape Marketing

Are there other small business blogs that you regularly read and get a lot of good, useful information from? Leave a comment and let us know about them.

Bootstrapping. It’s hard, but we all know how to get things done. When money is tight, funding is impossible and equity won’t due, sometimes you have to resort to alternative means. Here is a great article from the WSJ on how businesses are bartering to get the stuff they need. From equipment to services, people are willing to barter:

Online Sites Promote The Art of the Barter

What I find incredible is the level of trust that people have, especially in the services realm. How can you be sure that if you barter services for goods, that you’ll actually realize the services from the second party? A lot of times, I can’t get a contractor to do work for real money!

(Photo courtesy of Nate Steiner)

Refreshing, isn’t it? You may have noticed our new updated look and additional content about SimplifyThis. These changes should signal to you that we are a few weeks away from giving more people a taste of the future of software that helps you manage your small business.

While we still have a number of tricks up our sleeves, the SimplifyThis home page spells out the service with the most detail yet:

SimplifyThis is an intuitive web-based service to easily invoice your customers and get paid faster online. No more forgotten invoices, no software to install and no help manuals to read. Use this from home, from the library, or from any other computer on the internet.

Also called out are the core features and who we’re targeting with this service. Check out the details and be sure to leave your email address so we can let you know when the beta is ready.

The best part about it is that this is just the first step along the way for SimplifyThis. Keep checking back over the next few months to see what we’ve been up to…

(Photo courtesy of: RINAJO.DK)

Over the past few months, I have seen a lot of posts for new businesses about what to do, what not to do, what new technology to use and even posts about what new businesses to start right now. These are all great posts for new businesses. While some of these themes also hold true for existing businesses, one area that seems to be neglected is how existing businesses should take advantage of new technologies.

Whether it’s new invoicing software, a reporting solution or even GPS-enabled cell phones for your employees, the technology has to make sense from both a usefulness, as well as a cost and return perspective. Here is a common-sense guide to making sure you are taking advantage of the right new technologies and whether or not they make sense for your business.

Identify the Need. It should go without saying that if you don’t need a piece of new technology to meet some business requirement, you probably should stick to watching the bottom line and not be on the lookout for cool stuff to buy. Make sure you’re addressing business problems or ways to improve productivity. It may be ok to boost employee morale with a technology upgrade, but buying it just because it’s the new thing should not be your agenda.

Evaluate the Options and Costs. Just as if you were getting multiple bids for a service, you should also be evaluating all possible options to meeting the need you identified in step 1. Generally, for any piece of technology you are looking to buy, there are competitors with different offerings covering a variety of price points. Although the most cost effective option is usually appealing, consider how it will hold up over the longer term, what trends on the horizon may make it obsolete, or whether or not it will limit your own ability to grow without serious upgrade. Pick technology that gives you a little room to grow, but not something so fully featured that you wind up overpaying for it. At this point, it also makes sense to start looking at your expected return on the investment.

Decide and Implement the Technology. Making the decision to acquire the technology cannot be an emotional decision, as with all business decisions. It should be made carefully considering the need, options, cost and expected return.

Measure the Return. Making the decision to procure a new technology is only the first step. Making sure that once you get the technology in-house, that employees embrace it and help you realize your return is paramount to the technology making sense in the first place.

The Carnival of Business is up at the MyMoneyForest Blog. Be sure to check it out!

Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com

Welcome to the 10th edition of the Carnival of Home Business, hosted this week at SimplifyThis. My name is Sanjay Kumar and after working a number of years in the Small Business group at Microsoft, I’ve recently become an entrepreneur myself. I’m very passionate about small businesses and hope that you enjoy the carnival.
I would like to thank Pascal over at Start a Side Business for starting the Carnival of Home Business and allowing me to host it this week. Be sure to visit his site on Nov. 21 for the 11th edition of the Carnival of Home Business covering “What free resources can you use for advertising your home business”. If you wish to contribute to this edition of the carnival, you can submit your post using the standard submission page.

For this week’s carnival, I divided up the submissions into four rough categories, based on the content of each post: Business, Adsense/Monetizing Blogs, Advise and finally the Other category. Happy reading!

Business

Michelle Cramer chimes in with two great articles this week: Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Revitalize Your Stagnant Business. Both are posted at The Small Business Buzz.

Kevin contributed a cool article on Working From Home: the Pros and Cons, posted on his Site Help Center blog.

Shannon Herod talks about getting down to business though planning in Turning a business into a business. You can find Shannon’s blog at: Internet Marketing.

Kim tells us what it really means to work from home in: Small Business Pitfalls, posted at Blogfabulous.

Joe Caterisano from help with everything contributes a post about the basics of eBay selling in: Make $20 an hour on eBay.

Adsense / Monetizing Blogs

Phil of Phil for Humanity posts about an interesting Adsense effect he is seeing when his blog is linked from a carnival vs. another high traffic site. See: Web 2.0 versus AdSense for the discussion.

