Does the idea of quitting your current 9-5 job and starting your own business sound like a dream come true to you?
Although being the owner of your own business can provide you with personal and financial freedom, these benefits do not kick in until your business has become established. When you are first trying to get your business off the ground, you will probably spend more time working than you ever have before in your life. Additionally, it is not uncommon for new business owners to endure multiple hardships as they are working to create a successful business.

Because starting your own business requires a lot more than most “gurus” and infomercials would like you tobelieve, before you run out and decide that you are going to become your own boss, there are five questions you need to ask yourself. Although it may be tempting to lie to yourself, as you look at each of these five questions, it is important that you are brutally honest with yourself.
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If you are working on starting your own small business, one of the biggest issues you are most likely facing is financing. Regardless of what kind of business you are starting, it takes money to make the transition from a dream to an actual business. Although there are different ways to obtain funds for your new business venture (such as angel investors or venture capitalist financing), at one point or another, the majority of small businesses requirea loan from a bank to keep them alive and growing.

In a perfect world, any small business owner with a great idea and strong work ethic would be able to obtain a loan to help their business. Unfortunately, the reality is that it takes more than these two elements for a small business to receive a loan. Because banks are always concerned about minimizing the amount of risk involved in making a loan (especially given the current economic climate), they take multiple factors into account when they are determining whether or not to approve a loan for a small business owner.
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In case you are not familiar with the term guerrilla marketing, it is a term that refers to marketing your business with tactics that don’t require a large budget. The term guerrilla marketing was introduced in 1984 by author Jay Conrad Levinson, and over the last two decades, the popularity and methods of guerrilla marketing have grown rapidly. One of the main reasons that guerrilla marketing has gained so much popularity among small business owners is the emergence of the Internet. Thanks to the power of the Internet, guerrilla marketing is now more powerful than ever.

Although there are a wide variety of offline guerrilla marketing techniques that can be very useful in promoting your business, today I want to focus solely on a handful of online guerrilla marketing techniques. To give you the best return on the time you invest, I’ve compiled a list of the four best online guerrilla marketing techniques. Regardless of the products or services your business offers, by taking advantage of the following techniques, you will be able to attract new customers and increase your sales.
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It wasn’t that long ago when ninety-nine percent of blogging was nothing more than people keeping their personal journal online. However, in a short amount of time, blogging has evolved from people talking about their cats into a very effective communication tool for businesses of all sizes. Considering that even large corporations are taking advantage of blogging, it’s time for you to find out what blogging can do for your small business.

When it comes to blogging, it’s important to understand that it is not some kind of magical secret that will instantly triple the revenue of your small business. However, when done properly, blogging can be a very useful tool in helping you harness the power of the Internet to attract new customers.

So, how do you get started with blogging for your small business? The first step is creating a blog. You should already have a website for your business (if you don’t, before you think about blogging, get a website set up), so you can add a blog directly to your website. You will have to discuss your options with your webmaster, but one of the most popular free blogging platforms is WordPress, which your webmaster should be able to add to your website.

Once you have created a blog, it is time to start writing. When it comes to blogging, there are no set rules about how you should write or what you should write about. However, there are some general guidelines that will help you move in the right direction. The most important thing you can do when you are writing posts for your blog is to be honest and real. While sales copy on websites does not necessarily have to be personalized, your blogging style should show your personality. The whole point of small business blogging is to create a one-on-one relationship with your customers and potential customers, so if your writing is dry and hides your personality, it is going to be much harder to accomplish that goal.

In terms of what you should write about, there are once again no concrete rules, but you should always focus on creating content that will appeal to your target audience. This can take time to figure out, but the more comfortable you get writing for your audience, the easier it will be to come up with content that they enjoy.

In addition to writing your own posts, you should start reading and commenting on other blogs within your industry. Participating in this kind of activity is the easiest way to attract new readers for your own blog. When you leave an interesting comment on a relevant blogger, visitors will take notice of you, and follow the link attached to the comment to your own blog. Additionally, when you come across a good post from a relevant blog, don’t be afraid to link to it from one of your future posts.

By blogging for your small business and participating on relevant blogs, you will begin to build a community which will continue to grow over time.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a file format based on XML that is popular for broadcasting and publishing web site content. You’ve probably seen the signature orange RSS icon on many blogs and web sites every day. With an RSS feed, a user can subscribe to a site’s content using one of nearly a dozen news aggregation programs available online. These programs will then periodically check the RSS feeds for new content and if any is available notify the user. RSS is an easy way to keep up to date on your favorite websites all in one place.

As a web designer, RSS feeds can be seen as a two-way street. You can, and should, produce RSS feeds for your own web site content. At the same time, you also have the ability to take the RSS feeds of other and insert their content into your own web sites. This is a great way to keep your site and web design constantly fresh with new and auto-updating content.
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One of the new styles of web sites in this Web 2.0 era are called social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites give their users a means to store and share web sites they visit that they enjoy. In a typical social bookmarking site, everyone’s bookmarks are made public so that others can continue sharing them or vote for them so that more users will check out the bookmark as well. Some popular examples of bookmarking sites include digg.com, reddit.com and del.icio.us.
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Cascading Style Sheets, better known as CSS, have become a staple tool in web design. In short, CSS is the way in which web designers separate the presentation or design of a web site from the structure or the markup. By using CSS a web designer can built his web site so that any style or presentation changes he wants to make in the future can all be handled in one place. This consolidation of resources is not only helpful to the web design professional but also to the site visitor as well.
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One of the most intriguing web frameworks for the Python programming language is called Django. As in most frameworks, the idea behind Django is to simplify the more boring and obvious programming tasks required when building an interactive or elaborate web sites that are driven by databases.

Developed in 2005 by The World Company, a news organization based in Lawrence, Kansas, Django was used the backbone for several large news sites before it was released to the public. It is frequently compared to another web framework called Ruby on Rails. The comparison is apt as both stress a “Don’t Repeat Yourself” programming philosophy using model-view-controller techniques.
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Programming frameworks and libraries have become incredibly popular. A good framework can make a programmers life much easier and remove some of the more tedious and difficult tasks associated with building a complex web site. One of the frameworks that have seen a meteoric rise in use recently is called Ruby on Rails.

Before describing Ruby on Rails it is key to understand its foundation: the programming language Ruby. Invented in Japan during the 1990s, Ruby is an objected-oriented programming language that was designed to be used in general programming applications. The emphasis by the language’s original designers was to create something flexible and fun for other programmers to use on their projects. Ruby’s level of popularity was moderate at best until the release of Ruby on Rails by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2004.
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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is something many people regard as mysteriously and confusing. There are few resources that clearly define just exactly what SEO is and that’s because the rules and methods seem to change every single day. This makes it very difficult to stay on top of things and keep your sites promoted and up in search engine results. No matter what the rules of the day are there are some things you can do with your web design that will help you in search engines regardless.

The first thing you want to do to ensure at least basic search engine optimization for your web site is to make sure you’re using clean HTML markup. You want to make sure your site is as easy for the search engines to crawl and index and cluttered markup will severely lessen those changes. The best way to get clean markup is to validate your HTML every time you make a change to make sure it is error free and always separate your design styles with Cascading Style Sheets.

One thing many web designers seem to forget is the important of a page’s title. This is set using the