Small Businesses to Spend $70 Billion Online by 2012

The internet is becoming an important part of many small businesses. Whether you want to get some relatively cheap advertising for products like a fire table, books, or digital cameras, you can usually find a way to do it cheaper online. So it is no surprise that over the course of the next 5 years online spending is going to increase substantially. Not only are the advertising budgets going to go up, but many other reasons for using the internet for your small business is becoming important.

As the number of small businesses continues to grow over the next five years, they will be spending more money online, new research shows.

In a new report, "U.S. Online Small Business Market Category Forecast, 2007 to 2012," New York-based JupiterResearch projects that total online spending by small businesses will exceed $70 billion by 2012, up from $47 billion in 2006. more

Getting Clients to Pay in Advance

Whether your business works with manufacturing cabinet hardware, or you just plain run a service business there may be a need to get paid before you actually deliver on the deal. How exactly do you get customers to pay you before you actually perform the deed you promise when you collect the cash? I ran a crossed an interesting article that helps explain just how to do this and some tips to make sure that you can get your customers to help you out...in advance.

For a small company, getting paid on time can mean the difference between having cash for an expansion and borrowing to pay the bills. But if you're a minor vendor, you may be last on your customers' payment priority list. One solution: getting clients to pay in advance. That's easier said than done, of course, because your customers like holding on to their cash as much as you like seeing them part with it. Nevertheless, clients will prepay if given the right incentives. Following are three stories of business owners who got sick of waiting around for payment and decided to do something about it. full story

Entrepreneur of the Year

All the ballots are being sent to the Mailboxes as we speak and soon we will know who Inc.coms Entrepreneur of the year is going to be. Check this site here to see who is nominated and what they are all about. There are links at the bottom of every nominee so you can shift to the next one after reading about the one thta is currently linked in this post. Fun read to see what kind of things are being mentioned.