"Selling is Dead" is one of 10 best books on sales effectiveness published in the United States in the past 20 years. * * *

Of course selling isn't dead, literally. But it's changing in major ways, the authors say. Sales teams are underperforming because they are ineffective. The cost of sales people has risen much higher than their productivity. If selling isn't exactly dead, it's broken. The authors say the main reason is that sellers are generally unable to cope with the quickening pace of innovation."

• Small Business Trends - Anita Campbell looks at the latest trends affecting small businesses and entrepreneurs. A must-read for entrepreneurs.



• Just for Small Business - Full of thought-provoking tips for small business owners from Denise O'Berry, I like this blog because the topics are often unexpected - not your usual small business fare.



• WorkHappy.net - Carson McComas lives up to this blog's subtitle of "killer resources for entrepreneurs" by providing links and reviews of "killer" applications and other resources to help entrepreneurs work smarter, not harder.



• Duct Tape Marketing - John Jantsch delivers 2-3 small business marketing tips weekly in easily digestible, actionable bite-size chunks.



• Home Office Voice - Internet entrepreneur Martin Neumann shares his experience and tips for building a web-based business. His writing style is very informal and entertaining, but at the same time he provides some really solid advice.



• Sacred Cow Dung - There are a number of really good blogs out there by venture capitalists about the VC market, entrepreneurship, and so on, but Christian Mayaud's blog is for me the one that most consistently provides content that is actionable, not just informative.



• The Entrepreneurial Mind - Jeff Cornwall, Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship, looks at trends in small business and entrepreneurship and their impact on individual business owners.



• Escape Velocity - Flemming Funch chronicles the ups and downs of life as an Internet entrepreneur.



• BizzBangBuzz - Pittsburgh attorney Anthony Cerminaro delivers excellent commentary and some original posts on the challenges facing emerging growth companies, with particular emphasis on legal issues.



• Business Opportunities Weblog - Dane Carlson mixes links and commentary on legitimate business opportunities with his thoughts and personal experiences regarding entrepreneurship.

• running several businesses that are symbiotic and related in ways that I can see, but which must seem far-flung and unrelated to the casual observer;



• bootstrapping small businesses, because today I think there is so much opportunity for small businesses versus larger ones that there is no need to get out and get venture capital or other seed money;



• leveraging the Internet with information businesses, because those areas have growth potential and, besides, they are what I know -- and everyone should be in business with something they know.

"The more diffuse the company becomes, the more frequently I am asked about my vision for Virgin. I tend either to avoid this question or to answer it at great length, safe in the knowledge that I will give a different version the next time I'm asked. My vision for Virgin has never been rigid and changes constantly, like the company itself."

• On Branson's style of management: "I make sure that I spend most of my time out and about and experiencing my businesses...."



• On competition and striving to be the best: "Anyway, there were 12 other airlines and they were all much, much bigger than Virgin Atlantic and we were not out to topple them, we were out to survive. They toppled themselves and every single one of them disappeared. And I think the -- the thing to learn from that is the best -- you know, the best never -- never -- never disappear."



• Branson's views about the Internet: "I think if companies are not embracing it they're making a big mistake."



• On the advantages of choosing entrepreneurship very very young: "One of the advantages of leaving school at 15 or 16 is you don't have a steady relationship. You don't have a mortgage to pay. You've got nothing to lose."

• Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines - It is impossible to overemphasize how much these giant search engines have changed the way we do business. Want to research a product or service, find outlets in your area carrying it, and do some comparison shopping? Go to the search engines. Need to find out the background of a prospective employee or a potential supplier or business partner? Check them out online. Want to conduct market research or get competitive intelligence? Dig in and start at the search engines.
  
  It would be easy to focus solely on Google. After all, Google has by far the biggest share of business searchers, and its name has become synonymous with ferreting out information via the Internet. But I include the other top search engines, MSN and Yahoo, because they bring something to the table too. Perhaps most importantly, the competition among all three is part of the reason that Google and the rest keep getting better. Funny how competition works....



• Amazon.com - You are probably thinking, 'why would an online bookstore be among the list of functions small business could not live without?' It's because Amazon.com is more than just a bookstore.
  
  Once Amazon.com began to sell books, CDs and DVDs that the average Joe created, and became a distribution channel for the little guy, Amazon.com ceased to be a bookstore and became a marketplace. And once that happened, its value to small business skyrocketed.
  
