December 16, 2009 – San Francisco, CA – WorkingPoint™, Inc., the developer of easy-to-use online business management software for small businesses, announced today the addition of a new, convenient small business online payroll service that will enable WorkingPoint’s subscribers to run payroll for their employees at an affordable price. WorkingPoint’s payroll service is enabled through a partnership with Business Online Payroll, which specializes in online payroll processing for small businesses. Much like WorkingPoint, Business Online Payroll offers a comprehensive, full service online solution for small businesses.

Subscribers of Business Online Payroll can dependably calculate employee wages and deductions; deduct, deposit and file all federal, state and local taxes; track employee benefits; pay employees by direct deposit at the bank of their choice or by printing a manual check; provide comprehensive online reports that are readily accessible day or night; and eliminate IRS penalties and handle IRS notices.

Through this payroll service, WorkingPoint subscribers can save up to 50% compared to traditional payroll models.  They can also preview payroll online to check for accuracy before processing, access payroll reports online and export them easily, and speak with a friendly, U.S.-based payroll expert when needed.  For employees, this service provides email notices alerting them they’ve been paid.  Plus the employer can grant employees secure online access to their individual pay stubs and payroll history.

“Our subscribers have been asking us for payroll services, and we are pleased to be able to provide them with a comprehensive set of services at a reasonable price,” said WorkingPoint CEO Tate Holt. “Small business owners look to WorkingPoint for complete, uncomplicated solutions that manage their whole business, and this offering helps us meet their needs.”

The payroll features are another addition to WorkingPoint’s premium services offering and will be available immediately.  WorkingPoint is continuing to expand its services in other areas as well before the end of the year with the recent addition of new features designed to help subscribers more easily complete their income taxes and a new tool that enables customers to collect invoice payments with PayPal.

For a list of features included with WorkingPoint’s free and premium offerings along with corresponding prices, go to www.workingpoint.com/pricing-and-signup/.

As I mentioned last week, one of my favorite media traditions for December (aside from How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, of course) is the year-in-review list.

This week, the one I that I want to highlight is (again) from Inc.com, and it’s about the year’s best business books for business owners, as recommended by high profile entrepreneurs.

Every year, more and more and more books are published.  And more and more of them are focused on niche markets (such as entrepreneurs).  Inc.com asked the CEO of Zappos, one of Inc’s Editors-at-Large, the founder of 800 CEO Read, and others for their top picks from 2009.

1. Getting to Plan B by John Mullins and Randy Komisar; recommended by Leigh Buchanan
2. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith; recommended by Jack Covert
3. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; recommended by Tony Hsieh
4. Early Exits by Basil Peters; recommended by Bo Burlingham
5. Poorly Made in China by Paul Midler; recommended by Joel Spolsky
6. Exploiting Chaos by Jeremy Gutsche; recommended by Jack Covert
7. How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins; recommended by Leigh Buchanan, Bo Burlingham, and Tony Hsieh
8. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford; recommended by Jack Covert
9. Clever by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones; recommended by Leigh Buchanan
10. Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk; recommended by Jack Covert and Tony Hsieh
11. Change by Design by Tim Brown; Recommended by Leigh Buchanan
12. Borrowing Brilliance by David Kord Murray; recommended by Jack Covert
13. The Match King by Frank Partnoy; recommended by Leigh Buchanan
14. I Love You More Than My Dog by Jeanne Bliss; recommended by Jack Covert

Covering everything from ethical business practices to smart staffing, and from customer service to following your passion, there is a great array of choices laid out here for entrepreneurs of all stripes.

If you are still looking for a gift idea for your favorite entrepreneur, this list might be a great place to start. Do you have any great business books of 2009 that you’d add to the list?

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

In a recent blog post, author Scott Ginsberg recently asked Have You Executed These Ten Essentials of Entrepreneurial Excellence? He then listed off the ten things he highlights as essential for entrepreneurs to be truly successful:

• Prestige requires pandemonium
• Confidence requires congruency
• Fame requires flexibility
• Success requires surrender.
• Creativity requires curiosity
• Originality requires murder
• Serendipity requires strategy
• Dominance requires discomfort
• Matchlessness requires relentlessness
• Remarkability requires reinvention

Scott’s list reminds me of a principle called Open Beats Closed, by an old friend and former colleague, Joshua-Michele Ross.

