No question, owning a small business can mean greater challenges than running a large one or a chain store. Part of your growth strategy is holding off new competitors (businesses newer than you) while you take on the more-established competition with more resources. This is easier to do in some industries than in others, and we can all learn from one another. But look to the coffee world for a second...

If you’re anything like me, the hardest part of running your own business isn’t providing your product or service. It’s the little stuff, like making your own travel reservations, sending your own faxes, going to the post office, formatting documents. It took me days to find a phone system for my new office. Or the not-so-little stuff, like putting up a Web site, paying the bills, or doing your own...

(This tip is provided to you from the e-book, “ 5 Steps for a Successful E-Commerce Web Site ,” available for download now.) Ever wonder how some online retailers are able to offer so many diverse products on their sites? They must have a warehouse the size of Lake Michigan to store their stuff, right? Well, not really. The e-commerce world has adopted the longstanding practice of what is called “drop...

If you are a developer creating solutions for Microsoft Office Live Small Business, you should check out the new Contact Manager Web Service Examples download on the Office Live Small Business Code Samples page in the MSDN Code Gallery. The download is an Office Live solution (.olp) file. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can add it to your Office Live Small Business account as a custom business application...

If you’ve got a company logo you use on letterhead or business cards, marketing gurus will tell you that displaying it prominently on your Web site is a great way to solidify your online and offline branding. I’m here to tell you that adding a logo to your Web site header is a pretty simple task, although you may want to experiment a bit with how you display it. But let’s start with the basics: 1....

1. How do I activate my Office Live Mail account? You don’t have to activate an Office Live Mail account. When you sign up for an Office Live Small Business account, you use an existing e-mail address. Any e-mail that is sent from Office Live Small Business will be sent to this address. To read those e-mails, you need to go to the inbox associated with that account. Once you are signed in to Office...

Your Web site tells customers all about you and your business. But how do you learn more about your customers? The answer is to add a form to one of your Web site pages. While forms can be complicated to build from scratch, Office Live Small Business makes it easy with the Form Designer module. The module enables you to design and add a form to any page with a few clicks. You just open a page in Page...

I saw a statistic the other day that blew me away. According to Jupiter Research, 61% of online consumers use search engines on a daily basis . For anyone with a Web site – whether you’re selling products or offering services – that’s got to be a pretty compelling reason to advertise on search sites. Now, I know some of you think search marketing is a bit mysterious. And if you’re new to keywords and...