  Today, you can self-publish a book or produce films or music on your own inexpensively, and Amazon.com will sell them for you. With Amazon's nearly worldwide reach, you can be assured that the tiniest niche audience can find your product. It's turned the economics of marketing niche products on its head -- suddenly it is affordable to get to market. Moreover, this has led to a huge increase in the number and variety of voices that can now be "heard" all over the world. How empowering!



• U.S. Government websites - The United States government websites used to be pretty bad, with few exceptions. They were boring, bureaucratic, and oriented to the agency, not to the citizenry. The past year and a half have seen significant improvements. I am amazed at the information available online at these sites, and even the transactions that can be carried out online. Never in recent history has our federal government been so helpful toward small business, and I only hope this is a trend that we see more of. (My apologies to my international readers. The same may be true for government websites of other countries -- I just do not happen to be familiar with them.)
  
  Among the U.S. government sites essential to small business are (sorry -- I could not limit this category to just one):

  Business.gov - This impressive website is the government's gateway to all sorts of advice on how to start, grow and run a business. 'Nuff said -- check it out.
  
  IRS Small Business - I know what you're probably thinking... 'Get help from the IRS? Right!' But go over to this site and give it a chance. Trust me, you'll find a lot of helpful information, including online workshops for business owners. You can even apply online for employer identification numbers (EINs).
  
  Small Business Administration (SBA) - The SBA is not just about loans. You'll find a tremendous amount of information on the topic of financing a business generally. You can also find research about small business at the Advocacy section.
  
  Census.gov - many people email me and ask me how to research businesses of a certain type, etc. Whatever you do, when looking for market research always start at the U.S. Census site. It is a wealth of free data that you can slice and dice multiple ways, with various online search and reporting tools.

• SCORE Biz Powerlinks - SCORE's (Service Corp of Retired Executives) website is impressive. While many of the resources are directed toward startups, you can find useful business information for established businesses, too. The Power Links section of the SCORE website is an exhaustive collection of links to helpful business websites.



• CEO Express - The fifth information website was a tough call. I actually could have named a dozen or more sites I find valuable. But CEO Express aggregates hand-selected links to a wide array of business tools and information sites, on topics ranging from travel sites, to office tools and calculators, to international newspapers, to health information. Definitely worth bookmarking.

1) Do what others are NOT doing - Branson spoke at the Adventures event about his mobile phone company, Virgin Mobile. He said that people wondered why on earth anyone would start a telecommunications company in this day and age.

To him, though, the reason was quite clear. All the cellular phone companies in Great Britain were requiring long contracts. Yet consumers did not want contracts. He saw an opportunity to deliver something different, that was not being done.

The same lesson can apply to just about any situation. For instance, I know one retailer faced with competition from retail giant Wal-Mart. Simply put, his strategy is to not do what Wal-Mart does. He literally walks the aisles of Wal-Mart to see what the retail giant is not carrying on its shelves. Usually that means that his merchandise fills narrow niche needs. Wal-Mart supplies the mass market, not the narrow niches.

This particular small retailer also provides a far wider selection of merchandise within those niches. In other words, he goes narrow and deep, instead of shallow and wide. At the same time, because he goes after such narrow niches, he recognizes that he has to reach out beyond his local area in order to get enough customers. So he operates an active online sales outreach. His approach takes constant monitoring and adjustment. He is constantly looking at product selection. But it is why he can compete with a giant.

2) Listen carefully and pay attention to detail - We don't normally associate attention to detail with being nimble. But it is clear that Richard Branson takes careful listening to a level few of us match. His ability to take in large amounts of data, process it, and then act on it, gives him an uncanny ability to identify new opportunities and jump on them with firm, confident decisions. By the time he makes a decision, he has already amassed a large amount of data and had time to digest it.

In his book, Branson gives a clue to just how detail-oriented he really is. He writes, "As anyone in my office knows when I've lost it, my most essential possession is a standard-sized school notebook, which can be bought at any stationery shop on any high street across the country. I carry this everywhere and write down comments made to me by Virgin staff and anyone else I meet. I make notes of all telephone conversations and all meetings, and I draft out letters to send and lists of telephone calls to make. Over the years I have worked my way through a bookcase of them, and the discipline of writing everything down ensures that I have to listen to people carefully."

3) Have courage ... and hedge your bets - Branson cultivates an image of a wild risk-taker who laughs in the face of death. I maintain this is all a public relations act, designed to promote his companies. One of the most striking themes that comes through in his talk at the Adventures event and also throughout his book, is how little appetite for business risk he really has.