Much like Scott, Josh posits that in an information economy — particularly that fueld by the social web — the old constructs, objectives and means of accomplishment need to be re-examined and, in many cases, tossed for radically different approaches.  What comes out of these changes are a new set of social guidelines that are based on how our social interactions currently work, instead of how they used to work 5, 10 or 20 years ago.  And while these are most definitely “social” guidelines, they ultimately must also evolve into business guideliness.

Scott’s list is similar, insofar as that most of what he is talking about is the relationship between two seemingly unrelated concepts (in most cases) as being essential to success.  What is great about this list, though, is that it makes you think.  If you read Scott’s entire post (Josh’s, as well), the examples he highlights are all very relatable, and it doesn’t take long before your brain is scrambling for similar memories that make the same point.

To my mind, this begs the following questions:

• What assumptions are you taking for granted today?
• What historical conditions are you still artificially imposing on your life and your business, and can you spot them and let them go?
• And if you do, what does that mean?

One of the biggest ones I see entrepreneurs stuggle with is the “dollars for hours” problem — building a “practice” that is centered around their time, rather than building a business that can run without them.  What assumptions are at the root of this?  And do they still apply?  If no, what is the underlying reality now?

I find both Scott and Josh’s points tremendously valuable because everytime I review them, I am forced to acknowledge that some of the things I spend my time on are not valuable.  While that is frustrating in the moment, calling that out is the only way for me to make both my life and my business better.  And isn’t that why I started my own business in the first place?

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Mike Wild at All Fixes Handyman:

All Fixes Handyman provides home repair, paint walls, pressure washing, and help with ready-to-assemble furniture in the Vancouver, WA. – Portland, OR., metro area.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Sarai Thomas, an Avon Independent Sales:

Sarai is an Avon Independent Representative and sells Avon beauty products.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

CNN recently reported that researchers from Harvard Business School, Insead and Brigham Young University have just completed a six-year study of more than 3,000 executives and 500 innovative entrepreneurs, and say they have identified five skills that drive innovation:

Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.

Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask “why?”, “why not?” and “what if?”

Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.

Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.

Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.

I find the results of this study interesting, if not earth-shatteringly shocking.  What’s even more interesting, however, is that CNN’s article also comes with some recommendations about how to develop those skills, even for those of us who don’t consider ourselves tremendous ‘innovators’ to begin with.

Recommendations:

• Teach yourself to think differently by deliberately taking opportunities to act differently
• Identify a problem and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days
• Identify a business, customer, supplier, or client, and spend a day or two watching how they work so you can better understand their issues
• Build a diverse network, and understand people’s backgrounds, interests and strengths; and then make sure to remain in touch with them regularly

Since most of us are creatures of habit (to one extent or another), taking opportunities to break behavioral patterns and act differently can be hard.  But it is the corollary to the old saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So, sane or not, if you want different results, then make sure you do something different.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

If you missed yesterday’s webinar from Earn.com on the topic of “How to Start a Business,” then you missed a great talk by Earn’s own David Gass. What I liked about it was that it wasn’t your average, “here is 50 things you need to do to get a business up and running” – though, that list is a practical list. Instead, Gass started the talk off with the first thing you need when starting a business: Passion – Are you passionate about the specific type of business you are thinking about starting or is that you just want to get into any type of business.

I think this is a point that we entrepreneurs often skip over. We get an idea and run with it, without stopping to think if this is “the idea” – the one we are going to be passionate about on those long days or nights when it doesn’t seem to be going the way we had hoped but we still believe in going to work and drives us to press on.

