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...

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...

Recently, we sent an update about our E-Mail Marketing feature that mistakenly stated that the free beta period had ended. This demonstrates one of the first rules of e-mail marketing: Make sure you send the correct information to your customers! Another rule: If you do make a mistake, send out a correction quickly and humbly ask for forgiveness. Here’s our correction, and please accept our sincere...

I’ve managed many Web sites in my career and often come back to the same concept: Keep it simple! I found that one of the toughest parts of Web site creation is figuring out what to write. I’m often surprised at people’s natural instincts to go overboard and want to add everything to a Web site. The result is paralysis, brought on by being overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to create all the content...