Branson makes bold moves in business, but they are carefully calculated risks. He always takes steps to minimize the risk. For instance, when he started Virgin Atlantic Airlines -- with just one plane! -- and took on the industry giants, he was careful to lease (not purchase) a jumbo jet. He also set up a separate company in order to protect the assets of his other business interests.

His words are filled with references such as "managing cash closely" and "protected the downside - always my first concern." Those are not the words of a devil-may-care risk taker.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but moderating your risk can position you to be more nimble. It is a lot easier to reinvent your business again and again, adding new ventures, if you know the core business is protected and secure. It's when you put it all on the line, without protecting anything, that you may be forced to forego opportunities.

• Does the vendor really understand the needs of the small business market?



• Is the small business market an important part of their business strategy so that they will invest in product development for the SMB market?



• Has the offering been intelligently designed from the ground up specifically with small businesses in mind (rather than something half-heartedly slapped together to respond to senior management's call "we need an SMB offering, people!")?

• James J. Hill Reference Library: I've been a big fan of the James J. Hill Library for some time. It is one of the largest business reference libraries in the United States, and they offer a unique Internet-only subscription. Now they've made it even better, adding a less-expensive membership category designed specifically for small businesses, called Standard Membership. Don't miss the 6-minute Flash video describing membership benefits -- you will be hooked once you watch it.



• NEOBabble is a civic commentary blog by Chas Rich that resides at Cleveland.com, an Advance Internet site and the online home of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper. We reviewed Chas's original blog, Sardonic Views, as part of the PowerBlog Review series (it was number 14). Chas writes one heck of a blog, and now it is even being recognized alongside the likes of the New York Times. His blog NEOBabble has been named a finalist in the national Online Journalism Awards. Congratulations to Chas and also to the Editor of Cleveland.com, Denise Polverine. This recognition of blogs alongside traditional media sites is a significant trend.



• Emily Chang's eHub is a "constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing." OK, if you don't know what half of this stuff means, you are not alone. Some of these are cutting bleeding edge technologies. But if you want to learn about these things, Emily Chang's eHub is a great place to start.



• Small Firm Business: Small law firms account for over 90% of law firms in the United States. Monica Bay, who is Editorial Director of Small Firm Business, announces at her blog, The Common Scold, an award for small law firms. Go here for the entry form for the 2005 Best Practices Awards. Deadline is October 28.



• Spinfluencer: Eric Schwartzman, the Chairman of iPressroom, has started a podcast series, "On the Record...Online" which resides at his blog, Spinfluencer. His first 18th podcast is an interview of Ron Bloom, CEO of the Podshow.com. Ron Bloom's interview is very interesting because he explains why podcasts are so popular with listeners and how podcasting is evolving as a business. Bloom discusses that Internet audio advertising will be 3% - 4% of total advertising within the next 5 to 10 years.



• AlanebyDay: This is a blog being used to chronicle the startup process in a new business. It describes itself this way: "Alane By Day is the real-time narrative of the step-by-step creation of Alane's architecture practice in just 82 days. We're using the blog format so everyone can see how it's done. If you're starting a business, this blog will help you; if you've already started a business, you can help this blog." As I write this it is Day 18.



• Reflections of a Biz Driven Life: I have been wanting to call out Wilson Ng's site for some time now. Wilson is a successful CEO in the Phillipines who was named the 2004 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Wilson's blog is a wealth of business insights and motivational reflections. He tells me he now has a network of at least 7 sites. In the interests of space, I will simply mention his blog here and then write a separate post later pointing out in detail the great things he is doing.



• NFIB: Hold the presses! Rex Hammock informs me this evening that the NFIB now offers RSS feeds. The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) is a member and advocacy organization for small business in the United States. The NFIB offers excellent research, surveys, tools and other important information for business owners and anyone who follows the small business market. You can subscribe to separate feeds for different kinds of information, so that you only need to receive in your newsreader the kind of information you want to see. Nice job, NFIB.

"Factors in the dramatic growth include:

• Increasing use of the Internet by small businesses as web sites and online storefronts become more affordable.



• The explosive growth of weblogs, a growing number of which are purchasing domains for branding purposes.



• Speculation in the market for domain names, buoyed by rising resale prices and the ability to generate revenue via pay-per-click advertising on parked domains.



• Strong sales of online advertising, especially keyword-based contextual ads that support business models for both domain parking and commercial weblogs.