Gass recommends that to test your passion level, you wait 30 days before acting on the business idea to see if you are still passionate about it. This is what he calls the “30 Day Rule.” I think it may be hard to wait 30 days and not do research and run the idea by friends and family to see what they think but there may be something to it. Starting a business is a huge commitment, like a marriage. Day-in and day-out, you’ll be committing yourself to setting goals and meeting the needs of your business. If you are still psyched about the idea after 30 days of not doing any real work to make it happen, I think you may have “the idea.”

Once the 30 days is over, Gass’ “90 Day Rule” comes into play. On Day 31 to Day 90, Gass recommends that you don’t spend any of your own money until you have spent these 60 days doing your due diligence. Quoting an SBA study, Gass claims that you are 6 times more likely to succeed if you start with a plan. He recommends gathering the following:

1) A Feasibility Study – Is there a market for your product/service?
2) A Competitive Analysis – Is someone else doing it?
3) Your USP or “Unique Selling Proposition” – What makes you different?
4) Financial Projections – Can you make money at it?

Gass then goes on to touch on building the right team (employees, mentors, advisers, consultants), determining your business structure (sole proprietor, partnership, LLC, corporation), identifying proper funding, meeting compliance issues (licenses, permits, taxes, etc), marketing your business’ USP and finally after all your planning is complete, take action! Start your business, keep positive, be determined.

In addition to Gass’ list of steps, you’ll also need to set up your bookkeeping system or better yet, get a WorkingPoint account and manage your sale, contacts, inventory and bookkeeping. We want to help you succeed and we’re building the application that has everything you need to start, grow and manage your  business.

For more information on Earn.com. Visit their website. Earn.com offers Business Breakthrough Seminars and an advanced Earn University courses to help you reach investors and take your business plans to another level.

As a content strategist one of the things I spend a great deal of time discussing with entrepreneurs is SEO.  As I’ve written here before, my first goal in any SEO discussion with someone is to help educate them on what SEO is and isn’t, and what it really can do versus what it really can’t.  (Can: help people who know what they are looking for find you; Can’t: wash your dog, change your oil or solve all of your sales and marketing problems.)  And then from there, we can discuss what a reasonable SEO strategy would look like for a small business.

In the end, though, I always end up advocating one thing: valuable content.   And while I often get a lot of ‘yes ma’am’ head nodding around that topic, there is a single critical reason that I continue to make that point: the world of search is on a roller coaster at the moment, and trying to play the SEO game with the current set of rules is only going to get you a short-term win (if that) without putting your focus on strong, valuable content. This is a great untapped opportunity for entrepreneurs, because they are better equipped to move faster than large businesses, full of teams of people whose job would be in danger if they were not longer perceived as critical.

People who are unfamiliar with the online search space often do not understand what I mean when I talk about the imminent changes to the the industry.  Today I’ll cover a few examples, thanks to some new releases that Google has just made. (Examples from Google’s official blog.)

• Personalized search
• Real time search

What is “personalized search“?

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

What is “real time search“?

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

These are two great examples, because they demonstrate why having relevant content on your website is important.  Focusing your SEO energy (and budget) on building link-backs and fine-tuning your keywords has limited value in the long-term, because search engines are going to increasingly focus on other things to establish relevancy.

Just these two changes alone mean that two different people can type in the same keywords but get different results, depending on their personal search history and when they look.  And, if you factor in the increasingly popular localized search, what city those users are in could also impact their results.

What excites me most about these changes is that it further helps in taking the focus off the means and onto the end: your web presence should be about engaging your customers in a meaningful way, finding new customers and enhancing your existing relationship.  Far too many people focus on jockeying for a good SEO position in spite of their content, instead of focusing on the content first and using it as a foundation for successful SEO.

The tidal wave of changes in the search space is going to make it increasingly hard to duck the real question for all businesses on the web: are you saying anything worth paying attention to?  If you are, then these updated techniques will only help you.  If you are not and have been playing SEO-peek-a-boo, then these changes are going to expose that.

I see far too many entrepreneurs who have been taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous “SEO consultants,” and one of my chief missions is to help prevent that wherever possible. So before you look to hire SEO help, ask yourself if you are prepared to actually create (or pay for) good content for your website.

