Source: Naaree.com

The first reality is the constraint of obligations at home. Whether by the choice or duty to care for others (e.g. children), most women staying at home do not have very flexible work availability when it comes to time and location.

Source: International Business Times

The 7th Annual Small Business Summit Gains Momentum
The Seventh Annual Small Business Summit, (#smallbizsummit) New York’s premier event for small businesses, is continuing to gain momentum among small business owners, larger businesses and groups that work within the small business vertical.
MarketWatch

Small-Business Outlook: What Are The Biggest Challenges On Main Street?
They also named weak sales as the top business concern in NFIB’s monthly Small-Business Optimism Index report for the 16th consecutive quarter. Other challenges recession-weary small-business owners reported?
Huffington Post

Women Small Business Owners Wave a Magic Wand in Portland, OR
Portland, OR women in small business opportunity to connect for free at the Magic Wand Collective launch meeting set for this Thursday, January 26th, 2012, 6:30 – 9:00 pm at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, 1441 NE 2nd Ave., Portland, OR 97232.
PR Urgent

Small Business Loans: How They Work and What You Should Know
Asking for loans is “unpleasant; it’s like asking your dad for the car keys,” said Charles H. Green, Executive Director at the Small Business Finance Institute and author of The SBA Loan Book.
International Business Times

How to Choose a Mobile Carrier for Your Small Business
AT&T, among other carriers, walks you through choosing small-business products.As for choosing a voice-minutes package, most providers offer free calls on nights and weekends.
PCWorld

Xiimo Brings New Marketing Tools to the Small Business Owner
Named one of the most disruptive cloud based technology companies by VentureBeat, Xiimo is redefining how small businesses market and promote on the web.
Sacramento Bee

More Signs of Increased Small Business Lending
We’ve been hearing about increased confidence in small business and, if you’re like me, you want to believe it – but you’re suspicious, too. How do we really know if things are getting better?
Small Business Trends

Sales of Small Business Companies Increase in 2011 Franchise Stats Lacking
The small-business-for-sale marketplace picked up again last year, for the second year in a row, thanks in part to better business performance. Sales of businesses with roughly $360000 in annual revenue rose 3.3% in 2011, according to BizBuySell.com…
Blue MauMau

Small Business Social Media – Avoid At Your Peril
Friends, Fans, Circles, Likes, Plus 1’s, it can all be a bit intimidating for small business owners. The fact of the matter is though that Social media is not going away…
Business 2 Community

Hiding Income? Look Out, Here Comes the 1099-K
Starting this month, business owners will begin getting new tax forms issued by their credit-card and online-payment processors and intended to keep businesses from hiding income. The form, called 1099-K, will document all 2011 transactions processed for sellers with more than 200 transactions and $20,000 in annual gross receipts.
BusinessWeek

Cloud app helps small companies manage sales compensation
Wondering how much your small business should be paying that great new sales person you want to hire? More important, wondering how to make sure everything is managed and paid out properly?
ZDNet (blog)

21 Reasons You’ll Fail at Marketing
I don’t know what it is about Marketing, but everyone on earth seems to think they can do it. And yet I see so many people NOT doing it or wasting thousands of dollars and not getting results.  I see business owners try the same things over and over, small businesses fail at marketing wasting more money, more time, and more energy.
Bplans

Self-employment in the Internet Age
Everyone who’s ever seen their career crash and burn can point to one or more big picture factors that directly or indirectly greased the wheels of their departure. We can either poison ourselves with bitterness, or find some way to benefit from prevailing changes.
OutOfYourRut.com

Small-business pessimism hangs around
Three years of poor sales and a slow economy have conditioned small-business owners to think negatively. Or at least that’s how it seems in the latest round of reports on the small-business economic outlook.
OCRegister

Exporting to China just got easier for small business
How do you export to and distribute your products in China. Frank Lavin joins Jim Blasingame from Hong Kong to explain how ExportNow.com will help small businesses gain access to China’s consumers without prohibitive expense.
The Small Business Advocate (audio)

Small Business Tax Cheats: A $122 Billion Problem
But an increasingly tricky web of politics and logistics surrounding small business tax matters virtually eliminates any likelihood of a serious crackdown on these diverse entities.
The Fiscal Times

Office Depot Small Business Index Finds Organization is a Big Challenge
According to the survey, filing and organization are the top business tasks that small business owners least look forward to, as 27 percent loath putting their office in order.
MarketWatch (press release)

Verizon Wireless Amps Up Small Business Capabilities with Powerful New Devices at
This week, at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Verizon Wireless unveiled new devices, including tablets, smartphones and mobile hotspots,that are sure to capture the attention of SMB proprietors.  Here are a few great options…