"The team developing the next version of Microsoft Excel want you to know all about it. The Excel team has set up a blog to document some of the features that are going to be available in the next version of Excel, for now codenamed 'Excel 12'. One of the more promising features looks to be the introduction of 'colour scales' to shade particular cells according to their value. For instance, in the example shown, the higher numbered cells are shaded in green tones, mediate numbered cells in yellow, and lower numbered in red. Instead of analyzing the numbers to get an idea of what your spreadsheet is telling you, now you will only need to look at the colors it is showing you. This definitely makes extracting data and trends from a spreadsheet a lot easier."

"U.S. small businesses (SBs; companies with 1 to 99 employees) spent approximately US$410 million on purchasing accounting software solutions in the last 12 months, and this figure is expected to cross the half-billion-dollar mark by 2008. The nearly 6% annual increase in accounting-software-related dollars augurs well for industry-leader Intuit (with their QuickBooks portfolio) and Microsoft, which recently jumped on the small business bandwagon with its release of Small Business Accounting 2006. More than ever before, SBs are searching for solutions that are easy to install, user-friendly and, most importantly, tailored specifically to their size. In addition, nearly three fourths of these businesses upgrade their accounting software package every one to two years, opening the door for consideration of new solutions."

"Passing along Grand River Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, in the rainy, pre-dawn hours of June 4, 1896, neighbors would have witnessed a sight that at once would have seemed both normal and strange.

The strange part would be seeing one of the residents of this quiet neighborhood test-driving the gasoline-powered "quadracycle" he had built.

The normal part would be that this enterprise was taking place at the man's residence.

For literally thousands of years prior to the 20th century, regardless of the chosen profession, most humans earned their living under the same roof where they did their living. Eventually, as much as anyone in history, our home-based car builder from Detroit changed where America went to work.

To leverage their dream of serving the burgeoning consumer economy, entrepreneurs like Henry Ford had to leave the house and build factories, offices and stores. And of course, all this corporate growth required the employment of millions to staff these operations.

Ultimately, and for most of the 20th century, working away from the home or farm became the norm in America. Indeed, home-based businesses actually became so rare as to be considered an oddity. And based on many community zoning ordinances, sometimes even illegal.

As the century of the major corporation -- the 20th -- evolved into the century of the entrepreneur -- the 21st -- two things converged to make operating a business from home not only socially acceptable once again, but as it had been for thousands of years, professionally sensible and practical.

1. The official death of the job security illusion.

2. Technology.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, downsizing as a way of corporate life created professional and family emergencies for millions of American workers who were conditioned to rely on corporate employment. Whether as a complete alternative to seeking employment, or as a part-time income supplement, those who were laid-off, as well as those who feared such a prospect, started looking for ways to work from home.

And if being sacked was the stick that motivated these would-be entrepreneurs to strike out on their own, surely the carrot was technology.

Technology made it feasible again for millions of people to literally set up shop at home, as their forebears had done for millennia. Actually, the home-based business silver bullets were powerful personal technology hardware and software, both delivered in bite-size increments and pricing, and of course, the Internet.

Being a successful small business owner is very difficult. But doing all of this from home adds a degree of difficulty that deserves special recognition. As America celebrates Home-Based Business Week -- October 10-14 -- we recognize and honor the more than 20 million courageous entrepreneurs who work without a net, from home."

"Worried that shadowy gangs of Russian hackers are breaking into computer networks, stealing your financial secrets? Don't lose too much sleep over it. * * *

Despite a series of alarming reports in recent months ... most bank-related crimes remain stubbornly low-tech."

"With more than 14 million blogs in existence and another 80,000 being created each day, how is a person supposed to find the ones worth reading?

That is the question CNET News.com is attempting to answer with our first Blog 100 list. This effort adds to features such as News.com Blogs, Extra, My News, TalkBack, Newsburst, and Blogma, in which News.com editors and reporters are helping find the best news and views on the Web for the convenience of our readers.

Blogs have become an important source of information, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it hard to find the gems. In our pursuit, we spent weeks checking out technology-oriented blogs based on the recommendations from our reporters and readers."

1. Legibility Problems.
2. Non-Standard Links.
3. Flash
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web.
5. Bad Search.
6. Browser Incompatibility.
7. Cumbersome Forms.
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info.
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths.
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement.

There's not much point me going into lengthy detail about each one of the ten problems as Jakob has already done the job here.

Instead we might as well talk about how small businesses sometimes get themselves into a bit of a web design muddle in the first place. There's a feeling amongst small business types that the actual term 'small business' is only a temporary one; we'll all be a big business some time in the future. We think one of the areas we can change this is in terms of the way we present ourselves through our websites - think big, act big, look big.

