From Duct Tape Marketing Blog - their weekly newsletter they profiled what I think are essential small business tools. These tools don’t all directly relate to marketing, but most perform a marketing function. You can DuctTape’s 10 essential tools here. They cover things like project management, virus protection, file sending, spam blocking and keyword locating.

I highly recommend the Duct Tape Marketing Blog as a fantastic resource for great marketing articles.

• See the Top 10 Small Business Productivity Tools list

From Business 2.0 Magazine - While interviewing with the CEO of a top Silicon Valley e-commerce firm, Scott Langmack got the idea for a company of his own.

Langmack, a PepsiCo and Microsoft veteran, was a shoo-in for the position of chief marketing officer. But then the CEO complained that his headhunters had scoured thousands of resumes and that he’d spent three months interviewing shortlist candidates. A lightbulb went on in Langmack’s brain, and he turned down the job.

• See the whole article

Here is a short list of Tom Peter’s favorite books from this past year.

• Most notable books by Tom Peters

I’m a big believer that personal growth comes from people you associate with as well as books you read. Tom’s perspective is certainly a very global one - focuses on a wide variety of business and professional topics. This list is well worth the look as his Tom’s daily weblog.

Here is an incredibly, free, convenient, and extremely useful web-based tool that lets you make all sorts of checklists.  You can keep them private, share them with others. (I used mine to help plan our wedding!!) - and best of all - you can get to it on the web from anywhere, anytime. Visit http://www.tadalist.com to check it out - here's a quick screenshot to give you the idea…

Just another one of these simple - killer conveniently little web applications that we all wish we had thought of.  It's made by the team at 37Signals.com - a brilliant team of developers out of Chicago.  Paul McNeely and I had the chance to meet them this summer - fantastic perspective they have at keeping tools like this simple and usable.  Enjoy.

• Visit www.tadalist.com  

BusinessWeek has a new article up containing noteworthy news and tips for entrepreneurs.  Amongst the things discussed– a smart way to divide stock, VC interest in early-stage companies, doing business related to Cuba, and Google vs. Yahoo for advertisers.

• Read more

Here is a link from BusinessWeek Online that provides some resources for young entrepreneurs. This tipsheet can help those who are looking to start their first business as well as those looking to simply start another new business.

• Read more
• Follow-Up Article: Venture Capital - the Spigot's on!

Our most exciting announcement this issue - we've been working the past three months to create WV's most   comprehensive news headline aggregation site.  We're launching this nationally in all 50 states - beginning right here in our home state of West Virginia!

The website puts all the headline links from most every WV news source on one page. This saves you time each day by helping you quickly find the news you want to read.

WVNewsline.com automatically aggregates headlines and links to every news article published online in West Virginia. The site is currently tracking over 30 news sources and updating hourly. 10-20 additional news sections are coming soon!

Please take a quick moment to visit the site and see if it might be a useful tool for your own daily news experience.  And most of all, please let us know what you think and how we can improve it and make it even better! 

• Visit www.WVNewsline.com 
  

From Forbes - Everybody in Lake Wobegone may be above average, but that doesn't hold true in most sales departments, where, as the old saying goes, 20% of a sales force tends to land roughly 80% of the business.

After three decades in sales (as both foot soldier and business owner), I can vouch for the cliche. But that doesn't mean I like or accept it–and nor should entrepreneurs who want to sell more stuff.

• See the rest of the article

From Business 2.0 Magazine - Once upon a time, in the bad old days of business, giving away a product without charge was unheard of. Sure, Estee Lauder gave samples to celebrities and Gillette sold its razors cheap and made money on the blades.

But free didn't become a serious option until the Internet gave us low-cost online distribution. Adobe did it with its PDF Reader in 1994, Macromedia with its Shockwave Player in 1995. Both became the industry standard, and those companies were able to make money by selling the products' authoring software. Read about the 9 trends that make a difference.

• Read the whole article

From SmallBizTechnology - When you search on Google for a topic you are overwhelmed with a list of search engine results. If you are a business, especially a small business looking for answers to a specific question, you simply don't have the time to wade through all of these results looking for a specific solution.  With work.com, you can get the answer you need quickly.

