The Ultimate Small Business Twitter List | Small Business Trends
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/01/the-ultimate-small-business-twitter-list.html/

Explorar en Twitter

So I set out to create a list of the people and organizations to consider following on Twitter if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of small businesses. In other words, who are the people on Twitter who regularly provide information by, about and for small businesses?

Making the choice to go freelance (or independent as I prefer to call it) is a tough choice, I wish I had more knowledge about the pros vs cons when I made the

The most common question entrepreneurs ask me, is “how can I improve my marketing with no or little money?” With this in mind, I asked for help from the TPE community and here is what I got… 115 ideas. Skim them or read them in detail, but whatever you do make sure you go through the list. Just one of these ideas may trigger a marketing opportunity that you never considered before. Just one of these ideas may take your business to a whole new level!

Using Twitter for Business

Twitter may not be the sole driving source (no pun intended) behind the growth of street food vendors. But a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways.

A wealth of resources for business owners — videos, articles, blogs, and expert advice to boost your business, sponsored by American Express OPEN.

It's quite easy for small business owners to become distracted by their day-to-day responsibilities. But in this competitive economy you can't afford to miss out on the newest business innovations. That's why we asked 50 of the top small business bloggers to share their best tips for small business owners. Their response was incredible. While some shared nuggets of wisdom, others gave us actionable tips you can use right away. Here's your crib sheet to the best business advice the blogosphere has to offer.

Great roundup of tips for small business by successful bloggers.

Even before I had a single customer, I "knew" it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a "real company." I need culture-neutral language complimenting culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash with the thrill and delight of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008.

Why small companies should look and act like small companies instead of fluffing their feathers

ade $800,000 in their first year of operations, so don't tell me "big companies" need to hear garbage PR/marketing language. Balsamiq got 100 product reviews during their first six weeks of operation, so don't tell me "a couple of guys in a studio" isn't a good public persona.

- Blog - Startups + Marketing + Geekery

Relevant for nonprofits too: use plugins, integrate social media, keep the design simple but professional, host it yourself, and have a prominent "about us" section

Social Media

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses who want to market using social media is capacity. crowdSPRING is a small business - there are only 10 people on our team - so we understand this challenge well. You must decide whether social media makes sense for your small business. There is no universal answer. In this two part series (part 2 will be published in a few days), I’ll offer 10 small business social media marketing tips. For each tip, I’ll discuss the basic strategy - for those who simply want to get their toes wet, and also the advanced strategy - for those who want to spend a bit more time and go a bit deeper in their social media marketing efforts. Where possible, I’ll point you to other excellent resources to help you execute your strategy. The tips are all based on my own experience leveraging social media marketing for crowdSPRING. I recommend only tools I’ve personally used - and third party references I trust.

PLEASE READ

This article outlines how to promote and market a newly launched small-business website, in 3 months.

针对小企业的优化推广

I write quite often from the perspective of larger company social media and business communications. That’s because most of my clients are large companies. However, these social tools allow a small business owner a lot in the way of advantages, and I want to put together a little map of steps I might take if I were running a small business and wanted more sales.

Basecamp

how can we use linked in to help us connect to people in our industry

According to a study by Sage Software and AMI-Partners, more than 260,000 small businesses in the US and Canada employ social networking tactics.

Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.

Google veut inciter les entreprises à prendre en charge leurs listings de recherche dans Google Maps et les autres services géolocalisés, via le lancement d'un nouveau produit, Google Local Business center. Pas encore d'intégration avec Google Adwords mais c'est surement la prochaine étape : "The other benefit to Google is that the more that small businesses can measure the impact of search, the more likely they will be to buy search ads. The dashboard shows the top search queries that result in a business’ listing showing up. The next obvious step is to start buying those keywords or optimize a business’ site to make sure they are on the page. "

Green markers that show how many clicks for Driving Directs happened in this area. Free analytic program from Google

use for each biz idea. helps with search google

GReader share: Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard http://ow.ly/ayc9 [from http://twitter.com/webbstrategi/statuses/2001202908]

100 business tools to make your iphone more productive