In fact, this can lead us down a very uncertain path of projecting what we'd like our businesses to be in ten years time. The next thing you know you're paying web designers a small fortune to produce you a fancy site with more va-va-voom than your average multinational.

If you were to develop a web presence along the lines of what mistakes to avoid, you'd be surprised as to how cheap it can be. There are far too many web designers out there obsessed with 'style' over content and usability.

There's also the added bonus that your average user might be happier with it aswell.

And that's what really counts, right?

• Carnival of the Capitalists: The 104th edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, a weekly roundup of business and economics posts, is now up over at Drakeview. John Dmohowski did a fantastic job, even creating a chart showing the growth in popularity of Carnival of the Capitalists in the two years since it was started. Weekly editions of Carnival now routinely feature 50 or more bloggers participating each week. Be sure to check out Yaro Starak's detail-packed entry, "How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit."



• Blawg Review: This week's Blawg Review, a roundup of legal posts, is now available at Inter Alia. As you are reading all of this week's edition, don't miss the Patent Baristas' entry "Are Tax Breaks for Biotech Worth the Price?"

"The proposed legislation seeks to reform the pension system to provide for greater worker protections and more transparency in employer-sponsored pension plans. After the rather spectacular failures of several corporate pension plans in recent years as a result of bankruptcies and corporate accounting scandals, the need for the bill seemed pretty clear.

Since they were working on pension reform anyway, this might also have given lawmakers a golden opportunity to make the pension system more small business friendly, but that is a set of reforms that didn't happen.

In 2001, the National Small Business Association (NSBA) released an important study entitled The Internal Revenue Code: Unequal Treatment Between Large and Small Firms. Among its findings were several problems for small employers in the nondiscrimination rules governing several kinds of employee benefits plans, including retirement savings plans.

'Currently, the high and largely-fixed administrative costs for starting and running a 401(k) plan are unaffordable for our smallest businesses,' said NSBA President Tod McCracken in response to an emailed inquiry. 'As a consequence, more than two-thirds of individuals working for small businesses have no access to generous federal tax subsidies for retirement savings. SIMPLE plans are much cheaper to administer, but are less generous in the tax subsidy and require mandatory employer outlays.'

The biggest problem for small employers remains the costs of compliance. As with many other kinds of regulations, regulatory compliance costs for small businesses sponsoring pension plans are considerably higher, on a per-employee basis, than they are for larger firms, a finding that was confirmed last month by the SBA's Office of Advocacy. Advocacy found that the per-participant administrative costs of defined-contribution pension plans are 'as much as 14 times more for the smallest firms than for their largest counterparts.'"

• Disintermediation has happened more slowly than predicted. It's not like a switch being turned on or off. These kinds of shifts in commerce take years and do not occur overnight.



• Disintermediation has not happened uniformly or for every industry. Some industries have been hit hard. Others have not. In other cases the Internet has profoundly changed the way consumers interact with intermediaries, but not eliminated the need for them. The new car industry is an example. The Internet has become a place for consumers to educate themselves before walking into the dealership thus tipping the balance of power, and it has changed the way dealerships serve customers. It has not eliminated the need for car dealers.



• In some industries one batch of intermediaries is being replaced by another crop of Internet-based intermediaries. That is partly what's to blame for the decline of local travel agents. Certainly, some consumers go directly to air carriers' websites, bypassing the middleman altogether. But you also have large Internet sites like Priceline and Travelocity that are themselves intermediaries, just of a new type.
  
  Arguably another industry with a new crop of Internet intermediaries knocking on the door is the legal profession. Today if you want to file a trademark application or incorporate, you have choices ranging from LegalZoom, which helps you file basic paperwork, to Nolo, which provides forms for do-it-yourselfers. You can even go to government websites and download forms you need.

"Yet there now seems to be a broader "middle class" of entrepreneurs than before. In San Francisco, Jim Rushforth last year opened up Auto Trainers & Advisors, devoted to holding seminars and writing manuals that, he says, "teach people how not to get screwed by the auto industry." Pile & Co., a Boston consulting firm, boasts a fast-growing division (sales up 30% this year) that "helps big advertisers figure out ad agencies," says chief marketing officer Chris Colbert, 46. There are go-between businesses now wedged between you and your friends (networking consultants), you and your flab (personal trainers), and you and your life's mission (CEO coaches). In fact, the intermediary market has fragmented into cybermediaries (Internet-based deal brokers), infomediaries (linking companies and online suppliers), and mediaries that are so new they have yet to be assigned annoying prefixes."