A tour of Small Biz Survival

Welcome to Small Biz Survival.com, bringing promising technologies to the regular everyday small business people of the rural world. I'm glad you stopped in! You can read more about us, if you'd like. Let me give you a tour around the place.

First, if you don't much like reading, just watch our video commercial.

What can you expect to read here? Articles by and for small business people in rural areas and small towns. The special challenges of small town small business include:

• Pressure from competitors in bigger cities,
  
• Pressure from competitors online, world wide,
• Scarce, or variable quality, resources to assist you locally,
• Tight labor supply, and a graying workforce,
• Lack of skills in your workforce,
  
• Isolation from your industry peers.
  

But for each challenge, there is also opportunity.

• The online market opens the world to you.
  
• Involvement in your community is your way to fight against decline.
• Land is usually cheap, compared to growing areas.
  
• Regulatory burdens tend to be lower than in well-developed regions.
  
• A little payroll usually goes a long way.
• Work ethic is usually high.

Regular Features
Based on those challenges and opportunities, I have a few regular features that I write: ideas, resources, tools, POV (point of view), news and the Brag Basket. Click on those links for a list of the articles in that category.

• Ideas: concepts to inspire new businesses, economic and community development. You might find an idea for a new product or service, or a tip on a way to help develop your small town.
  
• Resources: the best places to go online for small business articles, tips, and help of all kinds. Everybody from Inc. to the SBA has "stuff" online. But who has useful stuff? I'm happy to share my opinion.
• Tools: useful online services you can use right now. The goal is to delegate more work to your computer. Web services like this are exploding in number right now, part of the web 2.0 boom. I'll bring you reports and reviews from the web 2.0 experts and from real users who have tried them.
• POV: articles sharing the point of view of entrepreneurs. Sometimes we learn the most from other people's mistakes and triumphs. The internet makes it possible for us to read the first-person stories of famous and unknown small business heroes.
• News: rural entrepreneurship articles. I select global stories on these topics and offer my own commentary.
  
• Brag Basket: celebrate! Once a week, we give you a chance to share your business successes.

We also write all sorts of how-to articles, post tips for USA income taxes, and anything else that strikes our fancy. A complete list of our categories is in the sidebar, to the right. For a list of what we like best of our work, read the Best of Small Biz Survival.

I've even dabbled in podcasting, here and mirrored at Small Biz Survival Podcast.

If you'd like to search our blog for any article, or category, just use the search box at the very, very top of the page.

Some additional articles on small business, economic development and rural communities, collected from all over, can be found in my Shared Items from Google Reader. You can read it as a complete web page, and you can subscribe to the feed. It's also in the sidebar to the right.

If you are interested in contributing articles for small business owners and rural entrepreneurs, just email me and we'll talk.


Do you like what you see?
Come back and visit often! And feel free to comment. We enjoy a good conversation. We welcome your story ideas, feedback, tips, and ideas for us to share with everyone.

You can see all the subscription options on our Subscribe page.

If you'd like to reprint or reuse any of our materials, we publish under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 License. That means you can use it for noncommercial purposes, with just a few limits. We'd also appreciate an email or a comment letting us know that you found our work useful!

That's all!
So that's the tour. Hope you found something useful for yourself and your business. Keep in touch.