Poll: Corporate political cash hurts small business
An opinion poll released Wednesday found that two-thirds of small business leaders believe the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision hurts them, and a whopping 88 percent view money as playing a negative role in politics.
Salt Lake Tribune

How to Become a Tech Guru in One Year
Last year, Ryan Bubinski, 22, and Zach Sims, 21, founded Codecademy, a New York City-based startup that provides online learning opportunities in the programming space. The company offers classes and videos on how to code, and this month launched Code Year, a free and interactive yearlong coding class.
American Express OPEN Forum

The ups and downs of small business employment
We’ll start by defining a small business as an enterprise with fewer than 500 employees. That’s the definition used by the Small Business Administration.
PolitiFact

Study: Three in Four Women Small Business Owners Predict More Tough Times in 2012
A new Nationwide Financial study shows three quarters (74 percent) of women small business owners expect their business to be negatively impacted in 2012 by the economy.
Insurance News Net (press release)

How to Make the Perfect Website

Sadly, many entrepreneurs have provided the public with websites that are faulty, unreadable, esthetically displeasing, or incompatible with mobile devices. If you’re cringing with guilt, you may want to read up on these tips to make a perfect website.
NewBizBlogger

5 Things Every Small Business Should Know about Email Marketing
Here are five aspects of email marketing that every small business owner should be aware of.
Everything PR

How The SBA Can Better Serve The Other 29353039 Small Businesses
The paperwork, the certifications, the bidding, the bureaucracy…for a small business who’s not familiar with the system it’s almost impossible. I’m not alone. Most of my clients hate working with the government.
Huffington Post

Ten Twitter tips and tricks
Two social media experts explain how small business owners can channel Twitter’s tiny might.
Sydney Morning Herald

Local Search: A Must for Small Business
For small business some of the most important search is local and optimising your site to be found in local search directories. Here are some of our top hints on how to optimise your site being found locally.
PRWire

SOPA Kills Small Business and Fangirls
It’s badly written and has far too great a possibility of hurting small business. Big and broad laws like this have been proven, time and again, to be very dangerous to the people.
FemPop

There are thousands of fearless women over the internet, but we just decided to publish just a minimum list of 200 of them. If your name is not amongst the below list, I don’t imply that you are not a fearless WOMAN.

Source/Read More: BigMoneyWeb.com

Just last week the website, The Next Web published a post called, “The 25 Most Influential People Tweeting About Entrepreneurship”. While I enjoyed the reading the list, I was a little discouraged by the fact that only 1 woman made the list.

With women starting new businesses at twice the rate of men, and with women dominating the social media realm, I knew that there was no shortage of women tweeting about entrepreneurship.

So instead of sitting back and letting all the guys get all of the glory, I took it upon myself to create a list of the 25 Most Influential WOMEN Tweeting About Entrepreneurship.

Source: The Work At Home Woman

Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP), a non-partisan organization that advocates for issues affecting the health of small businesses, will be leading a coalition of small business advocates around the country to further the Small Business Saturday movement.

Small Business Saturday, which falls between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is a national movement to drive consumers to shop at local merchants during the heaviest shopping weekend of the year. American Express, the founding sponsor of Small Business Saturday, created the movement in response to small business owners’ most pressing need: more demand for their products and services.

Source/Read More: FinChannel.com

Cheryl and I thought it would be a great idea to collaborate on this special social media project – and so the process began for creating the 2011 #Nifty50 List of Top Twitter Women. We decided to recognize and share the names of some of these noteworthy individuals with our respective readers and followers, starting today with 50 remarkable women (just in time for Mother’s Day, as we’re pretty certain that every woman on this list either is a mom, has a mom, knows someone who’s a mom, or some combination thereof).

Source/Read More: Blue Focus Marketing

Small businesses have rebounded from the recession faster than the broader business population but need easier access to loans and other support to continue growing, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s second in command said in San Antonio.

SBA Deputy Administrator Marie Johns was in San Antonio to speak at a dinner Thursday for a training program the SBA and Syracuse University have developed for female veterans who also are entrepreneurs.

Source/Read More: San Antonio Express News

May is the month of Mother’s Day, so it’s a good time to remember that many people who own small businesses — and not-so-small businesses — are mothers, too.

If you’re a mom and are self-employed or own a small business, you know how tough this can be. You have to juggle demands and duties for both kids and customers. It’s a challenge. So it’s time to make your life a little bit easier.

Source/Read More: USA Today