• Read more

From paulgraham.com via digg - "In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed– if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed– and that's too big a question to answer on the fly."

• Read the complete article

Innova strives to connect entrepreneurs to the best resources available to help their businesses succeed. FastTrac accomplishes this through a series of educational experiences and products.  Here is their outline of training for this fall and for the courses next year.

•  http://www.innovawv.org/FastTrac.htm

From Yahoo - Google launched a test version of a service that lets users create documents or spread sheets online instead of needing word processing software on their computers.

The Google Docs and Spreadsheets service was a "mash-up," or meshing, of its Spreadsheets program and word processing capabilities from Writely, which Google bought earlier this year.

• Read more
• Try it out - it's FREE!

Here are some great lessons from a clear winner in their field.  This article shares Google's 10 Golden Rules of  Management.  Below is the link and we've summarized these for you into one short list.  Very insightful and it seems to help people give the company their very best.

• Complete Article from MSNBC

Google's Ten Golden Rules (see article for details on each)

1. Hire by committee.
2. Cater to their every need.
3. Pack them in.
4. Make coordination easy.
5. Eat your own dog food.
6. Encourage creativity.
7. Strive to reach consensus.
8. Don't be evil.
9. Data drive decisions.
10. Communicate effectively.

This is an incredible story of a very successful business owner (sold his business to Warren Buffett) who tapped the professional and personal wisdom of an informal board of directors.  The experience he shares provides valuable insight as does his 6 key strategies for having an informal board.

• Complete Article from StartupJournal.com

Guy Kawasaki, author of 'The Art of the Start' is an experienced entrepreneur, venture capitalist and I think, a great resource to new entrepreneurs.  In his weblog, he shares 11 fantastic tips that will provide some great guidance to anyone getting a business going by the bootstraps.

• Read the Complete Post by Guy Kawasaki 

How one entrepreneur built his business from scratch by pitching deals to complete strangers - a few thousand times. In the 20 months his company has been in business, he must have spoken those words 1,000 times. Borba did $5 million in retail sales last year, and every deal he made started from a cold call.  Read this story of some incredible best practices on good, old-fashioned hustle and hard work.

• View the Complete CNN Money / Fortune Small Business Story

Scott Vincent Borba's ten-employee company makes beverages, candy, and cosmetics infused with vitamins and extracts that are clinically shown to improve the skin. His products are sold by high-end retailers such as Henri Bendel, Nordstrom, and Sephora. In December he signed a deal with Jamba Juice, but that deal really started a year earlier, when he made the first cold call to Jamba CEO Paul Clayton.

Business 2.0 reveals how Staples needed to simplify itself before it could reap the rewards of its new Easy Button ad campaign. The five-year branding odyssey that began in 2001 has helped make $16.1 billion Staples the runaway leader in office retail. In 2005 its profit was up 18 percent to $834 million. Second-place Office Depot (Research), meanwhile, booked 2005 earnings of just $274 million, an 18 percent slide, and OfficeMax (Research) posted a loss of $73.8 million. Staples now receives twice as many compliments as complaints. Here's a great article on what the retailer learned along the way.

• CNN Money Lead Story in Business 2.0
• Complete Business 2.0 Interview
  

A new peer-to-peer finance services aims to help groups of people come together online to lend up to $25,000 to someone they don't know, eliminating the bank middleman. The information week article describes the company as flush with venture capital. Prosper has about $20 million from Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures, and Omidyar Network. Prosper is like eBay for money–except that instead of auctioning products, it lists loans people want and lets lenders bid on them, alone or in groups.

• Complete Information Week Article
• The Prosper.com Website  

Information Week reports that Prosper's rates range from 7.32% (low risk, low amount) to 24.04% (high risk, high amount). Zopa claims an average gross return of 7%. The sites make money on fees and attract a mix of ardent capitalists and wild-eyed dreamers.

Keith Rosen writes: 'Most salespeople are reluctant to follow up. They worry about "bothering the prospect." Quite often, this reluctance stems from not having a follow-up process they are comfortable with. They don't know what to say, they don't know when to make these calls, and they don't know the frequency or how often to make follow-up calls.'  Keith shares a 3-point plan for fantastic follow up in this article.

• 3 Step Sales Follow Up Plan