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 StartupJournal.com - This is a great follow-up article regarding the two young 34-year old entrepreneurs who secured a distribution deal with Wal-Mart and WalGreen for their innovative ink-pens (www.penagain.com). Catapulting revenues to over $3.8 million and with re-orders exceeding 400,000 units, it has put the small startup in a challenging state dealing with the growth. Enjoy the complete article. It provides a fantastic perspective on managing high-growth opportunities.

Excerpt: “Hi, this is Tim Banazek,” came the voice on the other line. “You don’t know me, and I know you get calls like this all the time, but I’m a distributor for Walgreen, and I have an order for over 470,000 units of your PenAgain. And I’d need them fast — in time for back-to-school.”

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  

Here's a clearcut summary that comes to us courtesy of Forbes.  It's an interactive map of the United States showing the country's largest private companies.  The map shows revenue by companies as well as total revenue by state.  You can then click on the state name to get a detailed breakdown of the largest private companies in each state.

• About the map
• See the map

• Show and Sort List By:
  Rank | Name | State | Industry | Revenue | Employees

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

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 CNNmoney - Google is projected to pocket a full quarter of US online advertising market in 2006, according to a report released Tuesday.

The online ad giant is projected to take home $4 billion of the expected $16 billion US market, according to eMarketer, an online marketing research company.

• See the rest of the article
• Read more about Google's domination

From Forbes - Their list of the 200 Best Small Companies ferrets out the most robust, fundamentally disciplined public outfits with sales between $5 million and $750 million. Candidates must carry profit margins of greater than 5% with positive sales and profit growth, on average, over both the last five years and last twelve months. The result? Small, but growing, businesses designed to survive the ups and downs of market volatility.

• Complete article  

Sort List By:
Rank | Company | State
ROE | Sales Growth | Profit Growth | MarketValue 

From Inc.com: Let's face it. Starting a business is tough. You have to build a client base, hire employees, find office space. There are plenty of challenges, but the one that many entrepreneurs find most daunting is raising start-up capital. Here is a site FULL of great resources for finding your funding.

• Complete Article from Inc.com 

The article provides links to over 40 in-depth resources in each of these areas:

1. Survey the Field
2. Bootstrap your New Business
3. Inspiration from the Inc 500
4. Tapping Family and Friends
5. Bank Borrowing
6. Government Programs
7. Finding an Angel
8. Getting Creative
9. Credit Cards

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 

From CNNMoney.com: Established franchises are booming, while over 500 new franchises were formed last year. A third of all franchises had more than 100 operating outlets and nearly half had more than 50.

• Complete Article from CNNMoney.com
  

The article also states:

Over the past three years, around 900 businesses started franchising. In 2005, there were over 500 new franchise businesses, that is up from 220 in 2004 and 207 in 2003.

A third of all franchises had more than 100 operating outlets and nearly half had more than 50. Significantly influenced by the growing number of new franchises in the past few years, 25 percent had 10 or less units.

There are 767,483 franchise businesses in the U.S., according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers based on data from 2001, the latest figures available.

The franchising sector's impact on the economy exceeds $1.5 trillion and provides more than 18 million jobs, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

From Information Week: E-commerce sales rose to $80.8 billion from $67.2 billion during the same period last year, ComScore Networks reported this week. Nontravel retail increased 24.6% from a year ago to $46.1 billion, and travel spending rose 14.7% to $34.7 billion.

• Complete Article

The article also shares that:

For the full year, ComScore expects online spending overall to reach $170 billion, including $102 billion in non-travel e-commerce. This year could mark the first time such spending has topped $100 billion.

In the retail category in the first half of the year, office supplies accounted for 54 percent of spending, followed by computer software, 39 percent; sports and fitness, 38 percent; home and garden, 36 percent; and toy and hobbies, 33 percent.

A great article from the Wall Street Journal's Startup Journal team -

'Building a business as a twentysomething has its own special challenges. On the one hand, you have decades to recover financially if the business goes bust. And you're less likely to be tied down with big financial commitments, such as kids, that often scare older people away from self-employment. On the other hand, you may lack the money, life experience and connections that are crucial to make a business work.' 

This is a recommended reading if this thought hits home.

• Startup Journal Article

From CNNMoney.com - Here are five great resources that offer advice and contacts for women entrepreneurs. 

• Complete Article

Also - here are some shortcuts to the organizations:

• www.c200.org
• www.makemineamillion.org
• www.springboardenterprises.org
• www.womenpresidentsorg.com
• www.wtc-sf.org

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
  

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