Sushith Mundayadan presents Reasons For Getting Irrelevant Or Off-targeted Google Adsense Ads And How To Stop Them posted at Tips To Make Money Online.
In his post, Sushith offers a few Reasons that you may be getting off-targeted Adsense ads and some tips to stop them from appearing on your site.

Sarakastic of The Fibromyalgia Experiment is not exactly “in love” with Blogitive, but shares his thoughts about this advertising program in his Blogitive Review.

Azmi Mufti tells us about his Adsense income with: Finally! My $1,400+ Payment for October from AdSense, posted at Azmi M.

Advice

James D. Brausch presents Are You Being A Good Guy Or A Plain Old Procrastinator posted at jamesbrausch.com.

Other

Barry Welford talks about how the internet growth has slowed down to a mere 25% growth and ponders the growth rate of Mobile web v.s. the regular web in: 100 Million Websites - How Many To Go?, posted at StayGoLinks.

(Photo courtesy of ptessier)

The Wall Street Journal has a Q&A site for budding entrepreneurs that sometimes has questions and answers worth noting. Yesterday, a woman with a new business plan asked the question: “Why is the failure rate of startups so high?” Clearly a smart woman looking to learn from the mistakes of others in launching her business. Here is another person asking the same question. And another. It’s apparently a popular question.

The WSJ staff reporter who answered the questions made a point that we don’t often think about when we hear stats like “50% of businesses fail within 4 years.” Her point was: when you dig down and read most of the studies that claim these types of failure rates, you often find that they include business closures as well (e.g., owner retirements, businesses sold and consumed by other businesses). Business closures are not always failures, so the numbers are not always pure.

In addition to that interesting point, she went on to cite a mid-90s study by University of Texas and Harvard University that found:

1. 38.5% of owners said they failed due to factors external to the business — those presumably not under direct control of the owner. Is it a coincidence that most owners pointed this out?
2. 28% of owners said financing difficulties caused the business to fail. I would venture to guess that there is overlap between this point and #1, but it wasn’t separated out.
3. 27.1% of owners called out factors internal to the business were to blame — those factors that the owner could impact to some degree.

Although the journalist cites a few other studies, the results are similar. The lesson? Manage external risks, but make sure you keep your own house tidy at the same time.

Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com

(photo courtesy of Jasoon)

With Sanjay introducing himself a few days ago, I though it was also a good time to introduce myself. My name is Mauro Lombarda and am currently working on the development side of SimplifyThis. Following are a few words about my background:

Co-founder of SimplifyThis and a native Italian, Mauro received a bachelor of science in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano. Prior to founding SimplifyThis he worked for TXT e-solutions where he helped to grow the company from 10 to more than 500 employees, serving as Technical Director and Chief Technology Officer. He did extensive research and work in the fields of supply-chain management and demand management. It was during one of TXT’s projects where he met Sanjay and a long discussion eventually led to SimplifyThis.

Mauro’s interests include computer languages, mathematics and psychology. His interest in computer science started very early with an unforgotten Commodore 64. He loves cooking, good cuisine and fine wines.

Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com

It looks like PayPal is offering a holiday rebate to customers who purchase goods and check out with the service between 11/23 and 5/23/07. The rebate is reportedly up to $20. While this is great news for both users and businesses alike, as a business accepting PayPal, you should be aggressively marketing this rebate. By marketing this rebate and other offers like it from other vendors, you will certainly drive your own sales and effectively ride the coat-tails of these vendors who are putting up the capital to drive more traffic. The only thing better than encouraging your customers would be to also motivate you (the business) with a revenue share of some kind. For now, we’ll have to keep dreaming about the rev-share, but be sure to take advantage of this program by aggressively marketing it.

Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com

Now, I know there are quite a few Sanjay Kumar’s in the world (1.4M pages, to be exact), but when I saw this in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, I was quite taken aback. I thought, why not take this opportunity to update my profile and share my background and show how it uniquely positions me to tackle the mission that SimplifyThis is trying to address. With that in mind, I have updated my profile (link to the right) with the following details about my background:

Sanjay is a co-founder of SimplifyThis. Prior to starting SimplifyThis, he worked at Microsoft Corporation and i2 Technologies. He specializes in designing business applications for customer management, accounting and supply-chain management. During his time at Microsoft, Sanjay worked in the Business Solutions division where he held several engineering, product management, and senior advisory positions. He led the efforts to build online services for small businesses, decision support software for Microsoft’s ERP line of products, and also worked as an executive advisor to shape the roadmap of Microsoft Dynamics line of products. At i2 Technologies, Sanjay held several senior product management positions for supply-chain management products. Prior to joining i2, he was working as a engineer with Sabre Decision Technologies (Now Sabre Airline Solutions). Sanjay received an MS in Engineering from Penn State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from IIT Bombay.

I hope this clarifies the situation and please don’t hesitate to sign up for our beta. (Yes, that was a shameless plug).