In the modern web-based business world, there is an updated version to your grandmother’s old saying:  “If you don’t have anything relevant to say, don’t say anything at all.”  These new changes by Google will continue to make that point.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

On my last blog post I mentioned that every small business has an opportunity to better get the word out (facilitate the marketing process, acquire customers, and communicate with them) by creating a web presence.  For many of you, that is something you thought about and addressed long ago.  Again, if you have not yet, there are simple ways to address the need and opportunity.  WorkingPoint offers you one of the simplest with our one page Online Company Profile feature.

Today I’ll discuss another very basic but important topic, and that is what you put on your web page or web site.    When you create a home page for your company web site or a one-page profile on the web, you are representing your company, your brand, your business.  It is like putting your company up on a bill-board for many people to see.  So what do want to tell them?

This is not an insignificant topic for most small businesses.  My wife creates web sites for small businesses.  She can create them and get them up fairly efficiently.  She often tells me that the most challenging aspect of creating these web sites is working with her clients to create the content that should go on them.  Typically that is not a technical issue; it is a marketing or communications issue.  So, what do you want to say about your business?

IMHO, your one page profile or home page of your web site should state several things:

• What – The most fundamental and obvious topic you should cover on your web site is to simply state what your value proposition is.  What products and / or services do you offer?  Briefly describe them in as few words as possible.
• Who – Communicate who you are providing your product or service for.  You want viewers of your web site to very easily be able to determine whether you have something for them.  Make it easy for them.  Tell them.
• How – How do you provide the high-level value proposition?  Here, you offer one level of detail that enables your viewers to quickly get the complete picture of what your product or service consists of.  This one level of detail also enables you to set up much more detail about your products and services further down on the page or on other pages of your site.

5 Second Rule –  One of the things that is very special about the internet is that there is a ton of information available.  If your web site does not efficiently communicate what you do for whom and how within a very few seconds, these viewers will go somewhere else.  In short, a viewer of your home page needs to be able to comprehend the what, who, and how within 5 seconds.  If they can’t, you will probably lose them.  The home page of your web site needs to be similar to your elevator pitch for your business.  If you are cold-calling someone to make a sale, you need to tell them in much less than a minute what you do and why they should buy from you.  The home page of your web site should do the same.

Other things you may want to do on your home page:

1. Give the viewer the opportunity to become a customer or subscriber. A call to action to sign-up, buy or subscribe for your product or service is ideal.  Calling you or sending you an email works too.  Answer the question of how you want the viewer to become a customer.  Make it easy for them.
2. State what your business or brand represents. Answer the question of what you want to always be known for, how you are special, and what principles you will always operate by.  This is about your brand.
3. Provide some customer testimonials. They are compelling.  They allow your viewers to see that you are meeting the needs of clients and pleasing them.  That helps them buy from you.

WorkingPoint follows this model.  At the top of our home page, within a very few seconds, a viewer can capture <what> we provide – an online management solution for small businesses <who>.  On the right side of the top portion of the page, you see what features that management solution includes – online invoicing, expense management, double entry bookkeeping, contact management, inventory management, etc.   This is the <how> one level of detail I described.  Below that, we state what makes us special and we want to be known for:  that our solution is comprehensive, simple and very high quality.  Below that we offer some customer testimonials.  And of course, we very prominently place a button that enables a viewer to sign-up.

What do you want to communicate about your company to viewers?

Tomorrow (December 10, 2009), our partner Earn.com is hosting a webinar from 2-3:00 PM PST on the topic: “How to Start a Business”.

Are you thinking about starting a business but just don’t know where to begin? Have you looking for a good way to come up with an idea to start a business or test your current idea? This webinar will guide you through four steps to taking your idea to start-up.

Earn.com (Entrepreneur Accreditation and Resource Network) provides entrepreneurs with proven strategies, secrets and systems in an easy to understand format so they can begin improving their business immediately. The Earn.com portal helps small business owners find financing, grow their business and save money through webinars, seminars, conferences and by connecting with a network of successful entrepreneurs.

For more information on Earn.com and how to become a member, visit their website.