Author Archive

If you own a restaurant or food-related business, you won’t want to miss Rieva Lesonsky’s post on Tasty Food Trends for 2013 and Beyond.

Want to expand your empire? Read Maria Valdez Haubrich’s post Is Now a Good Time to Buy a Business?  to see if you’re ready to buy.

Feeling the need for a refresher course on SEO? Check out Monika Jansen’s post SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO in 2013.

If you have a retail business, you’ll be happy to read Rieva Lesonsky’s post Good News for Retailers: Millennials Love to Shop.

Curious about native advertising’s potential? Monika Jansen’s Your 6 Burning Questions About Native Advertising, Answered, has all the answers.

Yes, your business can compete against big companies–and win. Read 5 Ways a Small Business Can Successfully Compete Against the Big Boys, by Monika Jansen, to learn how.

If you’ve slashed your business travel budget, you may think again after reading Karen Axelton’s post Study Shows Spending on Business Travel Pays Off.

Customers Care About Social Responsibility—So Use Social Media to Prove You’re Doing Good. Rieva Lesonsky tells you how.

Is your email marketing missing the mark? Read Rieva Lesonsky’s post to learn The 1 Simple Trick That Makes Your Email Marketing More Effective.

Facebook contests can be effective–but also tricky. Read Monika Jansen’s 7 Tips From an Expert on How to Run a Facebook Contest to get the scoop.

What’s Holding M-Commerce Back? Find out in Rieva Lesonsky’s post.

Are Small Business Owners Ready to Hire? See if your plans align with other entrepreneurs’ in Maria Valdez Haubrich’s post.

If you’ve hired or are getting ready to hire, don’t miss Rieva Lesonsky’s post on 4 Secrets to Successfully Onboarding New Hires.

Trying to hire graphic designers but don’t want to pay a lot? Check out Monika Jansen’s post 5 Reasons Why Good Design Ain’t Cheap – or Free for a reality check.

Struggling to keep up with content creation for your content marketing plan? Read 6 Content Creation Takeaways From How to Feed the Content Beast, by Monika Jansen.

Is Your Restaurant Giving Customers What They Want? Learn what matters to today’s diners in Karen Axelton’s post.

Is your business seeking to hire female tech employees? Read Maria Valdez Haubrich’s post The Secret to Hiring Women Tech Employees: Get Virtual first.

Whatever type of worker you’re looking to hire, read The First Step to Finding the Perfect Employee by Rieva Lesonsky before you post that want ad.

Did you know radio can still be one of the most effective ad venues around? Read Karen Axelton’s Turn It Up: Why Radio Advertising Can Deliver for Small Business to learn why.

New to Twitter? Get the basics in Monika Jansen’s post Twitter 101: The Do’s and Don’ts When Getting Started.

Is your industry, well, kind of boring? No worries: Read 5 Marketing Tricks to Turn a Boring Business Into a Fun One, by Monika Jansen, and liven it up.

By Karen Axelton

If you filed your business taxes yesterday and are wishing you could have paid less, you might want to check out the Tax Foundation’s 2013 State Business Tax Climate Index. The annual listing ranks the 50 states based on their tax-friendliness to small business.

The Index ranks the states based on 118 different variables in five key areas of taxation: major business taxes, individual income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment insurance taxes and property taxes. The results are added up for an overall ranking. The goal is to reward states for especially strong aspects of their tax systems, and penalize them for especially weak aspects, while also measuring the general competitiveness of their tax systems overall.

The 10 best states for small business taxes this year are:

1. Wyoming
2. South Dakota
3. Nevada
4. Alaska
5. Florida
6. Washington
7. New Hampshire
8. Montana
9. Texas
10. Utah

Many of these states made it to the top 10 because they lack a major tax that most other states have, such as corporate tax, sales tax or individual income tax. (All states have property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes.) For instance, Wyoming, Nevada, and South Dakota have no corporate or individual income tax; Alaska has no individual income or state-level sales tax; Florida has no individual income tax; and New Hampshire and Montana have no sales tax.

The 10 worst states for small business taxes are:

1. Maryland
2. Iowa
3. Wisconsin
4. North Carolina
5. Minnesota
6. Rhode Island
7. Vermont
8. California
9. New Jersey
10. New York

“The states in the bottom 10 suffer from the same afflictions: complex, non-neutral taxes with comparatively high rates,” the report notes. For instance, although New York has only moderate corporate taxes, having the worst individual income tax, the sixth-worst unemployment insurance taxes and the sixth-worst property taxes put it in the bottom spot.

Which state was “most improved” this year compared to laat? Maine went from 37^th to 30^th by repealing its alternative minimum tax and changing how it treats net operating losses. Michigan also improved from 18^th to 12^th overall by replacing its gross receipts tax (the Michigan Business Tax) with a flat 6 percent corporate income tax.

Before you pack up the moving van, keep in mind these rankings are based solely on business taxes. The Tax Foundation cautions that it’s not measuring quality of life or even the best states for business—just the best states in terms of business taxes.

You can view more details and download full rankings here.

Image by Flickr user gemsling (Creative Commons)

By Karen Axelton

How are small businesses using cloud computing, and how are they benefiting from it? A study by CDW reported on CIO.com found that more than half of businesses surveyed are moving at least some of their functions to the cloud. What they’re using the cloud for, however, varies by business size. For small and midsized businesses, storage is the primary way they use the cloud, while bigger companies and government agencies use cloud services mostly for collaboration and conferencing.

Of course, these aren’t the only things the cloud is being used for. CDW found that companies are also using the cloud to handle messaging, to access office and productivity suites, and to use business process apps.

No matter what types of functions they move to the cloud, doing so brings many benefits to companies of all sizes, CDW’s survey contends. Greater efficiency was the major benefit, cited by 55 percent of respondents. Close behind were greater employee mobility (49 percent), improved ability to innovate (32 percent) and freeing up the IT staff’s time to focus on more important work (31 percent). However, cloud computing may not save as much money as you expect: Just one-fourth of respondents said that reducing IT costs was a major benefit of cloud computing.

If you’re considering moving some of your business functions to the cloud or using cloud computing to access new applications and services, keep the following advice from CDW in mind:

• Carefully analyze costs and benefits before making the decision.
• Start small, using cloud services for functions that are simple to implement, aren’t business-critical and don’t put your company’s data or processes at risk.
• Ease your employees into using cloud computing by leveraging their familiarity with consumer cloud services that they likely use, such as Spotify or Dropbox.
• Keep track of your ROI to ensure that cloud services are truly saving you money or providing additional benefits that make them worth the cost.
• Always review cloud service providers’ contracts and terms carefully. Make sure the provider’s security precautions are suitable for your needs, and know what type of customer service assistance you can expect in case of a problem.
• Make sure a cloud provider’s offerings can scale up quickly with your company as it grows. This can be one of the major benefits of using cloud services, but you also need to know what costs will be as you add users, applications or services to make sure the solution is still cost-effective.

Image by Flickr user Kevin Dooley (Creative Commons)